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Averting the climate crisis

Al Gore

{0: 'Al Gore'}

{0: ['climate advocate']}

{0: 'Nobel Laureate Al Gore focused the world’s attention on the global climate crisis. Now he’s showing us how we’re moving towards real solutions.\r\n'}

2006-02-25

2006-06-27

TED2006

en

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['alternative energy', 'cars', 'climate change', 'culture', 'environment', 'global issues', 'science', 'sustainability', 'technology']

{243: 'New thinking on the climate crisis', 547: 'The business logic of sustainability', 2093: 'The state of the climate — and what we might do about it', 54715: 'How we can turn the tide on climate', 29968: 'The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about it', 2339: "Climate change is happening. Here's how we adapt"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_averting_the_climate_crisis/

With the same humor and humanity he exuded in "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore spells out 15 ways that individuals can address climate change immediately, from buying a hybrid to inventing a new, hotter brand name for global warming.

Thank you so much, Chris. And it's truly a great honor to have the opportunity to come to this stage twice; I'm extremely grateful. I have been blown away by this conference, and I want to thank all of you for the many nice comments about what I had to say the other night. And I say that sincerely, partly because (Mock sob) I need that. (Laughter) Put yourselves in my position. (Laughter) I flew on Air Force Two for eight years. (Laughter) Now I have to take off my shoes or boots to get on an airplane! (Laughter) (Applause) I'll tell you one quick story to illustrate what that's been like for me. (Laughter) It's a true story — every bit of this is true. Soon after Tipper and I left the — (Mock sob) White House — (Laughter) we were driving from our home in Nashville to a little farm we have 50 miles east of Nashville. Driving ourselves. (Laughter) I know it sounds like a little thing to you, but — (Laughter) I looked in the rear-view mirror and all of a sudden it just hit me. There was no motorcade back there. (Laughter) You've heard of phantom limb pain? (Laughter) This was a rented Ford Taurus. (Laughter) It was dinnertime, and we started looking for a place to eat. We were on I-40. We got to Exit 238, Lebanon, Tennessee. We got off the exit, we found a Shoney's restaurant. Low-cost family restaurant chain, for those of you who don't know it. We went in and sat down at the booth, and the waitress came over, made a big commotion over Tipper. (Laughter) She took our order, and then went to the couple in the booth next to us, and she lowered her voice so much, I had to really strain to hear what she was saying. And she said "Yes, that's former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper." And the man said, "He's come down a long way, hasn't he?" (Laughter) (Applause) There's been kind of a series of epiphanies. (Laughter) The very next day, continuing the totally true story, I got on a G-V to fly to Africa to make a speech in Nigeria, in the city of Lagos, on the topic of energy. And I began the speech by telling them the story of what had just happened the day before in Nashville. And I told it pretty much the same way I've just shared it with you: Tipper and I were driving ourselves, Shoney's, low-cost family restaurant chain, what the man said — they laughed. I gave my speech, then went back out to the airport to fly back home. I fell asleep on the plane until, during the middle of the night, we landed on the Azores Islands for refueling. I woke up, they opened the door, I went out to get some fresh air, and I looked, and there was a man running across the runway. And he was waving a piece of paper, and he was yelling, "Call Washington! Call Washington!" And I thought to myself, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Atlantic, what in the world could be wrong in Washington? Then I remembered it could be a bunch of things. (Laughter) But what it turned out to be, was that my staff was extremely upset because one of the wire services in Nigeria had already written a story about my speech, and it had already been printed in cities all across the United States of America. It was printed in Monterey, I checked. (Laughter) And the story began, "Former Vice President Al Gore announced in Nigeria yesterday," quote: 'My wife Tipper and I have opened a low-cost family restaurant'" — (Laughter) "'named Shoney's, and we are running it ourselves.'" (Laughter) Before I could get back to U.S. soil, David Letterman and Jay Leno had already started in on — one of them had me in a big white chef's hat, Tipper was saying, "One more burger with fries!" (Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!" (Laughter) We like to celebrate each other's successes in life. (Laughter) I was going to talk about information ecology. But I was thinking that, since I plan to make a lifelong habit of coming back to TED, that maybe I could talk about that another time. (Applause) Chris Anderson: It's a deal! (Applause) Al Gore: I want to focus on what many of you have said you would like me to elaborate on: What can you do about the climate crisis? I want to start with a couple of — I'm going to show some new images, and I'm going to recapitulate just four or five. Now, the slide show. I update the slide show every time I give it. I add new images, because I learn more about it every time I give it. It's like beach-combing, you know? Every time the tide comes in and out, you find some more shells. Just in the last two days, we got the new temperature records in January. This is just for the United States of America. Historical average for Januarys is 31 degrees; last month was 39.5 degrees. Now, I know that you wanted some more bad news about the environment — I'm kidding. But these are the recapitulation slides, and then I'm going to go into new material about what you can do. But I wanted to elaborate on a couple of these. First of all, this is where we're projected to go with the U.S. contribution to global warming, under business as usual. Efficiency in end-use electricity and end-use of all energy is the low-hanging fruit. Efficiency and conservation — it's not a cost; it's a profit. The sign is wrong. It's not negative; it's positive. These are investments that pay for themselves. But they are also very effective in deflecting our path. Cars and trucks — I talked about that in the slideshow, but I want you to put it in perspective. It's an easy, visible target of concern — and it should be — but there is more global warming pollution that comes from buildings than from cars and trucks. Cars and trucks are very significant, and we have the lowest standards in the world. And so we should address that. But it's part of the puzzle. Other transportation efficiency is as important as cars and trucks. Renewables at the current levels of technological efficiency can make this much difference. And with what Vinod, and John Doerr and others, many of you here — there are a lot of people directly involved in this — this wedge is going to grow much more rapidly than the current projection shows it. Carbon Capture and Sequestration — that's what CCS stands for — is likely to become the killer app that will enable us to continue to use fossil fuels in a way that is safe. Not quite there yet. OK. Now, what can you do? Reduce emissions in your home. Most of these expenditures are also profitable. Insulation, better design. Buy green electricity where you can. I mentioned automobiles — buy a hybrid. Use light rail. Figure out some of the other options that are much better. It's important. Be a green consumer. You have choices with everything you buy, between things that have a harsh effect, or a much less harsh effect on the global climate crisis. Consider this: Make a decision to live a carbon-neutral life. Those of you who are good at branding, I'd love to get your advice and help on how to say this in a way that connects with the most people. It is easier than you think. It really is. A lot of us in here have made that decision, and it is really pretty easy. It means reduce your carbon dioxide emissions with the full range of choices that you make, and then purchase or acquire offsets for the remainder that you have not completely reduced. And what it means is elaborated at climatecrisis.net. There is a carbon calculator. Participant Productions convened — with my active involvement — the leading software writers in the world, on this arcane science of carbon calculation, to construct a consumer-friendly carbon calculator. You can very precisely calculate what your CO2 emissions are, and then you will be given options to reduce. And by the time the movie comes out in May, this will be updated to 2.0, and we will have click-through purchases of offsets. Next, consider making your business carbon-neutral. Again, some of us have done that, and it's not as hard as you think. Integrate climate solutions into all of your innovations, whether you are from the technology, or entertainment, or design and architecture community. Invest sustainably. Majora mentioned this. Listen, if you have invested money with managers who you compensate on the basis of their annual performance, don't ever again complain about quarterly report CEO management. Over time, people do what you pay them to do. And if they judge how much they're going to get paid on your capital that they've invested, based on the short-term returns, you're going to get short-term decisions. A lot more to be said about that. Become a catalyst of change. Teach others, learn about it, talk about it. The movie is a movie version of the slideshow I gave two nights ago, except it's a lot more entertaining. And it comes out in May. Many of you here have the opportunity to ensure that a lot of people see it. Consider sending somebody to Nashville. Pick well. And I am personally going to train people to give this slideshow — re-purposed, with some of the personal stories obviously replaced with a generic approach, and it's not just the slides, it's what they mean. And it's how they link together. And so I'm going to be conducting a course this summer for a group of people that are nominated by different folks to come and then give it en masse, in communities all across the country, and we're going to update the slideshow for all of them every single week, to keep it right on the cutting edge. Working with Larry Lessig, it will be, somewhere in that process, posted with tools and limited-use copyrights, so that young people can remix it and do it in their own way. (Applause) Where did anybody get the idea that you ought to stay arm's length from politics? It doesn't mean that if you're a Republican, that I'm trying to convince you to be a Democrat. We need Republicans as well. This used to be a bipartisan issue, and I know that in this group it really is. Become politically active. Make our democracy work the way it's supposed to work. Support the idea of capping carbon dioxide emissions — global warming pollution — and trading it. Here's why: as long as the United States is out of the world system, it's not a closed system. Once it becomes a closed system, with U.S. participation, then everybody who's on a board of directors — how many people here serve on the board of directors of a corporation? Once it's a closed system, you will have legal liability if you do not urge your CEO to get the maximum income from reducing and trading the carbon emissions that can be avoided. The market will work to solve this problem — if we can accomplish this. Help with the mass persuasion campaign that will start this spring. We have to change the minds of the American people. Because presently, the politicians do not have permission to do what needs to be done. And in our modern country, the role of logic and reason no longer includes mediating between wealth and power the way it once did. It's now repetition of short, hot-button, 30-second, 28-second television ads. We have to buy a lot of those ads. Let's re-brand global warming, as many of you have suggested. I like "climate crisis" instead of "climate collapse," but again, those of you who are good at branding, I need your help on this. Somebody said the test we're facing now, a scientist told me, is whether the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable combination. (Laughter) That's really true. I said the other night, and I'll repeat now: this is not a political issue. Again, the Republicans here — this shouldn't be partisan. You have more influence than some of us who are Democrats do. This is an opportunity. Not just this, but connected to the ideas that are here, to bring more coherence to them. We are one. Thank you very much, I appreciate it. (Applause)

The best stats you've ever seen

Hans Rosling

{0: 'Hans Rosling'}

{0: ['global health expert; data visionary']}

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

2006-02-22

2006-06-27

TED2006

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'bn', 'bs', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'is', 'it', 'ja', 'kn', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'mk', 'ml', 'mn', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'sv', 'sw', 'ta', 'te', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Africa', 'Asia', 'Google', 'demo', 'economics', 'global issues', 'health', 'statistics', 'global development', 'visualizations', 'math']

{2056: "Own your body's data", 2296: 'A visual history of human knowledge', 620: 'Let my dataset change your mindset', 2806: "Doesn't everyone deserve a chance at a good life?", 2560: 'How Africa can keep rising', 1418: "Let's put birth control back on the agenda"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen/

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."

About 10 years ago, I took on the task to teach global development to Swedish undergraduate students. That was after having spent about 20 years, together with African institutions, studying hunger in Africa. So I was sort of expected to know a little about the world. And I started, in our medical university, Karolinska Institute, an undergraduate course called Global Health. But when you get that opportunity, you get a little nervous. I thought, these students coming to us actually have the highest grade you can get in the Swedish college system, so I thought, maybe they know everything I'm going to teach them about. So I did a pretest when they came. And one of the questions from which I learned a lot was this one: "Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs?" And I put them together so that in each pair of countries, one has twice the child mortality of the other. And this means that it's much bigger, the difference, than the uncertainty of the data. I won't put you at a test here, but it's Turkey, which is highest there, Poland, Russia, Pakistan and South Africa. And these were the results of the Swedish students. I did it so I got the confidence interval, which is pretty narrow. And I got happy, of course — a 1.8 right answer out of five possible. That means there was a place for a professor of international health and for my course. (Laughter) But one late night, when I was compiling the report, I really realized my discovery. I have shown that Swedish top students know, statistically, significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees. (Laughter) Because the chimpanzee would score half right if I gave them two bananas with Sri Lanka and Turkey. They would be right half of the cases. But the students are not there. The problem for me was not ignorance; it was preconceived ideas. I did also an unethical study of the professors of the Karolinska Institute, which hands out the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and they are on par with the chimpanzee there. (Laughter) This is where I realized that there was really a need to communicate, because the data of what's happening in the world and the child health of every country is very well aware. So we did this software, which displays it like this. Every bubble here is a country. This country over here is China. This is India. The size of the bubble is the population, and on this axis here, I put fertility rate. Because my students, what they said when they looked upon the world, and I asked them, "What do you really think about the world?" Well, I first discovered that the textbook was Tintin, mainly. (Laughter) And they said, "The world is still 'we' and 'them.' And 'we' is the Western world and 'them' is the Third World." "And what do you mean with 'Western world?'" I said. "Well, that's long life and small family. And 'Third World' is short life and large family." So this is what I could display here. I put fertility rate here — number of children per woman: one, two, three, four, up to about eight children per woman. We have very good data since 1962, 1960, about, on the size of families in all countries. The error margin is narrow. Here, I put life expectancy at birth, from 30 years in some countries, up to about 70 years. And in 1962, there was really a group of countries here that were industrialized countries, and they had small families and long lives. And these were the developing countries. They had large families and they had relatively short lives. Now, what has happened since 1962? We want to see the change. Are the students right? It's still two types of countries? Or have these developing countries got smaller families and they live here? Or have they got longer lives and live up there? Let's see. We stopped the world then. This is all UN statistics that have been available. Here we go. Can you see there? It's China there, moving against better health there, improving there. All the green Latin American countries are moving towards smaller families. Your yellow ones here are the Arabic countries, and they get longer life, but not larger families. The Africans are the green here. They still remain here. This is India; Indonesia is moving on pretty fast. In the '80s here, you have Bangladesh still among the African countries. But now, Bangladesh — it's a miracle that happens in the '80s — the imams start to promote family planning, and they move up into that corner. And in the '90s, we have the terrible HIV epidemic that takes down the life expectancy of the African countries. And the rest of them all move up into the corner, where we have long lives and small family, and we have a completely new world. (Applause) (Applause ends) Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam. 1964: America had small families and long life; Vietnam had large families and short lives. And this is what happens. The data during the war indicate that even with all the death, there was an improvement of life expectancy. By the end of the year, family planning started in Vietnam, and they went for smaller families. And the United States up there is getting longer life, keeping family size. And in the '80s now, they give up Communist planning and they go for market economy, and it moves faster even than social life. And today, we have in Vietnam the same life expectancy and the same family size here in Vietnam, 2003, as in United States, 1974, by the end of the war. I think we all, if we don't look at the data, we underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economic change. So let's move over to another way here in which we could display the distribution in the world of income. This is the world distribution of income of people. One dollar, 10 dollars or 100 dollars per day. There's no gap between rich and poor any longer. This is a myth. There's a little hump here. But there are people all the way. And if we look where the income ends up, this is 100 percent of the world's annual income. And the richest 20 percent, they take out of that about 74 percent. And the poorest 20 percent, they take about two percent. And this shows that the concept of developing countries is extremely doubtful. We think about aid, like these people here giving aid to these people here. But in the middle, we have most of the world population, and they have now 24 percent of the income. We heard it in other forms. And who are these? Where are the different countries? I can show you Africa. This is Africa. Ten percent of the world population, most in poverty. This is OECD — the rich countries, the country club of the UN. And they are over here on this side. Quite an overlap between Africa and OECD. And this is Latin America. It has everything on this earth, from the poorest to the richest in Latin America. And on top of that, we can put East Europe, we can put East Asia, and we put South Asia. And what did it look like if we go back in time, to about 1970? Then, there was more of a hump. And most who lived in absolute poverty were Asians. The problem in the world was the poverty in Asia. And if I now let the world move forward, you will see that while population increases, there are hundreds of millions in Asia getting out of poverty, and some others getting into poverty, and this is the pattern we have today. And the best projection from the World Bank is that this will happen, and we will not have a divided world. We'll have most people in the middle. Of course it's a logarithmic scale here, but our concept of economy is growth with percent. We look upon it as a possibility of percentile increase. If I change this and take GDP per capita instead of family income, and I turn these individual data into regional data of gross domestic product, and I take the regions down here, the size of the bubble is still the population. And you have the OECD there, and you have sub-Saharan Africa there, and we take off the Arab states there, coming both from Africa and from Asia, and we put them separately, and we can expand this axis, and I can give it a new dimension here, by adding the social values there, child survival. Now I have money on that axis, and I have the possibility of children to survive there. In some countries, 99.7% of children survive to five years of age; others, only 70. And here, it seems, there is a gap between OECD, Latin America, East Europe, East Asia, Arab states, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The linearity is very strong between child survival and money. But let me split sub-Saharan Africa. Health is there and better health is up there. I can go here, and I can split sub-Saharan Africa into its countries. And when it bursts, the size of each country bubble is the size of the population. Sierra Leone down there, Mauritius is up there. Mauritius was the first country to get away with trade barriers, and they could sell their sugar, they could sell their textiles, on equal terms as the people in Europe and North America. There's a huge difference [within] Africa. And Ghana is here in the middle. In Sierra Leone, humanitarian aid. Here in Uganda, development aid. Here, time to invest; there, you can go for a holiday. There's tremendous variation within Africa, which we very often make that it's equal everything. I can split South Asia here. India's the big bubble in the middle. But there's a huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. I can split Arab states. How are they? Same climate, same culture, same religion — huge difference. Even between neighbors — Yemen, civil war; United Arab Emirates, money, which was quite equally and well-used. Not as the myth is. And that includes all the children of the foreign workers who are in the country. Data is often better than you think. Many people say data is bad. There is an uncertainty margin, but we can see the difference here: Cambodia, Singapore. The differences are much bigger than the weakness of the data. East Europe: Soviet economy for a long time, but they come out after 10 years very, very differently. And there is Latin America. Today, we don't have to go to Cuba to find a healthy country in Latin America. Chile will have a lower child mortality than Cuba within some few years from now. Here, we have high-income countries in the OECD. And we get the whole pattern here of the world, which is more or less like this. And if we look at it, how the world looks, in 1960, it starts to move. This is Mao Zedong. He brought health to China. And then he died. And then Deng Xiaoping came and brought money to China, and brought them into the mainstream again. And we have seen how countries move in different directions like this, so it's sort of difficult to get an example country which shows the pattern of the world. But I would like to bring you back to about here, at 1960. I would like to compare South Korea, which is this one, with Brazil, which is this one. The label went away for me here. And I would like to compare Uganda, which is there. I can run it forward, like this. And you can see how South Korea is making a very, very fast advancement, whereas Brazil is much slower. And if we move back again, here, and we put trails on them, like this, you can see again that the speed of development is very, very different, and the countries are moving more or less at the same rate as money and health, but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first. And to show that, you can put on the way of United Arab Emirates. They came from here, a mineral country. They cached all the oil; they got all the money; but health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population. And Sheikh Zayed did that in a fairly good way. In spite of falling oil prices, he brought this country up here. So we've got a much more mainstream appearance of the world, where all countries tend to use their money better than they used it in the past. Now, this is, more or less, if you look at the average data of the countries — they are like this. That's dangerous, to use average data, because there is such a lot of difference within countries. So if I go and look here, we can see that Uganda today is where South Korea was in 1960. If I split Uganda, there's quite a difference within Uganda. These are the quintiles of Uganda. The richest 20 percent of Ugandans are there. The poorest are down there. If I split South Africa, it's like this. And if I go down and look at Niger, where there was such a terrible famine [recently], it's like this. The 20 percent poorest of Niger is out here, and the 20 percent richest of South Africa is there, and yet we tend to discuss what solutions there should be in Africa. Everything in this world exists in Africa. And you can't discuss universal access to HIV [treatment] for that quintile up here with the same strategy as down here. The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized, and it's not relevant to have it on a regional level. We must be much more detailed. We find that students get very excited when they can use this. And even more, policy makers and the corporate sectors would like to see how the world is changing. Now, why doesn't this take place? Why are we not using the data we have? We have data in the United Nations, in the national statistical agencies and in universities and other nongovernmental organizations. Because the data is hidden down in the databases. And the public is there, and the internet is there, but we have still not used it effectively. All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly funded statistics. There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases, but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics. (Laughter) And this won't work. (Applause) So what is needed? We have the databases. It's not a new database that you need. We have wonderful design tools and more and more are added up here. So we started a nonprofit venture linking data to design, we called "Gapminder," from the London Underground, where they warn you, "Mind the gap." So we thought Gapminder was appropriate. And we started to write software which could link the data like this. And it wasn't that difficult. It took some person years, and we have produced animations. You can take a data set and put it there. We are liberating UN data, some few UN organization. Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world. But what we really need is, of course, a search function, a search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable format and get it out in the world. And what do we hear when we go around? I've done anthropology on the main statistical units. Everyone says, "It's impossible. This can't be done. Our information is so peculiar in detail, so that cannot be searched as others can be searched. We cannot give the data free to the students, free to the entrepreneurs of the world." But this is what we would like to see, isn't it? The publicly funded data is down here. And we would like flowers to grow out on the net. One of the crucial points is to make them searchable, and then people can use the different design tools to animate it there. And I have pretty good news for you. I have good news that the [current], new head of UN statistics doesn't say it's impossible. He only says, "We can't do it." (Laughter) And that's a quite clever guy, huh? (Laughter) So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years. We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways. This is the income distribution of China, 1970. This is the income distribution of the United States, 1970. Almost no overlap. Almost no overlap. And what has happened? What has happened is this: that China is growing, it's not so equal any longer, and it's appearing here, overlooking the United States, almost like a ghost, isn't it? (Laughter) It's pretty scary. (Laughter) But I think it's very important to have all this information. We need really to see it. And instead of looking at this, I would like to end up by showing the internet users per 1,000. In this software, we access about 500 variables from all the countries quite easily. It takes some time to change for this, but on the axes, you can quite easily get any variable you would like to have. And the thing would be to get up the databases free, to get them searchable, and with a second click, to get them into the graphic formats, where you can instantly understand them. Now, statisticians don't like it, because they say that this will not show the reality; we have to have statistical, analytical methods. But this is hypothesis-generating. I end now with the world. There, the internet is coming. The number of internet users are going up like this. This is the GDP per capita. And it's a new technology coming in, but then amazingly, how well it fits to the economy of the countries. That's why the $100 computer will be so important. But it's a nice tendency. It's as if the world is flattening off, isn't it? These countries are lifting more than the economy, and it will be very interesting to follow this over the year, as I would like you to be able to do with all the publicly funded data. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Simplicity sells

David Pogue

{0: 'David Pogue'}

{0: ['technology columnist']}

{0: 'David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the <em>New York Times</em> and a tech correspondent for CBS News. He\'s also one of the world\'s bestselling how-to authors, with titles in the For Dummies series and his own line of "Missing Manual" books. '}

2006-02-24

2006-06-27

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['computers', 'entertainment', 'interface design', 'media', 'music', 'performance', 'simplicity', 'software', 'technology']

{1725: '10 top time-saving tech tips', 2274: 'The first secret of design is ... noticing', 172: 'Designing for simplicity', 2664: 'Meet the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet', 2464: 'The mind behind Linux', 1347: 'The secret structure of great talks'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pogue_simplicity_sells/

New York Times columnist David Pogue takes aim at technology’s worst interface-design offenders, and provides encouraging examples of products that get it right. To funny things up, he bursts into song.

(Music: "The Sound of Silence," Simon & Garfunkel) Hello voice mail, my old friend. (Laughter) I've called for tech support again. I ignored my boss's warning. I called on a Monday morning. Now it's evening, and my dinner first grew cold, and then grew mold. I'm still on hold. I'm listening to the sounds of silence. I don't think you understand. I think your phone lines are unmanned. I punched every touch tone I was told, but I've still spent 18 hours on hold. It's not enough your software crashed my Mac, and it constantly hangs and bombs — it erased my ROMs! Now the Mac makes the sounds of silence. In my dreams I fantasize of wreaking vengeance on you guys. Say your motorcycle crashes. Blood comes gushing from your gashes. With your fading strength, you call 9-1-1 and you pray for a trained MD. But you get me. (Laughter) And you listen to the sounds of silence. (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Good evening and welcome to: "Spot the TED Presenter Who Used to Be a Broadway Accompanist." (Laughter) When I was offered the Times column six years ago, the deal was like this: you'll be sent the coolest, hottest, slickest new gadgets. Every week, it'll arrive at your door. You get to try them out, play with them, evaluate them until the novelty wears out, before you have to send them back, and you'll get paid for it. You can think about it, if you want. So, I've always been a technology nut, and I absolutely love it. The job, though, came with one small downside, and that is, they intended to publish my email address at the end of every column. And what I've noticed is — first of all, you get an incredible amount of email. If you ever are feeling lonely, get a New York Times column, because you will get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails. And the email I'm getting a lot today is about frustration. People are feeling like things — Ok, I just had an alarm come up on my screen. Lucky you can't see it. People are feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling like it's too much technology, too fast. It may be good technology, but I feel like there's not enough of a support structure. There's not enough help. There's not enough thought put into the design of it to make it easy and enjoyable to use. One time I wrote a column about my efforts to reach Dell Technical Support, and within 12 hours, there were 700 messages from readers on the feedback boards on the Times website, from users saying, ""Me too, and here's my tale of woe." I call it "software rage." And man, let me tell you, whoever figures out how to make money off of this frustration will — Oh, how did that get up there? Just kidding. (Laughter) Ok, so why is the problem accelerating? And part of the problem is, ironically, because the industry has put so much thought into making things easier to use. I'll show you what I mean. This is what the computer interface used to look like, DOS. Over the years, it's gotten easier to use. This is the original Mac operating system. Reagan was President. Madonna was still a brunette. And the entire operating system — this is the good part — the entire operating system fit in 211 k. You couldn't put the Mac OS X logo in 211 k! (Laughter) So the irony is, that as these things became easier to use, a less technical, broader audience was coming into contact with this equipment for the first time. I once had the distinct privilege of sitting in on the Apple call center for a day. The guy had a duplicate headset for me to listen to. And the calls that — you know how they say, "Your call may be recorded for quality assurance?" Uh-uh. Your call may be recorded so that they can collect the funniest dumb user stories and pass them around on a CD. (Laughter) Which they do. (Laughter) And I have a copy. (Laughter) It's in your gift bag. No, no. With your voices on it! So, some of the stories are just so classic, and yet so understandable. A woman called Apple to complain that her mouse was squeaking. Making a squeaking noise. And the technician said, "Well, ma'am, what do you mean your mouse is squeaking?" She says, "All I can tell you is that it squeaks louder, the faster I move it across the screen." (Laughter) And the technician's like, "Ma'am, you've got the mouse up against the screen?" She goes, "Well, the message said, 'Click here to continue.'" (Laughter) Well, if you like that one — how much time have we got? Another one, a guy called — this is absolutely true — his computer had crashed, and he told the technician he couldn't restart it, no matter how many times he typed "11." And the technician said, "What? Why are you typing 11?" He said, "The message says, 'Error Type 11.'" (Laughter) So, we must admit that some of the blame falls squarely at the feet of the users. But why is the technical overload crisis, the complexity crisis, accelerating now? In the hardware world, it's because we the consumers want everything to be smaller, smaller, smaller. So the gadgets are getting tinier and tinier, but our fingers are essentially staying the same size. So it gets to be more and more of a challenge. Software is subject to another primal force: the mandate to release more and more versions. When you buy a piece of software, it's not like buying a vase or a candy bar, where you own it. It's more like joining a club, where you pay dues every year, and every year, they say, "We've added more features, and we'll sell it to you for $99." I know one guy who's spent $4,000 just on Photoshop over the years. And software companies make 35 percent of their revenue from just these software upgrades. I call it the Software Upgrade Paradox — which is that if you improve a piece of software enough times, you eventually ruin it. I mean, Microsoft Word was last just a word processor in, you know, the Eisenhower administration. (Laughter) But what's the alternative? Microsoft actually did this experiment. They said, "Well, wait a minute. Everyone complains that we're adding so many features. Let's create a word processor that's just a word processor: Simple, pure; does not do web pages, is not a database." And it came out, and it was called Microsoft Write. And none of you are nodding in acknowledgment, because it died. It tanked. No one ever bought it. I call this the Sport Utility Principle. People like to surround themselves with unnecessary power, right? They don't need the database and the website, but they're like, "Well, I'll upgrade, because, I might, you know, I might need that someday." So the problem is: as you add more features, where are they going to go? Where are you going to stick them? You only have so many design tools. You can do buttons, you can do sliders, pop-up menus, sub-menus. But if you're not careful about how you choose, you wind up with this. (Laughter) This is an un-retouched — this is not a joke — un-retouched photo of Microsoft Word, the copy that you have, with all the toolbars open. You've obviously never opened all the toolbars, but all you have to type in is this little, teeny window down here. (Laughter) And we've arrived at the age of interface matrices, where there are so many features and options, you have to do two dimensions, you know: a vertical and a horizontal. You guys all complain about how Microsoft Word is always bulleting your lists and underlining your links automatically. The off switch is in there somewhere. I'm telling you — it's there. Part of the art of designing a simple, good interface, is knowing when to use which one of these features. So, here is the log-off dialogue box for Windows 2000. There are only four choices, so why are they in a pop-up menu? It's not like the rest of the screen is so full of other components that you need to collapse the choices. They could have put them all out in view. Here's Apple's take on the exact same dialogue box. (Applause) Thank you — yes, I designed the dialogue box. No, no. Already, we can see that Apple and Microsoft have a severely divergent approach to software design. Microsoft's approach to simplicity tends to be: let's break it down; let's just make it more steps. There are these "wizards" everywhere. And you know, there's a new version of Windows coming out this fall. If they continue at this pace, there's absolutely no telling where they might wind up. [Welcome to the Type a Word Wizard] (Laughter) (Applause) "Welcome to the Type a Word Wizard." Ok, I'll bite. Let's click "Next" to continue. (Laughter) (Applause) From the drop-down menu, choose the first letter you want to type. Ok. (Laughter) So there is a limit that we don't want to cross. So what is the answer? How do you pack in all these features in a simple, intelligent way? I believe in consistency, when possible, real-world equivalents, trash can folder, when possible, label things, mostly. But I beg of the designers here to break all those rules if they violate the biggest rule of all, which is intelligence. Now what do I mean by that? I'm going to give you some examples where intelligence makes something not consistent, but it's better. If you are buying something on the web, you're supposed to put in your address, and you're supposed to choose what country you're from, ok? There are 200 countries in the world. We like to think of the Internet as a global village. I'm sorry; it's not one yet. It's mainly like, the United States, Europe, and Japan. So why is "United States" in the "U"s? (Laughter) You have to scroll, like, seven screensful to get to it. Now, it would be inconsistent to put "United States" first, but it would be intelligent. This one's been touched on before, but why in God's name do you shut down a Windows PC by clicking a button called "Start?" (Laughter) Here's another pet one of mine: you have a printer. Most of the time, you want to print one copy of your document, in page order, on that printer. So why in God's name do you see this every time you print? It's like a 747 shuttle cockpit. (Laughter) And one of the buttons at the bottom, you'll notice, is not "Print." (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I'm not saying that Apple is the only company who has embraced the cult of simplicity. Palm is also, especially in the old days, wonderful about this. I actually got to speak to Palm when they were flying high in the '90s, and after the talk, I met one of the employees. He says, "Nice talk." And I said, "Thank you. What do you do here?" He said, "I'm a tap counter." I'm like, "You're a what?" He goes, "Well Jeff Hawkins, the CEO, says, 'If any task on the Palm Pilot takes more than three taps of the stylus, it's too long, and it has to be redesigned.' So I'm the tap counter." So, I'm going to show you an example of a company that does not have a tap counter. (Laughter) This is Microsoft Word. Ok, when you want to create a new blank document in Word — it could happen. (Laughter) You go up to the "File" menu and you choose "New." Now, what happens when you choose "New?" Do you get a new blank document? You do not. On the opposite side of the monitor, a task bar appears, and somewhere in those links — by the way, not at the top — somewhere in those links is a button that makes you a new document. Ok, so that is a company not counting taps. You know, I don't want to just stand here and make fun of Microsoft ... Yes, I do. (Laughter) (Applause) The Bill Gates song! (Piano music) I've been a geek forever and I wrote the very first DOS. I put my software and IBM together; I got profit and they got the loss. (Laughter) I write the code that makes the whole world run. I'm getting royalties from everyone. Sometimes it's garbage, but the press is snowed. You buy the box; I'll sell the code. Every software company is doing Microsoft's R&D. You can't keep a good idea down these days. Even Windows is a hack. We're kind of based loosely on the Mac. So it's big, so it's slow. You've got nowhere to go. I'm not doing this for praise. I write the code that fits the world today. Big mediocrity in every way. We've entered planet domination mode. You'll have no choice; you'll buy my code. I am Bill Gates and I write the code. (Applause) But actually, I believe there are really two Microsofts. There's the old one, responsible for Windows and Office. They're dying to throw the whole thing out and start fresh, but they can't. They're locked in, because so many add-ons and other company stuff locks into the old 1982 chassis. But there's also a new Microsoft, that's really doing good, simple interface designs. I liked the Media Center PC. I liked the Microsoft SPOT Watch. The Wireless Watch flopped miserably in the market, but it wasn't because it wasn't simply and beautifully designed. But let's put it this way: would you pay $10 a month to have a watch that has to be recharged every night like your cell phone, and stops working when you leave your area code? (Laughter) So, the signs might indicate that the complexity crunch is only going to get worse. So is there any hope? The screens are getting smaller, people are illuminating, putting manuals in the boxes, things are coming out at a faster pace. It's funny — when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, after 12 years away, it was the MacWorld Expo — he came to the stage in that black turtleneck and jeans, and he sort of did this. The crowd went wild, but I had just seen — I'm like, where have I seen this before? I had just seen the movie "Evita" — (Laughter) with Madonna, and I'm like, you know what? I've got to do one about Steve Jobs. (Music) It won't be easy. You'll think I'm strange. (Laughter) When I try to explain why I'm back, after telling the press Apple's future is black. You won't believe me. All that you see is a kid in his teens who started out in a garage with only a buddy named Woz. (Laughter) You try rhyming with garage! (Laughter) Don't cry for me, Cupertino. (Laughter) The truth is, I never left you. I know the ropes now, know what the tricks are. I made a fortune over at Pixar. (Laughter) Don't cry for me, Cupertino. I've still got the drive and vision. I still wear sandals in any weather. It's just that these days, they're Gucci leather. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. So Steve Jobs had always believed in simplicity and elegance and beauty. And the truth is, for years I was a little depressed, because Americans obviously did not value it, because the Mac had three percent market share, Windows had 95 percent market share — people did not think it was worth putting a price on it. So I was a little depressed. And then I heard Al Gore's talk, and I realized I didn't know the meaning of depressed. (Laughter) But it turns out I was wrong, right? Because the iPod came out, and it violated every bit of common wisdom. Other products cost less; other products had more features, they had voice recorders and FM transmitters. The other products were backed by Microsoft, with an open standard, not Apple's propriety standard. But the iPod won — this is the one they wanted. The lesson was: simplicity sells. And there are signs that the industry is getting the message. This is a little company that's done very well with simplicity and elegance. The Sonos thing — it's catching on. I've got just a couple examples. Physically, a really cool, elegant thinking coming along lately. When you have a digital camera, how do you get the pictures back to your computer? Well, you either haul around a USB cable, or you buy a card reader and haul that around. Either one, you're going to lose. What I do is, I take out the memory card, and I fold it in half, revealing USB contacts. I just stick it in the computer, offload the pictures, put it right back in the camera. I never have to lose anything. Here's another example. Chris, you're the source of all power. Will you be my power plug? Chris Anderson: Oh yeah. DP: Hold that and don't let go. You might've seen this, this is Apple's new laptop. This the power cord. It hooks on like this. And I'm sure every one of you has done this at some point in your lives, or one of your children. You walk along — and I'm about to pull this onto the floor. I don't care. It's a loaner. Here we go. Whoa! It's magnetic — it doesn't pull the laptop onto the floor. (Applause) In my very last example — I do a lot of my work using speech recognition software. And I'll just — you have to be kind of quiet because the software is nervous. Speech recognition software is really great for doing emails very quickly; period. Like, I get hundreds of them a day; period. And it's not just what I dictate that it writes down; period. I also use this feature called voice macros; period. Correct "dissuade." Not "just." Ok, this is not an ideal situation, because it's getting the echo from the hall and stuff. The point is, I can respond to people very quickly by saying a short word, and having it write out a much longer thing. So if somebody sends me a fan letter, I'll say, "Thanks for that." [Thank you so much for taking the time to write ...] (Laughter) (Applause) And conversely, if somebody sends me hate mail — which happens daily — I say, "Piss off." (Laughter) [I admire your frankness ...] (Laughter) (Applause) So that's my dirty little secret. Don't tell anyone. (Laughter) So the point is — this is a really interesting story. This is version eight of this software, and do you know what they put in version eight? No new features. It's never happened before in software! The company put no new features. They just said, "We'll make this software work right." Right? Because for years, people had bought this software, tried it out — 95 percent accuracy was all they got, which means one in 20 words is wrong — and they'd put it in their drawer. And the company got sick of that, so they said, "This version, we're not going to do anything, but make sure it's darned accurate." And so that's what they did. This cult of doing things right is starting to spread. So, my final advice for those of you who are consumers of this technology: remember, if it doesn't work, it's not necessarily you, ok? It could be the design of the thing you're using. Be aware in life of good design and bad design. And if you're among the people who create this stuff: Easy is hard. Pre-sweat the details for your audience. Count the taps. Remember, the hard part is not deciding what features to add, it's deciding what to leave out. And best of all, your motivation is: simplicity sells. CA: Bravo. DP: Thank you very much. CA: Hear, hear! (Applause)

Greening the ghetto

Majora Carter

{0: 'Majora Carter'}

{0: ['activist for environmental justice']}

{0: 'Majora Carter redefined the field of environmental equality, starting in the South Bronx at the turn of the century. Now she is leading the local economic development movement across the USA.'}

2006-02-26

2006-06-27

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'bn', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'kn', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sw', 'ta', 'te', 'th', 'tr', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['MacArthur grant', 'activism', 'business', 'cities', 'environment', 'green', 'inequality', 'politics', 'pollution']

{1041: '3 stories of local eco-entrepreneurship', 1892: 'A new vision for rebuilding Detroit', 2078: 'A park underneath the hustle and bustle of New York City', 2636: 'How an old loop of railroads is changing the face of a city', 12571: 'My $500 house in Detroit -- and the neighbors who helped me rebuild it', 3581: "A Republican mayor's plan to replace partisanship with policy"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/majora_carter_greening_the_ghetto/

In an emotionally charged talk, MacArthur-winning activist Majora Carter details her fight for environmental justice in the South Bronx -- and shows how minority neighborhoods suffer most from flawed urban policy.

If you're here today — and I'm very happy that you are — you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. However, when we're not at TED, we are often told that a real sustainability policy agenda is just not feasible, especially in large urban areas like New York City. And that's because most people with decision-making powers, in both the public and the private sector, really don't feel as though they're in danger. The reason why I'm here today, in part, is because of a dog — an abandoned puppy I found back in the rain, back in 1998. She turned out to be a much bigger dog than I'd anticipated. When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste: a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food-distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. The area also has one of the lowest ratios of parks to people in the city. So when I was contacted by the Parks Department about a $10,000 seed-grant initiative to help develop waterfront projects, I thought they were really well-meaning, but a bit naive. I'd lived in this area all my life, and you could not get to the river, because of all the lovely facilities that I mentioned earlier. Then, while jogging with my dog one morning, she pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump. There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won't mention here, but she kept dragging me, and lo and behold, at the end of that lot was the river. I knew that this forgotten little street-end, abandoned like the dog that brought me there, was worth saving. And I knew it would grow to become the proud beginnings of the community-led revitalization of the new South Bronx. And just like my new dog, it was an idea that got bigger than I'd imagined. We garnered much support along the way, and the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years. We leveraged that $10,000 seed grant more than 300 times, into a $3 million park. And in the fall, I'm going to exchange marriage vows with my beloved. (Audience whistles) Thank you very much. (Applause) That's him pressing my buttons back there, which he does all the time. (Laughter) (Applause) But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coal mine. We feel the problems right now, and have for some time. Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other. Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do. These land-use decisions created the hostile conditions that lead to problems like obesity, diabetes and asthma. Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighborhood? Our 27 percent obesity rate is high even for this country, and diabetes comes with it. One out of four South Bronx children has asthma. Our asthma hospitalization rate is seven times higher than the national average. These impacts are coming everyone's way. And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. Fifty percent of our residents live at or below the poverty line; 25 percent of us are unemployed. Low-income citizens often use emergency-room visits as primary care. This comes at a high cost to taxpayers and produces no proportional benefits. Poor people are not only still poor, they are still unhealthy. Fortunately, there are many people like me who are striving for solutions that won't compromise the lives of low-income communities of color in the short term, and won't destroy us all in the long term. None of us want that, and we all have that in common. So what else do we have in common? Well, first of all, we're all incredibly good-looking. (Laughter) Graduated high school, college, post-graduate degrees, traveled to interesting places, didn't have kids in your early teens, financially stable, never been imprisoned. OK. Good. (Laughter) But, besides being a black woman, I am different from most of you in some other ways. I watched nearly half of the buildings in my neighborhood burn down. My big brother Lenny fought in Vietnam, only to be gunned down a few blocks from our home. Jesus. I grew up with a crack house across the street. Yeah, I'm a poor black child from the ghetto. These things make me different from you. But the things we have in common set me apart from most of the people in my community, and I am in between these two worlds with enough of my heart to fight for justice in the other. So how did things get so different for us? In the late '40s, my dad — a Pullman porter, son of a slave — bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, and a few years later, he married my mom. At the time, the community was a mostly white, working-class neighborhood. My dad was not alone. And as others like him pursued their own version of the American dream, white flight became common in the South Bronx and in many cities around the country. Red-lining was used by banks, wherein certain sections of the city, including ours, were deemed off-limits to any sort of investment. Many landlords believed it was more profitable to torch their buildings and collect insurance money rather than to sell under those conditions — dead or injured former tenants notwithstanding. Hunts Point was formerly a walk-to-work community, but now residents had neither work nor home to walk to. A national highway construction boom was added to our problems. In New York State, Robert Moses spearheaded an aggressive highway-expansion campaign. One of its primary goals was to make it easier for residents of wealthy communities in Westchester County to go to Manhattan. The South Bronx, which lies in between, did not stand a chance. Residents were often given less than a month's notice before their buildings were razed. 600,000 people were displaced. The common perception was that only pimps and pushers and prostitutes were from the South Bronx. And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it's bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? So now, my family's property was worthless, save for that it was our home, and all we had. And luckily for me, that home and the love inside of it, along with help from teachers, mentors and friends along the way, was enough. Now, why is this story important? Because from a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation. The disinvestment that began in the 1960s set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come. Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided? What costs are associated with these decisions? And who pays? Who profits? Does anything justify what the local community goes through? This was "planning" — in quotes — that did not have our best interests in mind. Once we realized that, we decided it was time to do our own planning. That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a Greenway movement in the South Bronx. I wrote a one-and-a-quarter-million dollar federal transportation grant to design the plan for a waterfront esplanade with dedicated on-street bike paths. Physical improvements help inform public policy regarding traffic safety, the placement of the waste and other facilities, which, if done properly, don't compromise a community's quality of life. They provide opportunities to be more physically active, as well as local economic development. Think bike shops, juice stands. We secured 20 million dollars to build first-phase projects. This is Lafayette Avenue — and that's redesigned by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. And once this path is constructed, it'll connect the South Bronx with more than 400 acres of Randall's Island Park. Right now we're separated by about 25 feet of water, but this link will change that. As we nurture the natural environment, its abundance will give us back even more. We run a project called the Bronx [Environmental] Stewardship Training, which provides job training in the fields of ecological restoration, so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs. Little by little, we're seeding the area with green-collar jobs — and with people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment. The Sheridan Expressway is an underutilized relic of the Robert Moses era, built with no regard for the neighborhoods that were divided by it. Even during rush hour, it goes virtually unused. The community created an alternative transportation plan that allows for the removal of the highway. We have the opportunity now to bring together all the stakeholders to re-envision how this 28 acres can be better utilized for parkland, affordable housing and local economic development. We also built New York City's first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices. Cool roofs are highly-reflective surfaces that don't absorb solar heat, and pass it on to the building or atmosphere. Green roofs are soil and living plants. Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat, contribute to urban "heat island" effect and degrade under the sun, which we in turn breathe. Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions — which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. And they provide habitats for our little friends! [Butterfly] (Laughter) So cool! Anyway, the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business, bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx. [Green is the new black ...] (Laughter) (Applause) I like that, too. Anyway, I know Chris told us not to do pitches up here, but since I have all of your attention: We need investors. End of pitch. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Anyway — (Laughter) (Applause) OK. Katrina. Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another. In the post-Katrina era, we have still more in common. We're at best ignored, and maligned and abused, at worst, by negligent regulatory agencies, pernicious zoning and lax governmental accountability. Neither the destruction of the Ninth Ward nor the South Bronx was inevitable. But we have emerged with valuable lessons about how to dig ourselves out. We are more than simply national symbols of urban blight or problems to be solved by empty campaign promises of presidents come and gone. Now will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two, like the South Bronx did? Or will we take proactive steps and learn from the homegrown resource of grassroots activists that have been born of desperation in communities like mine? Now listen, I do not expect individuals, corporations or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral. This presentation today only represents some of what I've been through. Like a tiny little bit. You've no clue. But I'll tell you later, if you want to know. (Laughter) But — I know it's the bottom line, or one's perception of it, that motivates people in the end. I'm interested in what I like to call the "triple bottom line" that sustainable development can produce. Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government and the community where these projects go up. At present, that's not happening in New York City. And we are operating with a comprehensive urban-planning deficit. A parade of government subsidies is going to propose big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx, but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic, pollution, solid waste and the impacts on open space. And their approaches to local economic and job development are so lame it's not even funny. Because on top of that, the world's richest sports team is replacing the House That Ruth Built by destroying two well-loved community parks. Now, we'll have even less than that stat I told you about earlier. And although less than 25 percent of South Bronx residents own cars, these projects include thousands of new parking spaces, yet zip in terms of mass public transit. Now, what's missing from the larger debate is a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis between not fixing an unhealthy, environmentally-challenged community, versus incorporating structural, sustainable changes. My agency is working closely with Columbia University and others to shine a light on these issues. Now let's get this straight: I am not anti-development. Ours is a city, not a wilderness preserve. And I've embraced my inner capitalist. And, but I don't have — (Laughter) You probably all have, and if you haven't, you need to. (Laughter) So I don't have a problem with developers making money. There's enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable, community-friendly development can still make a fortune. Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins — both heroes of mine by the way — have shown that you can actually do that. I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create. But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities, is to learn from visionaries in other cities. This is my version of globalization. Let's take Bogota. Poor, Latino, surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking; a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx. However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly-influential mayor named Enrique Peñalosa. He looked at the demographics. Few Bogotanos own cars, yet a huge portion of the city's resources was dedicated to serving them. If you're a mayor, you can do something about that. His administration narrowed key municipal thoroughfares from five lanes to three, outlawed parking on those streets, expanded pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, created public plazas, created one of the most efficient bus mass-transit systems in the entire world. For his brilliant efforts, he was nearly impeached. But as people began to see that they were being put first on issues reflecting their day-to-day lives, incredible things happened. People stopped littering. Crime rates dropped, because the streets were alive with people. His administration attacked several typical urban problems at one time, and on a third-world budget, at that. We have no excuse in this country, I'm sorry. But the bottom line is: their people-first agenda was not meant to penalize those who could actually afford cars, but rather, to provide opportunities for all Bogotanos to participate in the city's resurgence. That development should not come at the expense of the majority of the population is still considered a radical idea here in the U.S. But Bogota's example has the power to change that. You, however, are blessed with the gift of influence. That's why you're here and why you value the information we exchange. Use your influence in support of comprehensive, sustainable change everywhere. Don't just talk about it at TED. This is a nationwide policy agenda I'm trying to build, and as you all know, politics are personal. Help me make green the new black. Help me make sustainability sexy. Make it a part of your dinner and cocktail conversations. Help me fight for environmental and economic justice. Support investments with a triple-bottom-line return. Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table, and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. Oh good, glad I have a little more time! Listen — when I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast, I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy. His response was a grant program. I don't think he understood that I wasn't asking for funding. I was making him an offer. (Applause) What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around. Now, don't get me wrong, we need money. (Laughter) But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process. Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day, don't add wasting our energy, intelligence and hard-earned experience to that count. (Applause) I have come from so far to meet you like this. Please don't waste me. By working together, we can become one of those small, rapidly-growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world. We might have come to this conference from very, very different stations in life, but believe me, we all share one incredibly powerful thing. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Ciao, bellos! (Applause)

Do schools kill creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson

{0: 'Sir Ken Robinson'}

{0: ['author', 'educator']}

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

2006-02-25

2006-06-27

TED2006

en

['af', 'ar', 'az', 'be', 'bg', 'bn', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'eo', 'es', 'et', 'eu', 'fa', 'fi', 'fil', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'gl', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'inh', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'kn', 'ko', 'ku', 'lo', 'lt', 'lv', 'mfe', 'mk', 'mn', 'mr', 'nb', 'ne', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'ur', 'uz', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['children', 'creativity', 'culture', 'dance', 'education', 'parenting', 'teaching']

{865: 'Bring on the learning revolution!', 1738: "How to escape education's death valley", 2276: 'How to fix a broken school? Lead fearlessly, love hard', 2182: 'How to run a company with (almost) no rules', 2341: "Why some of us don't have one true calling", 9048: 'The search for "aha!" moments'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity/

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Good morning. How are you? (Audience) Good. It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving. (Laughter) There have been three themes running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here; just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out. I have an interest in education. Actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education. Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education — actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly. (Laughter) If you work in education, you're not asked. (Laughter) And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do?" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my God. Why me?" (Laughter) "My one night out all week." (Laughter) But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall, because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion and money and other things. So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet, we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have — their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) That was it, by the way. Thank you very much. (Laughter) So, 15 minutes left. (Laughter) "Well, I was born ... " (Laughter) I heard a great story recently — I love telling it — of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, "What are you drawing?" And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute." (Laughter) When my son was four in England — actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest. (Laughter) If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story? (Laughter) No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it. (Laughter) "Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" (Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in? They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. This really happened. We were sitting there, and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and said, "You OK with that?" They said, "Yeah, why? Was that wrong?" They just switched. The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads. They put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." And the second boy said, "I bring you myrrh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this." (Laughter) What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original — if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this? I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. (Laughter) Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? (Laughter) How annoying would that be? (Laughter) "Must try harder." (Laughter) Being sent to bed by his dad, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now!" To William Shakespeare. "And put the pencil down!" (Laughter) "And stop speaking like that." (Laughter) "It's confusing everybody." (Laughter) Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition. Actually, my son didn't want to come. I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month. (Laughter) Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. He was really upset on the plane. He said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly — (Laughter) because she was the main reason we were leaving the country. (Laughter) But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities. At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting? (Laughter) Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. If you were to visit education as an alien and say "What's it for, public education?" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter) And I like university professors, but, you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life. Another form of life. But they're rather curious. And I say this out of affection for them: there's something curious about professors. In my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. (Laughter) Don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings. (Laughter) If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics and pop into the discotheque on the final night. (Laughter) And there, you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat. (Laughter) Waiting until it ends, so they can go home and write a paper about it. (Laughter) Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? "Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist." Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities design the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way. In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people. And it's the combination of all the things we've talked about: technology and its transformational effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain, called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, this is probably why women are better at multitasking. Because you are, aren't you? There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often ... thankfully. (Laughter) No, she's good at some things. But if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling — (Laughter) she's doing open-heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in, I get annoyed. I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here." (Laughter) "Give me a break." (Laughter) Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing, "If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, did it happen?" Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great T-shirt recently, which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?" (Laughter) And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called "Epiphany," which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne. Have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work. She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera." She's wonderful. I used to be on the board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see. (Laughter) Gillian and I had lunch one day. I said, "How did you get to be a dancer?" It was interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. (Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that. (Laughter) Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes, while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school, because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on. Little kid of eight. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "I've listened to all these things your mother's told me. I need to speak to her privately. Wait here. We'll be back. We won't be very long," and they went and left her. But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer. Take her to a dance school." I said, "What happened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room, and it was full of people like me — people who couldn't sit still, people who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School. She became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down. (Applause) What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within 50 years, all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years, all forms of life would flourish." And he's right. What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Behind the design of Seattle's library

Joshua Prince-Ramus

{0: 'Joshua Prince-Ramus'}

{0: ['architect']}

{0: 'Joshua Prince-Ramus is best known as architect of the Seattle Central Library, already being hailed as a masterpiece of contemporary culture. Prince-Ramus was the founding partner of OMA New York—the American affiliate of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the Netherlands—and served as its Principal until he renamed the firm REX in 2006.'}

2006-02-23

2006-07-10

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['architecture', 'collaboration', 'culture', 'design', 'library']

{750: 'Building a theater that remakes itself', 2092: 'How to reinvent the apartment building', 2183: 'Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by ... you', 2220: 'How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art', 2375: 'Why great architecture should tell a story', 31821: 'Stunning buildings made from raw, imperfect materials'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_prince_ramus_behind_the_design_of_seattle_s_library/

Architect Joshua Prince-Ramus takes the audience on dazzling, dizzying virtual tours of three recent projects: the Central Library in Seattle, the Museum Plaza in Louisville and the Charles Wyly Theater in Dallas.

I'm going to present three projects in rapid fire. I don't have much time to do it. And I want to reinforce three ideas with that rapid-fire presentation. The first is what I like to call a hyper-rational process. It's a process that takes rationality almost to an absurd level, and it transcends all the baggage that normally comes with what people would call, sort of a rational conclusion to something. And it concludes in something that you see here, that you actually wouldn't expect as being the result of rationality. The second — the second is that this process does not have a signature. There is no authorship. Architects are obsessed with authorship. This is something that has editing and it has teams, but in fact, we no longer see within this process, the traditional master architect creating a sketch that his minions carry out. And the third is that it challenges — and this is, in the length of this, very hard to support why, connect all these things — but it challenges the high modernist notion of flexibility. High modernists said we will create sort of singular spaces that are generic, almost anything can happen within them. I call it sort of "shotgun flexibility" — turn your head this way; shoot; and you're bound to kill something. So, this is the promise of high modernism: within a single space, actually, any kind of activity can happen. But as we're seeing, operational costs are starting to dwarf capital costs in terms of design parameters. And so, with this sort of idea, what happens is, whatever actually is in the building on opening day, or whatever seems to be the most immediate need, starts to dwarf the possibility and sort of subsume it, of anything else could ever happen. And so we're proposing a different kind of flexibility, something that we call "compartmentalized flexibility." And the idea is that you, within that continuum, identify a series of points, and you design specifically to them. They can be pushed off-center a little bit, but in the end you actually still get as much of that original spectrum as you originally had hoped. With high modernist flexibility, that doesn't really work. Now I'm going to talk about — I'm going to build up the Seattle Central Library in this way before your eyes in about five or six diagrams, and I truly mean this is the design process that you'll see. With the library staff and the library board, we settled on two core positions. This is the first one, and this is showing, over the last 900 years, the evolution of the book, and other technologies. This diagram was our sort of position piece about the book, and our position was, books are technology — that's something people forget — but it's a form of technology that will have to share its dominance with any other form of truly potent technology or media. The second premise — and this was something that was very difficult for us to convince the librarians of at first — is that libraries, since the inception of Carnegie Library tradition in America, had a second responsibility, and that was for social roles. Ok, now, this I'll come back to later, but something — actually, the librarians at first said, "No, this isn't our mandate. Our mandate is media, and particularly the book." So what you're seeing now is actually the design of the building. The upper diagram is what we had seen in a whole host of contemporary libraries that used high modernist flexibility. Sort of, any activity could happen anywhere. We don't know the future of the library; we don't know the future of the book; and so, we'll use this approach. And what we saw were buildings that were very generic, and worse — not only were they very generic — so, not only does the reading room look like the copy room look like the magazine area — but it meant that whatever issue was troubling the library at that moment was starting to engulf every other activity that was happening in it. And in this case, what was getting engulfed were these social responsibilities by the expansion of the book. And so we proposed what's at the lower diagram. Very dumb approach: simply compartmentalize. Put those things whose evolution we could predict — and I don't mean that we could say what would actually happen in the future, but we have some certainty of the spectrum of what would happen in the future — put those in boxes designed specifically for it, and put the things that we can't predict on the rooftops. So that was the core idea. Now, we had to convince the library that social roles were equally important to media, in order to get them to accept this. What you're seeing here is actually their program on the left. That's as it was given to us in all of its clarity and glory. Our first operation was to re-digest it back to them, show it to them and say, "You know what? We haven't touched it, but only one-third of your own program is dedicated to media and books. Two-thirds of it is already dedicated — that's the white band below, the thing you said isn't important — is already dedicated to social functions." So once we had presented that back to them, they agreed that this sort of core concept could work. We got the right to go back to first principles — that's the third diagram. We recombined everything. And then we started making new decisions. What you're seeing on the right is the design of the library, specifically in terms of square footage. On the left of that diagram, here, you'll see a series of five platforms — sort of combs, collective programs. And on the right are the more indeterminate spaces; things like reading rooms, whose evolution in 20, 30, 40 years we can't predict. So that literally was the design of the building. They signed it, and to their chagrin, we came back a week later, and we presented them this. And as you can see, it is literally the diagram on the right. (Laughter) We just sized — no, really, I mean that, literally. The things on the left-hand side of the diagram, those are the boxes. We sized them into five compartments. They're super-efficient. We had a very low budget to work with. We pushed them around on the site to make very literal contextual relationships. The reading room should be able to see the water. The main entrance should have a public plaza in front of it to abide by the zoning code, and so forth. So, you see the five platforms, those are the boxes. within each one, a very discrete thing is happening. The area in between is sort of an urban continuum, these things that we can't predict their evolution to the same degree. To give you some sense of the power of this idea, the biggest block is what we call the book spiral. It's literally built in a very inexpensive way — it is a parking garage for books. It just so happens to be on the 6th through 10th floors of the building, but that is not necessarily an expensive approach. And it allows us to organize the entire Dewey Decimal System on one continuous run; no matter how it grows or contracts within the building, it will always have its clarity to end the sort of trail of tears that we've all experienced in public libraries. (Laughter) And so this was the final operation, which was to take these blocks as they were all pushed off kilter, and to hold onto them with a skin. That skin serves double duty, again, for economics. One, it is the lateral stability for the entire building; it's a structural element. But its dimensions were designed not only for structure, but also for holding on every piece of glass. The glass was then — I'll use the word impregnated — but it had a layer of metal that was called "stretched metal." That metal acts as a microlouver, so from the exterior of the building, the sun sees it as totally opaque, but from the interior, it's entirely transparent. So now I'm going to take you on a tour of the building. Let me see if I can find it. For anyone who gets motion sickness, I apologize. So, this is the building. And I think what's important is, when we first unveiled the building, the public saw it as being totally about our whim and ego. And it was defended, believe it or not, by the librarians. They said, "Look, we don't know what it is, but we know it's everything that we need it to be, based on the observations that we've done about the program." This is going into one of the entries. So, it's an unusual building for a public library, obviously. So now we're going into what we call the living room. This is actually a program that we invented with the library. It was recognizing that public libraries are the last vestige of public free space. There are plenty of shopping malls that allow you to get out of the rain in downtown Seattle, but there are not so many free places that allow you to get out of the rain. So this was an unprogrammed area where people could pretty much do anything, including eat, yell, play chess and so forth. Now we're moving up into what we call the mixing chamber. That was the main technology area in the building. You'll have to tell me if I'm going too fast for you. And now up. This is actually the place that we put into the building so I could propose to my wife, right there. (Laughter) She said yes. (Laughter) I'm running out of time, so I'm actually going to stop. I can show this to you later. But let's see if I can very quickly get into the book spiral, because I think it's, as I said, the most — this is the main reading room — the most unique part of the building. You dizzy yet? Ok, so here, this is the book spiral. So, it's very indiscernible, but it's actually a continuous stair-stepping. It allows you to, on one city block, go up one full floor, so that it's on a continuum. Ok, now I'm going to go back, and I'm going to hit a second project. I'm going to go very, very quickly through this. Now this is the Dallas Theater. It was an unusual client for us, because they came to us and they said, "We need you to do a new building. We've been working in a temporary space for 30 years, but because of that temporary space, we've become an infamous theater company. Theater is really focused in New York, Chicago and Seattle, with the exception of the Dallas Theater Company." And the very fact that they worked in a provisional space meant that for Beckett, they could blow out a wall; they could do "Cherry Orchard" and blow a hole through the floor, and so forth. So it was a very daunting task for us to do a brand-new building that could be a pristine building, but keep this kind of experimental nature. And the second is, they were what we call a multi-form theater, they do different kinds of performances in repertory. So they in the morning will do something in arena, then they'll do something in proscenium and so forth. And so they needed to be able to quickly transform between different theater organizations, and for operational budget reasons, this actually no longer happens in pretty much any multi-form theater in the United States, so we needed to figure out a way to overcome that. So our thought was to literally put the theater on its head: to take those things that were previously defined as front-of-house and back-of-house and stack them above house and below house, and to create what we called a theater machine. We invest the money in the operation of the building. It's almost as though the building could be placed anywhere, wherever you place it, the area under it is charged for theatrical performances. And it allowed us to go back to first principles, and redefine fly tower, acoustic enclosure, light enclosure and so forth. And at the push of a button, it allows the artistic director to move between proscenium, thrust, and in fact, arena and traverse and flat floor, in a very quick transfiguration. So in fact, using operational budget, we can — sorry, capital cost — we can actually achieve what was no longer achievable in operational cost. And that means that the artistic director now has a palette that he or she can choose from, between a series of forms and a series of processions, because that enclosure around the theater that is normally trapped with front-of-house and back-of-house spaces has been liberated. So an artistic director has the ability to have a performance that enters in a Wagnerian procession, shows the first act in thrust, the intermission in a Greek procession, second act in arena, and so forth. So I'm going to show you what this actually means. This is the theater up close. Any portion around the theater actually can be opened discretely. The light enclosure can be lifted separate to the acoustic enclosure, so you can do Beckett with Dallas as the backdrop. Portions can be opened, so you can now actually have motorcycles drive directly into the performance, or you can even just have an open-air performance, or for intermissions. The balconies all move to go between those configurations, but they also disappear. The proscenium line can also disappear. You can bring enormous objects in, so in fact, the Dallas Theater Company — their first show will be a play about Charles Lindbergh, and they'll want to bring in a real aircraft. And then it also provides them, in the off-season, the ability to actually rent out their space for entirely different things. This is it from a distance. Open up entire portions for different kinds of events. And at night. Again, remove the light enclosure; keep the acoustic enclosure. This is a monster truck show. I'm going to show now the last project. This also is an unusual client. They inverted the whole idea of development. They came to us and they said — unlike normal developers — they said, "We want to start out by providing a contemporary art museum in Louisville. That's our main goal." And so instead of being a developer that sees an opportunity to make money, they saw an ability to be a catalyst in their downtown. And the fact that they wanted to support the contemporary art museum actually built their pro forma, so they worked in reverse. And that pro forma led us to a mixed-use building that was very large, in order to support their aspirations of the art, but it also opened up opportunities for the art itself to collaborate, interact with commercial spaces that actually artists more and more want to work within. And it also charged us with thinking about how to have something that was both a single building and a credible sort of sub-building. So this is Louisville's skyline, and I'm going to take you through the various constraints that led to the project. First: the physical constraints. We actually had to operate on three discrete sites, all of them well smaller than the size of the building. We had to operate next to the new Muhammad Ali Center, and respect it. We had to operate within the 100-year floodplain. Now, this area floods three to four times a year, and there's a levee behind our site, similar to the ones that broke in New Orleans. Had to operate behind the I-64 corridor, a street that cuts through the middle of these separate sites. So we're starting to build a sort of nightmare of constraints in a bathtub. Underneath the bathtub are the city's main power lines. And there is a pedestrian corridor that they wanted to add, that would link a series of cultural buildings, and a view corridor — because this is the historic district — that they didn't want to obstruct with a new building. (Laughter) And now we're going to add 1.1 million square feet. And if we did the traditional thing, that 1.1 million square feet — these are the different programs — the traditional thing would be to identify the public elements, place them on sites, and now we'd have a really terrible situation: a public thing in the middle of a bathtub that floods. And then we would size all the other elements — the different commercial elements: hotel, luxury housing, offices and so forth — and dump it on top. And we would create something that was unviable. In fact — and you know this — this is called the Time Warner Building. (Laughter) So our strategy was very simple. Just lift the entire block, flip some of the elements over, reposition them so they have appropriate views and relationships to downtown, and make circulation connections and reroute the road. So that's the basic concept, and now I'm going to show you what it leads to. Ok, it seems a very formal, willful gesture, but something derived entirely out of the constraints. And again, when we unveiled it, there was a sort of nervousness that this was about an architect making a statement, not an architect who was attempting to solve a series of problems. Now, within that center zone, as I said, we have the ability to mix a series of things. So here, this is sort of an x-ray — the towers are totally developer-driven. They told us the dimensions, the sizes and so forth, and we focused on taking all the public components — the lobbies, the bars — everything that different commercial elements would have, and combined it in the center, in the sort of subway map, in the transfer zone that would also include the contemporary art museum. So it creates a situation like this, where you have artists who can operate within an art space that also has an amazing view on the 22nd floor, but it also has proximity that the curator can either open or close. It allows people on exercise bicycles to be seen, or to see the art, and so forth. It also means that if an artist wants to invade something like a swimming pool, they can begin to do their exhibition in a swimming pool, so they're not forced to always work within the confines of a contemporary gallery space. So, how to build this. It's very simple: it's a chair. So, we begin by building the cores. As we're building the cores, we build the contemporary art museum at grade. That allows us to have incredible efficiency and cost efficiency. This is not a high-budget building. The moment the cores get to mid level, we finish the art museum; we put all the mechanical equipment in it; and then we jack it up into the air. This is how they build really large aircraft hangars, for instance, the ones that they did for the A380. Finish the cores, finish the meat and you get something that looks like this. Now I only have about 30 seconds, so I want to start an animation, and we'll conclude with that. Thank you. (Applause) Chris asked me to add — the theater is under construction, and this project will start construction in about a year, and finish in 2010. [identify public elements] [insert public elements at grade] [optimize tower dimensions] [place towers on site] [lift program] [flip!] [optimize program adjacencies] [connect to context] [redirect 7th street]

Letting go of God

Julia Sweeney

{0: 'Julia Sweeney'}

{0: ['actor', 'comedian', 'playwright']}

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

2006-02-24

2006-07-10

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'mr', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Christianity', 'God', 'atheism', 'comedy', 'culture', 'performance', 'religion', 'storytelling', 'humor']

{22: 'Why people believe weird things', 94: "Let's teach religion -- all religion -- in schools", 856: 'It\'s time for "The Talk"', 71: 'A life of purpose', 2801: '12 truths I learned from life and writing', 31459: 'Embrace your raw, strange magic'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/julia_sweeney_letting_go_of_god/

When two young Mormon missionaries knock on Julia Sweeney's door one day, it touches off a quest to completely rethink her own beliefs, in this excerpt from Sweeney's solo show "Letting Go of God."

On September 10, the morning of my seventh birthday, I came downstairs to the kitchen, where my mother was washing the dishes and my father was reading the paper or something, and I sort of presented myself to them in the doorway, and they said, "Hey, happy birthday!" And I said, "I'm seven." And my father smiled and said, "Well, you know what that means, don't you?" And I said, "Yeah, that I'm going to have a party and a cake and get a lot of presents?" And my dad said, "Well, yes. But more importantly, being seven means that you've reached the age of reason, and you're now capable of committing any and all sins against God and man." (Laughter) Now, I had heard this phrase, "age of reason," before. Sister Mary Kevin had been bandying it about my second-grade class at school. But when she said it, the phrase seemed all caught up in the excitement of preparations for our first communion and our first confession, and everybody knew that was really all about the white dress and the white veil. And anyway, I hadn't really paid all that much attention to that phrase, "age of reason." So, I said, "Yeah, yeah, age of reason. What does that mean again?" And my dad said, "Well, we believe, in the Catholic Church, that God knows that little kids don't know the difference between right and wrong, but when you're seven, you're old enough to know better. So, you've grown up and reached the age of reason, and now God will start keeping notes on you, and begin your permanent record." (Laughter) And I said, "Oh ... Wait a minute. You mean all that time, up till today, all that time I was so good, God didn't notice it?" And my mom said, "Well, I noticed it." (Laughter) And I thought, "How could I not have known this before? How could it not have sunk in when they'd been telling me? All that being good and no real credit for it. And worst of all, how could I not have realized this very important information until the very day that it was basically useless to me?" So I said, "Well, Mom and Dad, what about Santa Claus? I mean, Santa Claus knows if you're naughty or nice, right?" And my dad said, "Yeah, but, honey, I think that's technically just between Thanksgiving and Christmas." And my mother said, "Oh, Bob, stop it. Let's just tell her. I mean, she's seven. Julie, there is no Santa Claus." (Laughter) Now, this was actually not that upsetting to me. My parents had this whole elaborate story about Santa Claus: how they had talked to Santa Claus himself and agreed that instead of Santa delivering our presents over the night of Christmas Eve, like he did for every other family who got to open their surprises first thing Christmas morning, our family would give Santa more time. Santa would come to our house while we were at nine o'clock high mass on Christmas morning, but only if all of us kids did not make a fuss. Which made me very suspicious. It was pretty obvious that it was really our parents giving us the presents. I mean, my dad had a very distinctive wrapping style, and my mother's handwriting was so close to Santa's. (Laughter) Plus, why would Santa save time by having to loop back to our house after he'd gone to everybody else's? There was only one obvious conclusion to reach from this mountain of evidence: our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit, and my poor parents were trying to protect us from the embarrassment, this humiliation of rejection by Santa, who was jolly — but let's face it, he was also very judgmental. So to find out that there was no Santa Claus at all was actually sort of a relief. I left the kitchen not really in shock about Santa, but rather, I was just dumbfounded about how I could have missed this whole age of reason thing. It was too late for me, but maybe I could help someone else, someone who could use the information. They had to fit two criteria: they had to be old enough to be able to understand the whole concept of the age of reason, and not yet seven. The answer was clear: my brother Bill. He was six. Well, I finally found Bill about a block away from our house at this public school playground. It was a Saturday, and he was all by himself, just kicking a ball against the side of a wall. I ran up to him and said, "Bill! I just realized that the age of reason starts when you turn seven, and then you're capable of committing any and all sins against God and man." And Bill said, "So?" And I said, "So, you're six. You have a whole year to do anything you want to and God won't notice it." And he said, "So?" And I said, "So? So everything!" And I turned to run. I was so angry with him. But when I got to the top of the steps, I turned around dramatically and said, "Oh, by the way, Bill — there is no Santa Claus." (Laughter) Now, I didn't know it at the time, but I really wasn't turning seven on September 10th. For my 13th birthday, I planned a slumber party with all of my girlfriends, but a couple of weeks beforehand my mother took me aside and said, "I need to speak to you privately. September 10th is not your birthday. It's October 10th." And I said, "What?" (Laughter) And she said ... (Laughter) "Listen. The cut-off date to start kindergarten was September 15th." (Laughter) "So I told them that your birthday was September 10th, and then I wasn't sure that you weren't just going to go blab it all over the place, so I started to tell you your birthday was September 10th. But, Julie, you were so ready to start school, honey. You were so ready." I thought about it, and when I was four, I was already the oldest of four children, and my mother even had another child to come, so what I think she — understandably — really meant was that she was so ready, she was so ready. Then she said, "Don't worry, Julie. Every year on October 10th, when it was your birthday but you didn't realize it, I made sure that you ate a piece of cake that day." (Laughter) Which was comforting, but troubling. My mother had been celebrating my birthday with me, without me. (Laughter) What was so upsetting about this new piece of information was not that I had to change the date of my slumber party with all of my girlfriends. What was most upsetting was that this meant I was not a Virgo. I had a huge Virgo poster in my bedroom. And I read my horoscope every single day, and it was so totally me. (Laughter) And this meant that I was a Libra? So, I took the bus downtown to get the new Libra poster. The Virgo poster is a picture of a beautiful woman with long hair, sort of lounging by some water, but the Libra poster is just a huge scale. This was around the time that I started filling out physically, and I was filling out a lot more than a lot of the other girls, and frankly, the whole idea that my astrological sign was a scale just seemed ominous and depressing. (Laughter) But I got the new Libra poster, and I started to read my new Libra horoscope, and I was astonished to find that it was also totally me. (Laughter) It wasn't until years later, looking back on this whole age-of-reason, change-of-birthday thing, that it dawned on me: I wasn't turning seven when I thought I turned seven. I had a whole other month to do anything I wanted to before God started keeping tabs on me. Oh, life can be so cruel. One day, two Mormon missionaries came to my door. Now, I just live off a main thoroughfare in Los Angeles, and my block is — well, it's a natural beginning for people who are peddling things door to door. Sometimes I get little old ladies from the Seventh Day Adventist Church showing me these cartoon pictures of heaven. And sometimes I get teenagers who promise me that they won't join a gang and just start robbing people, if I only buy some magazine subscriptions from them. So normally, I just ignore the doorbell, but on this day, I answered. And there stood two boys, each about 19, in white, starched short-sleeved shirts, and they had little name tags that identified them as official representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they said they had a message for me, from God. I said, "A message for me? From God?" And they said, "Yes." Now, I was raised in the Pacific Northwest, around a lot of Church of Latter-day Saints people and, you know, I've worked with them and even dated them, but I never really knew the doctrine, or what they said to people when they were out on a mission, and I guess I was sort of curious, so I said, "Well, please, come in." And they looked really happy, because I don't think this happens to them all that often. (Laughter) And I sat them down, and I got them glasses of water — Ok, I got it, I got it. I got them glasses of water. Don't touch my hair, that's the thing. (Laughter) You can't put a video of myself in front of me and expect me not to fix my hair. Ok. (Laughter) So I sat them down and I got them glasses of water, and after niceties, they said, "Do you believe that God loves you with all his heart?" And I thought, "Well, of course I believe in God, but you know, I don't like that word 'heart,' because it anthropomorphizes God, and I don't like the word, 'his,' either, because that sexualizes God." But I didn't want to argue semantics with these boys, so after a very long, uncomfortable pause, I said, "Yes, yes, I do. I feel very loved." And they looked at each other and smiled, like that was the right answer. And then they said, "Do you believe that we're all brothers and sisters on this planet?" And I said, "Yes, I do." And I was so relieved that it was a question I could answer so quickly. And they said, "Well, then we have a story to tell you." And they told me this story all about this guy named Lehi, who lived in Jerusalem in 600 BC. Now, apparently in Jerusalem in 600 BC, everyone was completely bad and evil. Every single one of them: man, woman, child, infant, fetus. And God came to Lehi and said to him, "Put your family on a boat and I will lead you out of here." And God did lead them. He led them to America. I said, "America? (Laughter) From Jerusalem to America by boat in 600 BC?" And they said, "Yes." (Laughter) Then they told me how Lehi and his descendants reproduced and reproduced, and over the course of 600 years, there were two great races of them, the Nephites and the Lamanites, and the Nephites were totally good — each and every one of them — and the Lamanites were totally bad and evil — every single one of them just bad to the bone. Then, after Jesus died on the cross for our sins, on his way up to heaven, he stopped by America and visited the Nephites. (Laughter) And he told them that if they all remained totally, totally good — each and every one of them — they would win the war against the evil Lamanites. But apparently somebody blew it, because the Lamanites were able to kill all the Nephites. All but one guy, this guy named Mormon, who managed to survive by hiding in the woods. And he made sure this whole story was written down in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics chiseled onto gold plates, which he then buried near Palmyra, New York. (Laughter) Well, I was just on the edge of my seat. (Laughter) I said, "What happened to the Lamanites?" And they said, "Well, they became our Native Americans, here in the U.S." And I said, "So, you believe the Native Americans are descended from a people who were totally evil?" And they said, "Yes." Then they told me how this guy named Joseph Smith found those buried gold plates right in his backyard, and he also found this magic stone back there that he put into his hat and then buried his face into, and this allowed him to translate the gold plates from the reformed Egyptian into English. Well, at this point I just wanted to give these two boys some advice about their pitch. (Laughter) I wanted to say — (Applause) "Ok, don't start with this story." (Laughter) I mean, even the Scientologists know to start with a personality test before they start — (Applause) telling people all about Xenu, the evil intergalactic overlord. Then, they said, "Do you believe that God speaks to us through his righteous prophets?" And I said, "No, I don't," because I was sort of upset about this Lamanite story and this crazy gold plate story, but the truth was, I hadn't really thought this through, so I backpedaled a little and I said, "Well, what exactly do you mean by 'righteous'? And what do you mean by prophets? Like, could the prophets be women?" And they said, "No." And I said, "Why?" And they said, "Well, it's because God gave women a gift that is so spectacular, it is so wonderful, that the only gift he had left over to give men was the gift of prophecy." What is this wonderful gift God gave women, I wondered? Maybe their greater ability to cooperate and adapt? (Laughter) Women's longer lifespan? The fact that women tend to be much less violent than men? But no — it wasn't any of these gifts. They said, "Well, it's her ability to bear children." I said, "Oh, come on. I mean, even if women tried to have a baby every single year from the time they were 15 to the time they were 45, assuming they didn't die from exhaustion, it still seems like some women would have some time left over to hear the word of God." And they said, "No." (Laughter) Well, then they didn't look so fresh-faced and cute to me any more, but they had more to say. They said, "Well, we also believe that if you're a Mormon, and if you're in good standing with the church, when you die, you get to go to heaven and be with your family for all eternity." And I said, "Oh, dear. (Laughter) That wouldn't be such a good incentive for me." (Laughter) And they said, "Oh. (Laughter) Hey! Well, we also believe that when you go to heaven, you get your body restored to you in its best original state. Like, if you'd lost a leg, well, you get it back. Or, if you'd gone blind, you could see." I said, "Oh. Now, I don't have a uterus, because I had cancer a few years ago. So does this mean that if I went to heaven, I would get my old uterus back?" And they said, "Sure." And I said, "I don't want it back. I'm happy without it." Gosh. What if you had a nose job and you liked it? (Laughter) Would God force you to get your old nose back? Then they gave me this Book of Mormon, told me to read this chapter and that chapter, and said they'd come back and check in on me, and I think I said something like, "Please don't hurry," or maybe just, "Please don't," and they were gone. Ok, so I initially felt really superior to these boys, and smug in my more conventional faith. But then the more I thought about it, the more I had to be honest with myself. If someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the very first time, and they said, "We believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse, and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us." (Laughter) "And she had a baby, and that's the son of God," I mean, I would think that's equally ridiculous. I'm just so used to that story. (Laughter) So, I couldn't let myself feel condescending towards these boys. But the question they asked me when they first arrived really stuck in my head: Did I believe that God loved me with all his heart? Because I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about that question. Now, if they had asked me, "Do you feel that God loves you with all his heart?" Well, that would have been much different, I think I would have instantly answered, "Yes, yes, I feel it all the time. I feel God's love when I'm hurt and confused, and I feel consoled and cared for. I take shelter in God's love when I don't understand why tragedy hits, and I feel God's love when I look with gratitude at all the beauty I see." But since they asked me that question with the word "believe" in it, somehow it was all different, because I wasn't exactly sure if I believed what I so clearly felt.

Let's teach religion -- all religion -- in schools

Dan Dennett

{0: 'Dan Dennett'}

{0: ['philosopher', 'cognitive scientist']}

{0: 'Dan Dennett thinks that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes.'}

2006-02-02

2006-07-18

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'lt', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['God', 'atheism', 'brain', 'cognitive science', 'consciousness', 'evolution', 'philosophy', 'religion']

{71: 'A life of purpose', 2011: 'Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)', 234: 'My wish: The Charter for Compassion', 113: 'Militant atheism', 2643: "It's time to reclaim religion", 9125: 'My failed mission to find God -- and what I found instead'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_let_s_teach_religion_all_religion_in_schools/

Philosopher Dan Dennett calls for religion -- all religion -- to be taught in schools, so we can understand its nature as a natural phenomenon. Then he takes on The Purpose-Driven Life, disputing its claim that, to be moral, one must deny evolution.

It's wonderful to be back. I love this wonderful gathering. And you must be wondering, "What on earth? Have they put up the wrong slide?" No, no. Look at this magnificent beast, and ask the question: Who designed it? This is TED; this is Technology, Entertainment, Design, and there's a dairy cow. It's a quite wonderfully designed animal. And I was thinking, how do I introduce this? And I thought, well, maybe that old doggerel by Joyce Kilmer, you know: "Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree." And you might say, "Well, God designed the cow." But, of course, God got a lot of help. This is the ancestor of cattle. This is the aurochs. And it was designed by natural selection, the process of natural selection, over many millions of years. And then it became domesticated, thousands of years ago. And human beings became its stewards, and, without even knowing what they were doing, they gradually redesigned it and redesigned it and redesigned it. And then more recently, they really began to do reverse engineering on this beast and figure out just what the parts were, how they worked and how they might be optimized — how they might be made better. Now, why am I talking about cows? Because I want to say that much the same thing is true of religions. Religions are natural phenomena — they're just as natural as cows. They have evolved over millennia. They have a biological base, just like the aurochs. They have become domesticated, and human beings have been redesigning their religions for thousands of years. This is TED, and I want to talk about design. Because what I've been doing for the last four years — really since the first time you saw me — some of you saw me at TED when I was talking about religion — and in the last four years, I've been working just about non-stop on this topic. And you might say it's about the reverse engineering of religions. Now that very idea, I think, strikes terror in many people, or anger, or anxiety of one sort or another. And that is the spell that I want to break. I want to say, no, religions are an important natural phenomenon. We should study them with the same intensity that we study all the other important natural phenomena, like global warming, as we heard so eloquently last night from Al Gore. Today's religions are brilliantly designed — brilliantly designed. They are immensely powerful social institutions and many of their features can be traced back to earlier features that we can really make sense of by reverse engineering. And, as with the cow, there's a mixture of evolutionary design — designed by natural selection itself — and intelligent design — more or less intelligent design — and redesigned by human beings who are trying to redesign their religions. You don't do book talks at TED, but I'm going to have just one slide about my book, because there is one message in it which I think this group really needs to hear. And I would be very interested to get your responses to this. It's the one policy proposal that I make in the book, at this time, when I claim not to know enough about religion to know what other policy proposals to make. And it's one that echoes remarks that you've heard already today. Here's my proposal, I'm going to just take a couple of minutes to explain it: Education on world religions for all of our children — in primary school, in high school, in public schools, in private schools and in home schooling. So what I'm proposing is, just as we require reading, writing, arithmetic, American history, so we should have a curriculum on facts about all the religions of the world — about their history, about their creeds, about their texts, their music, their symbolisms, their prohibitions, their requirements. And this should be presented factually, straightforwardly, with no particular spin, to all of the children in the country. And as long as you teach them that, you can teach them anything else you like. That, I think, is maximal tolerance for religious freedom. As long as you inform your children about other religions, then you may — and as early as you like and whatever you like — teach them whatever creed you want them to learn. But also let them know about other religions. Now, why do I say that? Because democracy depends on an informed citizenship. Informed consent is the very bedrock of our understanding of democracy. Misinformed consent is not worth it. It's like a coin flip; it doesn't count, really. Democracy depends on informed consent. This is the way we treat people as responsible adults. Now, children below the age of consent are a special case. Parents — I'm going to use a word that Pastor Rick just used — parents are stewards of their children. They don't own them. You can't own your children. You have a responsibility to the world, to the state, to them, to take care of them right. You may teach them whatever creed you think is most important, but I say you have a responsibility to let them be informed about all the other creeds in the world, too. The reason I've taken this time is I've been fascinated to hear some of the reactions to this. One reviewer for a Roman Catholic newspaper called it "totalitarian." It strikes me as practically libertarian. Is it totalitarian to require reading, writing and arithmetic? I don't think so. All I'm saying is — and facts, facts only; no values, just facts — about all the world's religions. Another reviewer called it "hilarious." Well, I'm really bothered by the fact that anybody would think that was hilarious. It seems to me to be such a plausible, natural extension of the democratic principles we already have that I'm shocked to think anybody would find that just ridiculous. I know many religions are so anxious about preserving the purity of their faith among their children that they are intent on keeping their children ignorant of other faiths. I don't think that's defensible. But I'd really be pleased to get your answers on that — any reactions to that — later. But now I'm going to move on. Back to the cow. This picture, which I pulled off the web — the fellow on the left is really an important part of this picture. That's the steward. Cows couldn't live without human stewards — they're domesticated. They're a sort of ectosymbiont. They depend on us for their survival. And Pastor Rick was just talking about sheep. I'm going to talk about sheep, too. There's a lot of serendipitous convergence here. How clever it was of sheep to acquire shepherds! (Laughter) Think of what this got them. They could outsource all their problems: protection from predators, food-finding ... (Laughter) ... health maintenance. (Laughter) The only cost in most flocks — not even this — a loss of free mating. What a deal! "How clever of sheep!" you might say. Except, of course, it wasn't the sheep's cleverness. We all know sheep are not exactly rocket scientists — they're not very smart. It wasn't the cleverness of the sheep at all. They were clueless. But it was a very clever move. Whose clever move was it? It was the clever move of natural selection itself. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with Jim Watson, once joked about what he called Orgel's Second Rule. Leslie Orgel is a molecular biologist, brilliant guy, and Orgel's Second Rule is: Evolution is cleverer than you are. Now, that is not Intelligent Design — not from Francis Crick. Evolution is cleverer than you are. If you understand Orgel's Second Rule, then you understand why the Intelligent Design movement is basically a hoax. The designs discovered by the process of natural selection are brilliant, unbelievably brilliant. Again and again biologists are fascinated with the brilliance of what's discovered. But the process itself is without purpose, without foresight, without design. When I was here four years ago, I told the story about an ant climbing a blade of grass. And why the ant was doing it was because its brain had been infected with a lancet fluke that was needed to get into the belly of a sheep or a cow in order to reproduce. So it was sort of a spooky story. And I think some people may have misunderstood. Lancet flukes aren't smart. I submit that the intelligence of a lancet fluke is down there, somewhere between petunia and carrot. They're not really bright. They don't have to be. The lesson we learn from this is: you don't have to have a mind to be a beneficiary. The design is there in nature, but it's not in anybody's head. It doesn't have to be. That's the way evolution works. Question: Was domestication good for sheep? It was great for their genetic fitness. And here I want to remind you of a wonderful point that Paul MacCready made at TED three years ago. Here's what he said: "Ten thousand years ago, at the dawn of agriculture, human population, plus livestock and pets, was approximately a tenth of one percent of the terrestrial vertebrate landmass." That was just 10,000 years ago. Yesterday, in biological terms. What is it today? Does anybody remember what he told us? 98 percent. That is what we have done on this planet. Now, I talked to Paul afterwards — I wanted to check to find out how he'd calculated this, and get the sources and so forth — and he also gave me a paper that he had written on this. And there was a passage in it which he did not present here and I think it is so good, I'm going to read it to you: "Over billions of years on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life: complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans — a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature — have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paintbrush." We heard about the atmosphere as a thin layer of varnish. Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on this planet. And we're the ones that hold the paintbrush. And how can we do that? The key to our domination of the planet is culture. And the key to culture is religion. Suppose Martian scientists came to Earth. They would be puzzled by many things. Anybody know what this is? I'll tell you what it is. This is a million people gathering on the banks of the Ganges in 2001, perhaps the largest single gathering of human beings ever, as seen from satellite photograph. Here's a big crowd. Here's another crowd in Mecca. Martians would be amazed by this. They'd want to know how it originated, what it was for and how it perpetuates itself. Actually, I'm going to pass over this. The ant isn't alone. There's all sorts of wonderful cases of species which — in that case — A parasite gets into a mouse and needs to get into the belly of a cat. And it turns the mouse into Mighty Mouse, makes it fearless, so it runs out in the open, where it'll be eaten by a cat. True story. In other words, we have these hijackers — you've seen this slide before, from four years ago — a parasite that infects the brain and induces even suicidal behavior, on behalf of a cause other than one's own genetic fitness. Does that ever happen to us? Yes, it does — quite wonderfully. The Arabic word "Islam" means "submission." It means "surrender of self-interest to the will of Allah." But I'm not just talking about Islam. I'm talking also about Christianity. This is a parchment music page that I found in a Paris bookstall 50 years ago. And on it, it says, in Latin: "Semen est verbum Dei. Sator autem Christus." The word of God is the seed and the sower of the seed is Christ. Same idea. Well, not quite. But in fact, Christians, too ... glory in the fact that they have surrendered to God. I'll give you a few quotes. "The heart of worship is surrender. Surrendered people obey God's words, even if it doesn't make sense." Those words are by Rick Warren. Those are from "The Purpose Driven Life." And I want to turn now, briefly, to talk about that book, which I've read. You've all got a copy, and you've just heard the man. And what I want to do now is say a bit about this book from the design standpoint, because I think it's actually a brilliant book. First of all, the goal — and you heard just now what the goal is — it's to bring purpose to the lives of millions, and he has succeeded. Is it a good goal? In itself, I'm sure we all agree, it is a wonderful goal. He's absolutely right. There are lots of people out there who don't have purpose in their life, and bringing purpose to their life is a wonderful goal. I give him an A+ on this. (Laughter) Is the goal achieved? Yes. Thirty million copies of this book. Al Gore, eat your heart out. (Laughter) Just exactly what Al is trying to do, Rick is doing. This is a fantastic achievement. And the means — how does he do it? It's a brilliant redesign of traditional religious themes — updating them, quietly dropping obsolete features, putting new interpretations on other features. This is the evolution of religion that's been going on for thousands of years, and he's just the latest brilliant practitioner of it. I don't have to tell you this; you just heard the man. Excellent insights into human psychology, wise advice on every page. Moreover, he invites us to look under the hood. I really appreciated that. For instance, he has an appendix where he explains his choice of translations of different Bible verses. The book is clear, vivid, accessible, beautifully formatted. Just enough repetition. That's really important. Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. (Laughter) With me, everybody — (Audience and Dan Dennett) Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. Thank you. And now we come to my problem. Because I'm absolutely sincere in my appreciation of all that I said about this book. But I wish it were better. I have some problems with the book. And it would just be insincere of me not to address those problems. I wish he could do this with a revision, a Mark 2 version of his book. "The truth will set you free." That's what it says in the Bible, and it's something that I want to live by, too. My problem is, some of the bits in it I don't think are true. Now some of this is a difference of opinion. And that's not my main complaint, that's worth mentioning. Here's a passage — it's very much what he said, anyway: "If there was no God we would all be accidents, the result of astronomical random chance in the Universe. You could stop reading this book because life would have no purpose or meaning or significance. There would be no right or wrong and no hope beyond your brief years on Earth." Now, I just do not believe that. By the way, I find — Homer Groening's film presented a beautiful alternative to that very claim. Yes, there is meaning and a reason for right or wrong. We don't need a belief in God to be good or to have meaning in us. But that, as I said, is just a difference of opinion. That's not what I'm really worried about. How about this: "God designed this planet's environment just so we could live in it." I'm afraid that a lot of people take that sentiment to mean that we don't have to do the sorts of things that Al Gore is trying so hard to get us to do. I am not happy with that sentiment at all. And then I find this: "All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality have their meaning and explanation in this central fact." Well, that's Michael Denton. He's a creationist. And here, I think, "Wait a minute." I read this again. I read it three or four times and I think, "Is he really endorsing Intelligent Design? Is he endorsing creationism here?" And you can't tell. So I'm sort of thinking, "Well, I don't know, I don't know if I want to get upset with this yet." But then I read on, and I read this: "First, Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the Flood, God irrigated the earth from the ground up." I wish that sentence weren't in there, because I think it is false. And I think that thinking this way about the history of the planet, after we've just been hearing about the history of the planet over millions of years, discourages people from scientific understanding. Now, Rick Warren uses scientific terms and scientific factoids and information in a very interesting way. Here's one: "God deliberately shaped and formed you to serve him in a way that makes your ministry unique. He carefully mixed the DNA cocktail that created you." I think that's false. Now, maybe we want to treat it as metaphorical. Here's another one: "For instance, your brain can store 100 trillion facts. Your mind can handle 15,000 decisions a second." Well, it would be interesting to find the interpretation where I would accept that. There might be some way of treating that as true. "Anthropologists have noted that worship is a universal urge, hardwired by God into the very fiber of our being — an inbuilt need to connect with God." Well, the sense of which I agree with him, except I think it has an evolutionary explanation. And what I find deeply troubling in this book is that he seems to be arguing that if you want to be moral, if you want to have meaning in your life, you have to be an Intelligent Designer, you have to deny the theory of evolution by natural selection. And I think, on the contrary, that it is very important to solving the world's problems that we take evolutionary biology seriously. Whose truth are we going to listen to? Well, this is from "The Purpose Driven Life": "The Bible must become the authoritative standard for my life: the compass I rely on for direction, the counsel I listen to for making wise decisions, and the benchmark I use for evaluating everything." Well maybe, OK, but what's going to follow from this? And here's one that does concern me. Remember I quoted him before with this line: "Surrendered people obey God's word, even if it doesn't make sense." And that's a problem. (Sighs) "Don't ever argue with the Devil. He's better at arguing than you are, having had thousands of years to practice." Now, Rick Warren didn't invent this clever move. It's an old move. It's a very clever adaptation of religions. It's a wild card for disarming any reasonable criticism. "You don't like my interpretation? You've got a reasonable objection to it? Don't listen, don't listen! That's the Devil speaking." This discourages the sort of reasoning citizenship it seems to me that we want to have. I've got one more problem, then I'm through. And I'd really like to get a response if Rick is able to do it. "In the Great Commission, Jesus said, 'Go to all people of all nations and make them my disciples. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to do everything I've told you.'" The Bible says Jesus is the only one who can save the world. We've seen many wonderful maps of the world in the last day or so. Here's one, not as beautiful as the others; it simply shows the religions of the world. Here's one that shows the sort of current breakdown of the different religions. Do we really want to commit ourselves to engulfing all the other religions, when their holy books are telling them, "Don't listen to the other side, that's just Satan talking!"? It seems to me that that's a very problematic ship to get on for the future. I found this sign as I was driving to Maine recently, in front of a church: "Good without God becomes zero." Sort of cute. A very clever little meme. I don't believe it and I think this idea, popular as it is — not in this guise, but in general — is itself one of the main problems that we face. If you are like me, you know many wonderful, committed, engaged atheists, agnostics, who are being very good without God. And you also know many religious people who hide behind their sanctity instead of doing good works. So, I wish we could drop this meme. I wish this meme would go extinct. Thanks very much for your attention. (Applause)

A life of purpose

Rick Warren

{0: 'Rick Warren'}

{0: ['pastor', 'author']}

{0: 'Pastor Rick Warren is the author of <em>The Purpose-Driven Life,</em> which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. His has become an immensely influential voice seeking to apply the values of his faith to issues such as global poverty, HIV/AIDS and injustice.'}

2006-02-25

2006-07-18

TED2006

en

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['Christianity', 'God', 'culture', 'happiness', 'leadership', 'motivation', 'philanthropy', 'religion']

{94: "Let's teach religion -- all religion -- in schools", 676: 'Lose your ego, find your compassion', 2011: 'Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)', 86: 'Letting go of God', 9125: 'My failed mission to find God -- and what I found instead', 2801: '12 truths I learned from life and writing'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/rick_warren_a_life_of_purpose/

Pastor Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose-Driven Life," reflects on his own crisis of purpose in the wake of his book's wild success. He explains his belief that God's intention is for each of us to use our talents and influence to do good.

I'm often asked, "What surprised you about the book?" And I say, "That I got to write it." I would have never imagined that. Not in my wildest dreams did I think — I don't even consider myself to be an author. And I'm often asked, "Why do you think so many people have read this? This thing's selling still about a million copies a month." And I think it's because spiritual emptiness is a universal disease. I think inside at some point, we put our heads down on the pillow and we go, "There's got to be more to life than this." Get up in the morning, go to work, come home and watch TV, go to bed, get up in the morning, go to work, come home, watch TV, go to bed, go to parties on weekends. A lot of people say, "I'm living." No, you're not living — that's just existing. Just existing. I really think that there's this inner desire. I do believe what Chris said; I believe that you're not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but I believe God did. I think there are accidental parents; there's no doubt about that. I don't think there are accidental kids. And I think you matter. I think you matter to God; I think you matter to history; I think you matter to this universe. And I think that the difference between what I call the survival level of living, the success level of living, and the significance level of living is: Do you figure out, "What on Earth am I here for?" I meet a lot of people who are very smart, and say, "But why can't I figure out my problems?" And I meet a lot of people who are very successful, who say, "Why don't I feel more fulfilled? Why do I feel like a fake? Why do I feel like I've got to pretend that I'm more than I really am?" I think that comes down to this issue of meaning, of significance, of purpose. I think it comes down to this issue of: "Why am I here? What am I here for? Where am I going?" These are not religious issues. They're human issues. I wanted to tell Michael before he spoke that I really appreciate what he does, because it makes my life work a whole lot easier. As a pastor, I do see a lot of kooks. And I have learned that there are kooks in every area of life. Religion doesn't have a monopoly on that, but there are plenty of religious kooks. There are secular kooks; there are smart kooks, dumb kooks. There are people — a lady came up to me the other day, and she had a white piece of paper — Michael, you'll like this one — and she said, "What do you see in it?" And I looked at it and I said, "Oh, I don't see anything." And she goes, "Well, I see Jesus," and started crying and left. I'm going, "OK," you know? "Fine." (Laughter) Good for you. When the book became the best-selling book in the world for the last three years, I kind of had my little crisis. And that was: What is the purpose of this? Because it brought in enormous amounts of money. When you write the best-selling book in the world, it's tons and tons of money. And it brought in a lot of attention, neither of which I wanted. When I started Saddleback Church, I was 25 years old. I started it with one other family in 1980. And I decided that I was never going to go on TV, because I didn't want to be a celebrity. I didn't want to be a, quote, "evangelist, televangelist" — that's not my thing. And all of the sudden, it brought a lot of money and a lot of attention. I don't think — now, this is a worldview, and I will tell you, everybody's got a worldview. Everybody's betting their life on something. You're betting your life on something, you just better know why you're betting what you're betting on. So, everybody's betting their life on something. And when I, you know, made a bet, I happened to believe that Jesus was who he said he was. And I believe in a pluralistic society, everybody's betting on something. And when I started the church, you know, I had no plans to do what it's doing now. And then when I wrote this book, and all of a sudden, it just took off, and I started saying, now, what's the purpose of this? Because as I started to say, I don't think you're given money or fame for your own ego, ever. I just don't believe that. And when you write a book that the first sentence of the book is, "It's not about you," then, when all of a sudden it becomes the best-selling book in history, you've got to figure, well, I guess it's not about me. That's kind of a no-brainer. So, what is it for? And I began to think about what I call the "stewardship of affluence" and the "stewardship of influence." So I believe, essentially, leadership is stewardship. That if you are a leader in any area — in business, in politics, in sports, in art, in academics, in any area — you don't own it. You are a steward of it. For instance, that's why I believe in protecting the environment. This is not my planet. It wasn't mine before I was born, it's not going to be mine after I die, I'm just here for 80 years and then that's it. I was debating the other day on a talk show, and the guy was challenging me and he'd go, "What's a pastor doing on protecting the environment?" And I asked this guy, I said, "Well, do you believe that human beings are responsible to make the world a little bit better place for the next generation? Do you think we have a stewardship here, to take the environment seriously?" And he said, "No." I said, "Oh, you don't?" I said, "Let me make this clear again: Do you believe that as human beings — I'm not talking about religion — do you believe that as human beings, it is our responsibility to take care of this planet, and make it just a little bit better for the next generation?" And he said, "No. Not any more than any other species." When he said the word "species," he was revealing his worldview. And he was saying, "I'm no more responsible to take care of this environment than a duck is." Well now, I know a lot of times we act like ducks, but you're not a duck. You're not a duck. And you are responsible — that's my worldview. And so, you need to understand what your worldview is. The problem is most people never really think it through. They never really ... codify it or qualify it or quantify it, and say, "This is what I believe in. This is why I believe what I believe." I don't personally have enough faith to be an atheist. But you may, you may. Your worldview, though, does determine everything else in your life, because it determines your decisions; it determines your relationships; it determines your level of confidence. It determines, really, everything in your life. What we believe, obviously — and you know this — determines our behavior, and our behavior determines what we become in life. So all of this money started pouring in, and all of this fame started pouring in. And I'm going, what do I do with this? My wife and I first made five decisions on what to do with the money. We said, "First, we're not going to use it on ourselves." I didn't go out and buy a bigger house. I don't own a guesthouse. I still drive the same four year-old Ford that I've driven. We just said, we're not going to use it on us. The second thing was, I stopped taking a salary from the church that I pastor. Third thing is, I added up all that the church had paid me over the last 25 years, and I gave it back. And I gave it back because I didn't want anybody thinking that I do what I do for money — I don't. In fact, personally, I've never met a priest or a pastor or a minister who does it for money. I know that's the stereotype; I've never met one of them. Believe me, there's a whole lot easier ways to make money. Pastors are like on 24 hours-a-day call, they're like doctors. I left late today — I'd hoped to be here yesterday — because my father-in-law is in his last, probably, 48 hours before he dies of cancer. And I'm watching a guy who's lived his life — he's now in his mid-80s — and he's dying with peace. You know, the test of your worldview is not how you act in the good times. The test of your worldview is how you act at the funeral. And having been through literally hundreds if not thousands of funerals, it makes a difference. It makes a difference what you believe. So, we gave it all back, and then we set up three foundations, working on some of the major problems of the world: illiteracy, poverty, pandemic diseases — particularly HIV/AIDS — and set up these three foundations, and put the money into that. The last thing we did is we became what I call "reverse tithers." And that is, when my wife and I got married 30 years ago, we started tithing. Now, that's a principle in the Bible that says give 10 percent of what you get back to charity, give it away to help other people. So, we started doing that, and each year we would raise our tithe one percent. So, our first year of marriage we went to 11 percent, second year we went to 12 percent, and the third year we went to 13 percent, and on and on and on. Why did I do that? Because every time I give, it breaks the grip of materialism in my life. Materialism is all about getting — get, get, get, get all you can, can all you get, sit on the can and spoil the rest. It's all about more, having more. And we think that the good life is actually looking good — that's most important of all — looking good, feeling good and having the goods. But that's not the good life. I meet people all the time who have those, and they're not necessarily happy. If money actually made you happy, then the wealthiest people in the world would be the happiest. And that I know, personally, I know, is not true. It's just not true. So, the good life is not about looking good, feeling good or having the goods, it's about being good and doing good. Giving your life away. Significance in life doesn't come from status, because you can always find somebody who's got more than you. It doesn't come from sex. It doesn't come from salary. It comes from serving. It is in giving our lives away that we find meaning, we find significance. That's the way we were wired, I believe, by God. And so we began to give away, and now after 30 years, my wife and I are reverse tithers — we give away 90 percent and live on 10. That, actually, was the easy part. The hard part is, what do I do with all this attention? Because I started getting all kinds of invitations. I just came off a nearly month-long speaking tour on three different continents, and I won't go into that, but it was an amazing thing. And I'm going, what do I do with this notoriety that the book has brought? And, being a pastor, I started reading the Bible. There's a chapter in the Bible called Psalm 72, and it's Solomon's prayer for more influence. When you read this prayer, it sounds incredibly selfish, self-centered. He says, "God, I want you to make me famous." That's what he prays. He said, "I want you to make me famous. I want you to spread the fame of my name through every land, I want you to give me power. I want you to make me famous, I want you to give me influence." And it just sounds like the most egotistical request you could make, if you were going to pray. Until you read the whole psalm, the whole chapter. And then he says, "So that the king ..." — he was the king of Israel at that time, at its apex in power — "... so that the king may care for the widow and orphan, support the oppressed, defend the defenseless, care for the sick, assist the poor, speak up for the foreigner, those in prison." Basically, he's talking about all the marginalized in society. And as I read that, I looked at it, and I thought, you know, what this is saying is that the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. The purpose of influence is not to build your ego. Or your net worth. And, by the way, your net worth is not the same thing as your self-worth. Your value is not based on your valuables. It's based on a whole different set of things. And so the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. And I had to admit: I can't think of the last time I thought of widows and orphans. They're not on my radar. I pastor a church in one of the most affluent areas of America — a bunch of gated communities. I have a church full of CEOs and scientists. And I could go five years and never, ever see a homeless person. They're just not in my pathway. Now, they're 13 miles up the road in Santa Ana. So I had to say, ok, I would use whatever affluence and whatever influence I've got to help those who don't have either of those. You know, there's a story in the Bible about Moses, whether you believe it's true or not, it really doesn't matter to me. But Moses, if you saw the movie, "The Ten Commandments," Moses goes out, and there's this burning bush, and God talks to him, and God says, "Moses, what's in your hand?" I think that's one of the most important questions you'll ever be asked: What's in your hand? Moses says, "It's a staff. It's a shepherd's staff." And God says, "Throw it down." And if you saw the movie, you know, he throws it down and it becomes a snake. And then God says, "Pick it up." And he picks it back up again, and it becomes a staff again. Now, I'm reading this thing, and I'm going, what is that all about? OK. What's that all about? Well, I do know a couple of things. Number one, God never does a miracle to show off. It's not just, "Wow, isn't that cool?" And, by the way, my God doesn't have to show up on cheese bread. You know, if God's going to show up, he's not going to show up on cheese bread. (Laughter) Ok? I just, this is why I love what Michael does, because it's like, if he's debunking it, then I don't have to. But God — my God — doesn't show up on sprinkler images. He's got a few more powerful ways than that to do whatever he wants to do. But he doesn't do miracles just to show off. Second thing is, if God ever asks you a question, he already knows the answer. Obviously, if he's God, then that would mean that when he asks the question, it's for your benefit, not his. So he's going, "What's in your hand?" Now, what was in Moses' hand? Well, it was a shepherd's staff. Now, follow me on this. This staff represented three things about Moses' life. First, it represented his identity; he was a shepherd. It's the symbol of his own occupation: I am a shepherd. It's a symbol of his identity, his career, his job. Second, it's a symbol of not only his identity, it's a symbol of his income, because all of his assets are tied up in sheep. In those days, nobody had bank accounts, or American Express cards, or hedge funds. Your assets are tied up in your flocks. So it's a symbol of his identity, and it's a symbol of his income. And the third thing: it's a symbol of his influence. What do you do with a shepherd's staff? Well, you know, you move sheep from point A to point B with it, by hook or by crook. You pull them or you poke them. One or the other. So, he's saying, "You're going to lay down your identity. What's in your hand? You've got identity, you've got income, you've got influence. What's in your hand?" And he's saying, "If you lay it down, I'll make it come alive. I'll do some things you could never imagine possible." And if you've watched that movie, "Ten Commandments," all of those big miracles that happen in Egypt are done through this staff. Last year, I was invited to speak at the NBA All-Stars game. And so, I'm talking to the players, because most of the NBA teams, NFL teams and all the other teams have done this 40 Days of Purpose, based on the book. And I asked them, I said, "What's in your hand? So, what's in your hand?" I said, "It's a basketball. And that basketball represents your identity, who you are: you're an NBA player. It represents your income: you're making a lot of money off that little ball. And it represents your influence. And even though you're only going to be in the NBA for a few years, you're going to be an NBA player for the rest of your life. And that gives you enormous influence. So, what are you going to do with what you've been given?" And I guess that's the main reason I came up here today, to all of you very bright people at TED — it is to say, "What's in your hand?" What do you have that you've been given? Talent, background, education, freedom, networks, opportunities, wealth, ideas, creativity. What are you doing with what you've been given? That, to me, is the primary question about life. That, to me, is what being purpose-driven is all about. In the book, I talk about how you're wired to do certain things, you're "SHAPED" with — a little acrostic: Spiritual gifts, Heart, Ability, Personality and Experiences. These things shape you. And if you want to know what you ought to be doing with your life, you need to look at your shape — "What am I wired to do?" Why would God wire you to do something and then not have you do it? If you're wired to be an anthropologist, you'll be an anthropologist. If you're wired to be an undersea explorer, you'll be an undersea explorer. If you're wired to make deals, you make deals. If you're wired to paint, you paint. Did you know that God smiles when you be you? When my little kids — when my kids were little — they're all grown now, I have grandkids — I used to go in and sit on the side of their bed, and I used to watch my kids sleep. And I just watched their little bodies rise and lower, rise and lower. And I would look at them: "This is not an accident." Rise and lower. And I got joy out of just watching them sleep. Some people have the misguided idea that God only gets excited when you're doing, quote, "spiritual things," like going to church or helping the poor, or, you know, confessing or doing something like that. The bottom line is, God gets pleasure watching you be you. Why? He made you. And when you do what you were made to do, he goes, "That's my boy! That's my girl! You're using the talent and ability that I gave you." So my advice to you is: look at what's in your hand — your identity, your influence, your income — and say, "It's not about me. It's about making the world a better place." Thank you.

My wish: A global day of film

Jehane Noujaim

{0: 'Jehane Noujaim'}

{0: ['filmmaker']}

{0: 'TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim is a gutsy filmmaker whose astonishing documentaries reveal the triumphs and hardships of courageous individuals. '}

2006-02-26

2006-07-25

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['TED Prize', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'film', 'global issues', 'peace', 'social change', 'storytelling', 'art', 'movies']

{2228: 'How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine', 1476: 'The shared wonder of film', 800: 'We are the stories we tell ourselves', 2890: "What it's like to be a woman in Hollywood", 45233: 'How film transforms the way we see the world', 2694: "The data behind Hollywood's sexism"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jehane_noujaim_my_wish_a_global_day_of_film/

Jehane Noujaim unveils her 2006 TED Prize wish: to bring the world together for one day a year through the power of film.

I can't help but this wish: to think about when you're a little kid, and all your friends ask you, "If a genie could give you one wish in the world, what would it be?" And I always answered, "Well, I'd want the wish to have the wisdom to know exactly what to wish for." Well, then you'd be screwed, because you'd know what to wish for, and you'd use up your wish, and now, since we only have one wish — unlike last year they had three wishes — I'm not going to wish for that. So let's get to what I would like, which is world peace. And I know what you're thinking: You're thinking, "The poor girl up there, she thinks she's at a beauty pageant. She's not. She's at the TED Prize." (Laughter) But I really do think it makes sense. And I think that the first step to world peace is for people to meet each other. I've met a lot of different people over the years, and I've filmed some of them, from a dotcom executive in New York who wanted to take over the world, to a military press officer in Qatar, who would rather not take over the world. If you've seen the film "Control Room" that was sent out, you'd understand a little bit why. (Applause) Thank you. Wow! Some of you watched it. That's great. That's great. So basically what I'd like to talk about today is a way for people to travel, to meet people in a different way than — because you can't travel all over the world at the same time. And a long time ago — well, about 40 years ago — my mom had an exchange student. And I'm going to show you slides of the exchange student. This is Donna. This is Donna at the Statue of Liberty. This is my mother and aunt teaching Donna how to ride a bike. This is Donna eating ice cream. And this is Donna teaching my aunt how to do a Filipino dance. I really think as the world is getting smaller, it becomes more and more important that we learn each other's dance moves, that we meet each other, we get to know each other, we are able to figure out a way to cross borders, to understand each other, to understand people's hopes and dreams, what makes them laugh and cry. And I know that we can't all do exchange programs, and I can't force everybody to travel; I've already talked about that to Chris and Amy, and they said that there's a problem with this: You can't force people, free will. And I totally support that, so we're not forcing people to travel. But I'd like to talk about another way to travel that doesn't require a ship or an airplane, and just requires a movie camera, a projector and a screen. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today. I was asked that I speak a little bit about where I personally come from, and Cameron, I don't know how you managed to get out of that one, but I think that building bridges is important to me because of where I come from. I'm the daughter of an American mother and an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian father. So I'm the living product of two cultures coming together. No pun intended. (Laughter) And I've also been called, as an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian American with a Persian name, the "Middle East Peace Crisis." So maybe me starting to take pictures was some kind of way to bring both sides of my family together — a way to take the worlds with me, a way to tell stories visually. It all kind of started that way, but I think that I really realized the power of the image when I first went to the garbage-collecting village in Egypt, when I was about 16. My mother took me there. She's somebody who believes strongly in community service, and decided that this was something that I needed to do. And so I went there and I met some amazing women there. There was a center there, where they were teaching people how to read and write, and get vaccinations against the many diseases you can get from sorting through garbage. And I began teaching there. I taught English, and I met some incredible women there. I met people that live seven people to a room, barely can afford their evening meal, yet lived with this strength of spirit and sense of humor and just incredible qualities. I got drawn into this community and I began to take pictures there. I took pictures of weddings and older family members — things that they wanted memories of. About two years after I started taking these pictures, the UN Conference on Population and Development asked me to show them at the conference. So I was 18; I was very excited. It was my first exhibit of photographs and they were all put up there, and after about two days, they all came down except for three. People were very upset, very angry that I was showing these dirty sides of Cairo, and why didn't I cut the dead donkey out of the frame? And as I sat there, I got very depressed. I looked at this big empty wall with three lonely photographs that were, you know, very pretty photographs and I was like, "I failed at this." But I was looking at this intense emotion and intense feeling that had come out of people just seeing these photographs. Here I was, this 18-year-old pipsqueak that nobody listened to, and all of a sudden, I put these photographs on the wall, and there were arguments, and they had to be taken down. And I saw the power of the image, and it was incredible. And I think the most important reaction that I saw there was actually from people that would never have gone to the garbage village themselves, that would never have seen that the human spirit could thrive in such difficult circumstances. And I think it was at that point that I decided I wanted to use photography and film to somehow bridge gaps, to bridge cultures, bring people together, cross borders. And so that's what really kind of started me off. Did a stint at MTV, made a film called "Startup.com," and I've done a couple of music films. But in 2003, when the war in Iraq was about to start, it was a very surreal feeling for me, because before the war started, there was kind of this media war that was going on. And I was watching television in New York, and there seemed to be just one point of view that was coming across, and the coverage went from the US State Department to embedded troops. And what was coming across on the news was that there was going to be this clean war and precision bombings, and the Iraqis would be greeting the Americans as liberators, and throwing flowers at their feet in the streets of Baghdad. And I knew that there was a completely other story that was taking place in the Middle East, where my parents were. I knew that there was a completely other story being told, and I was thinking, "How are people supposed to communicate with each other when they're getting completely different messages, and nobody knows what the other's being told? How are people supposed to have any kind of common understanding or know how to move together into the future? So I knew that I had to go there. I just wanted to be in the center. I had no plan. I had no funding. I didn't even have a camera at the time — I had somebody bring it there, because I wanted to get access to Al Jazeera, George Bush's favorite channel, and a place which I was very curious about because it's disliked by many governments across the Arab world, and also called the mouthpiece of Osama Bin Laden by some people in the US government. So I was thinking, this station that's hated by so many people has to be doing something right. I've got to go see what this is all about. And I also wanted to go see Central Command, which was 10 minutes away. And that way, I could get access to how this news was being created — on the Arab side, reaching the Arab world, and on the US and Western side, reaching the US. And when I went there and sat there, and met these people that were in the center of it, and sat with these characters, I met some surprising, very complex people. And I'd like to share with you a little bit of that experience of when you sit with somebody and you film them, and you listen to them, and you allow them more than a five-second sound bite. The amazing complexity of people emerges. Samir Khader: Business as usual. Iraq, and then Iraq, and then Iraq. But between us, if I'm offered a job with Fox, I'll take it. To change the Arab nightmare into the American dream. I still have that dream. Maybe I will never be able to do it, but I have plans for my children. When they finish high school, I will send them to America to study there. I will pay for their study. And they will stay there. Josh Rushing: The night they showed the POWs and the dead soldiers — Al Jazeera showed them — it was powerful, because America doesn't show those kinds of images. Most of the news in America won't show really gory images and this showed American soldiers in uniform, strewn about a floor, a cold tile floor. And it was revolting. It was absolutely revolting. It made me sick at my stomach. And then what hit me was, the night before, there had been some kind of bombing in Basra, and Al Jazeera had shown images of the people. And they were equally, if not more, horrifying — the images were. And I remember having seen it in the Al Jazeera office, and thought to myself, "Wow, that's gross. That's bad." And then going away, and probably eating dinner or something. And it didn't affect me as much. So, the impact that had on me — me realizing that I just saw people on the other side, and those people in the Al Jazeera office must have felt the way I was feeling that night, and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn't as bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war. But it doesn't make me believe that we're in a world that can live without war yet. Jehane Noujaim: I was overwhelmed by the response of the film. We didn't know whether it would be able to get out there. We had no funding for it. We were incredibly lucky that it got picked up. And when we showed the film in both the United States and the Arab world, we had such incredible reactions. It was amazing to see how people were moved by this film. In the Arab world — and it's not really by the film, it's by the characters — I mean, Josh Rushing was this incredibly complex person who was thinking about things. And when I showed the film in the Middle East, people wanted to meet Josh. He kind of redefined us as an American population. People started to ask me, "Where is this guy now?" Al Jazeera offered him a job. (Laughter) And Samir, on the other hand, was also quite an interesting character for the Arab world to see, because it brought out the complexities of this love-hate relationship that the Arab world has with the West. In the United States, I was blown away by the motivations, the positive motivations of the American people when they'd see this film. You know, we're criticized abroad for believing we're the saviors of the world in some way, but the flip side of it is that, actually, when people do see what is happening abroad and people's reactions to some of our policy abroad, we feel this power, that we need to — we feel like we have to get the power to change things. And I saw this with audiences. This woman came up to me after the screening and said, "You know, I know this is crazy. I saw the bombs being loaded on the planes, I saw the military going out to war, but you don't understand people's anger towards us until you see the people in the hospitals and the victims of the war, and how do we get out of this bubble? How do we understand what the other person is thinking?" Now, I don't know whether a film can change the world. But I know the power of it, I know that it starts people thinking about how to change the world. Now, I'm not a philosopher, so I feel like I shouldn't go into great depth on this, but let film speak for itself and take you to this other world. Because I believe that film has the ability to take you across borders, I'd like you to just sit back and experience for a couple of minutes being taken into another world. And these couple clips take you inside of two of the most difficult conflicts that we're faced with today. [The last 48 hours of two Palestinian suicide bombers.] [Paradise Now] [Man: As long as there is injustice, someone must make a sacrifice!] [Woman: That's no sacrifice, that's revenge!] [If you kill, there's no difference between victim and occupier.] [Man: If we had airplanes, we wouldn't need martyrs, that's the difference.] [Woman: The difference is that the Israeli military is still stronger.] [Man: Then let us be equal in death.] [We still have Paradise.] [Woman: There is no Paradise! It only exists in your head!] [Man: God forbid!] [May God forgive you.] [If you were not Abu Azzam's daughter ...] [Anyway, I'd rather have Paradise in my head than live in this hell!] [In this life, we're dead anyway.] [One only chooses bitterness when the alternative is even bitterer.] [Woman: And what about us? The ones who remain?] [Will we win that way?] [Don't you see what you're doing is destroying us?] [And that you give Israel an alibi to carry on?] [Man: So with no alibi, Israel will stop?] [Woman: Perhaps. We have to turn it into a moral war.] [Man: How, if Israel has no morals?] [Woman: Be careful!] [And the real people building peace through non-violence] [Encounter Point] Video: (Ambulance siren) [Tel Aviv, Israel 1996] [Tzvika: My wife Ayelet called me and said, ] ["There was a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv."] [Ayelet: What do you know about the casualties?] [Tzvika off-screen: We're looking for three girls.] [We have no information.] [Ayelet: One is wounded here, but we haven't heard from the other three.] [Tzvika: I said, "OK, that's Bat-Chen, that's my daughter.] [Are you sure she is dead?"] [They said yes.] Video: (Police siren and shouting over megaphone) [Bethlehem, Occupied Palestinian Territories, 2003] [George: On that day, at around 6:30] [I was driving with my wife and daughters to the supermarket.] [When we got to here ...] [we saw three Israeli military jeeps parked on the side of the road.] [When we passed by the first jeep ...] [they opened fire on us.] [And my 12-year-old daughter Christine] [was killed in the shooting.] [Bereaved Families Forum, Jerusalem] [Tzvika: I'm the headmaster for all parts.] [George: But there is a teacher that is in charge?] [Tzvika: Yes, I have assistants.] [I deal with children all the time.] [One year after their daughters' deaths both Tzvika and George join the forum] [George: At first, I thought it was a strange idea.] [But after thinking logically about it, ] [I didn't find any reason why not to meet them] [and let them know of our suffering.] [Tzvika: There were many things that touched me.] [We see that there are Palestinians who suffered a lot, who lost children,] [and still believe in the peace process and in reconciliation.] [If we who lost what is most precious can talk to each other,] [and look forward to a better future,] [then everyone else must do so, too.] [From South Africa: A Revolution Through Music] [Amandla] (Music) (Video) Man: Song is something that we communicated with people who otherwise would not have understood where we're coming from. You could give them a long political speech, they would still not understand. But I tell you, when you finish that song, people will be like, "Damn, I know where you niggas are coming from. I know where you guys are coming from. Death unto apartheid!" Narrator: It's about the liberation struggle. It's about those children who took to the streets — fighting, screaming, "Free Nelson Mandela!" It's about those unions who put down their tools and demanded freedom. Yes. Yes! (Music and singing) (Singing) Freedom! (Applause) Jehane Noujaim: I think everybody's had that feeling of sitting in a theater, in a dark room, with other strangers, watching a very powerful film, and they felt that feeling of transformation. And what I'd like to talk about is how can we use that feeling to actually create a movement through film? I've been listening to the talks in the conference, and Robert Wright said yesterday that if we have an appreciation for another person's humanity, then they will have an appreciation for ours. And that's what this is about. It's about connecting people through film, getting these independent voices out there. Now, Josh Rushing actually ended up leaving the military and taking a job with Al Jazeera. (Laughter) So his feeling is that he's at Al Jazeera International because he feels like he can actually use media to bridge the gap between East and West. And that's an amazing thing. But I've been trying to think about ways to give power to these independent voices, to give power to the filmmakers, to give power to people who are trying to use film for change. And there are incredible organizations that are out there doing this already. There's Witness, that you heard from earlier. There's Just Vision, that are working with Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for peace, and documenting that process and getting interviews out there and using this film to take to Congress to show that it's a powerful tool, to show that this is a woman who's had her daughter killed in an attack, and she believes that there are peaceful ways to solve this. There's Working Films and there's Current TV, which is an incredible platform for people around the world to be able to put their — (Applause) Yeah, it's amazing. I've watched it and I'm blown away by it and its potential to bring voices from around the world — independent voices from around the world — and create a truly democratic, global television. So what can we do to create a platform for these organizations, to create some momentum, to get everybody in the world involved in this movement? I'd like for us to imagine for a second. Imagine a day when you have everyone coming together from around the world. You have towns and villages and theaters — all from around the world, getting together, and sitting in the dark, and sharing a communal experience of watching a film, or a couple of films, together. Watching a film which maybe highlights a character that is fighting to live, or just a character that defies stereotypes, makes a joke, sings a song. Comedies, documentaries, shorts. This amazing power can be used to change people and to bond people together; to cross borders, and have people feel like they're having a communal experience. So if you imagine this day when all around the world, you have theaters and places where we project films. If you imagine projecting from Times Square to Tahrir Square in Cairo, the same film in Ramallah, the same film in Jerusalem. You know, we've been talking to a friend of mine about using the side of the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall of China. It's endless what you can imagine, in terms of where you can project films and where you can have this communal experience. And I believe that this one day, if we can create it, this one day can create momentum for all of these independent voices. There isn't an organization which is connecting the independent voices of the world to get out there, and yet I'm hearing throughout this conference that the biggest challenge in our future is understanding the other, and having mutual respect for the other and crossing borders. And if film can do that, and if we can get all of these different locations in the world to watch these films together — this could be an incredible day. So we've already made a partnership, set up through somebody from the TED community, John Camen, who introduced me to Steven Apkon, from the Jacob Burns Film Center. And we started calling up everybody. And in the last week, there have been so many people that have responded to us, from as close as Palo Alto, to Mongolia and to India. There are people that want to be a part of this global day of film; to be able to provide a platform for independent voices and independent films to get out there. Now, we've thought about a name for this day, and I'd like to share this with you. Now, the most amazing part of this whole process has been sharing ideas and wishes, and so I invite you to give brainstorms onto how does this day echo into the future? How do we use technology to make this day echo into the future, so that we can build community and have these communities working together, through the Internet? There was a time, many, many years ago, when all of the continents were stuck together. And we call that landmass Pangea. So what we'd like to call this day of film is Pangea Cinema Day. And if you just imagine that all of these people in these towns would be watching, then I think that we can actually really make a movement towards people understanding each other better. I know that it's very intangible, touching people's hearts and souls, but the only way that I know how to do it, the only way that I know how to reach out to somebody's heart and soul all across the world, is by showing them a film. And I know that there are independent filmmakers and films out there that can really make this happen. And that's my wish. I guess I'm supposed to give you my one-sentence wish, but we're way out of time. Chris Anderson: That is an incredible wish. Pangea Cinema: The day the world comes together. JN: It's more tangible than world peace, and it's certainly more immediate. But it would be the day that the world comes together through film, the power of film. CA: Ladies and gentlemen, Jehane Noujaim.

My wish: Help me stop pandemics

Larry Brilliant

{0: 'Larry Brilliant'}

{0: ['epidemiologist', 'philanthropist']}

{0: "TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant has spent his career solving the world's biggest problems, from overseeing the last smallpox cases to saving millions from blindness."}

2006-02-23

2006-07-25

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['TED Prize', 'collaboration', 'disease', 'ebola', 'global issues', 'health', 'science', 'technology']

{1153: "How we'll stop polio for good", 869: 'HIV and flu -- the vaccine strategy', 1905: "Demo: A needle-free vaccine patch that's safer and way cheaper", 62748: 'A global pandemic calls for global solutions', 61301: 'How we must respond to the coronavirus pandemic', 61303: 'The quest for the coronavirus vaccine'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_my_wish_help_me_stop_pandemics/

Accepting the 2006 TED Prize, Dr. Larry Brilliant talks about how smallpox was eradicated from the planet, and calls for a new global system that can identify and contain pandemics before they spread.

I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I got to see the last case of killer smallpox in the world. I was in India this past year, and I may have seen the last cases of polio in the world. There's nothing that makes you feel more — the blessing and the honor of working in a program like that — than to know that something that horrible no longer exists. So I'm going to tell you — (Applause) so I'm going to show you some dirty pictures. They are difficult to watch, but you should look at them with optimism, because the horror of these pictures will be matched by the uplifting quality of knowing that they no longer exist. But first, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my own journey. My background is not exactly the conventional medical education that you might expect. When I was an intern in San Francisco, I heard about a group of Native Americans who had taken over Alcatraz Island, and a Native American who wanted to give birth on that island, and no other doctor wanted to go and help her give birth. I went out to Alcatraz, and I lived on the island for several weeks. She gave birth; I caught the baby; I got off the island; I landed in San Francisco; and all the press wanted to talk to me, because my three weeks on the island made me an expert in Indian affairs. (Laughter) I wound up on every television show. Someone saw me on television; they called me up; and they asked me if I'd like to be in a movie and to play a young doctor for a bunch of rock and roll stars who were traveling in a bus ride from San Francisco to England. And I said, yes, I would do that, so I became the doctor in an absolutely awful movie called "Medicine Ball Caravan." (Laughter) Now, you know from the '60s, you're either on the bus or you're off the bus; I was on the bus. My wife of 37 years and I joined the bus. Our bus ride took us from San Francisco to London, then we switched buses at the big pond. We then got on two more buses and we drove through Turkey and Iran, Afghanistan, over the Khyber Pass into Pakistan, like every other young doctor. This is us at the Khyber Pass, and that's our bus. We had some difficulty getting over the Khyber Pass. But we wound up in India. And then, like everyone else in our generation, we went to live in a Himalayan monastery. (Laughter) This is just like a residency program, for those of you that are in medical school. (Laughter) And we studied with a wise man, a guru named Karoli Baba, who then told me to get rid of the dress, put on a three-piece suit, go join the United Nations as a diplomat and work for the World Health Organization. And he made an outrageous prediction that smallpox would be eradicated, and that this was God's gift to humanity, because of the hard work of dedicated scientists. And that prediction came true. This little girl is Rahima Banu, and she was the last case of killer smallpox in the world. And this document is the certificate that the global commission signed, certifying the world to have eradicated the first disease in history. The key to eradicating smallpox was early detection, early response. I'm going to ask you to repeat that: early detection, early response. Can you say that? Audience: Early detection, early response. Larry Brilliant: Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history. In the last century, it killed 500 million people. You're reading about Larry Page already. Somebody reads very fast. (Laughter) In the year that Larry Page and Sergey Brin — with whom I have a certain affection and a new affiliation — in the year in which they were born, two million people died of smallpox. We declared smallpox eradicated in 1980. This is the most important slide that I've ever seen in public health, [Sovereigns killed by smallpox] because it shows you to be the richest and the strongest, and to be kings and queens of the world, did not protect you from dying of smallpox. Never can you doubt that we are all in this together. But to see smallpox from the perspective of a sovereign is the wrong perspective. You should see it from the perspective of a mother, watching her child develop this disease and standing by helplessly. Day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six. You're a mother and you're watching your child, and on day six, you see pustules that become hard. Day seven, they show the classic scars of smallpox umbilication. Day eight. And Al Gore said earlier that the most photographed image in the world, the most printed image in the world, was that of the Earth. But this was in 1974, and as of that moment, this photograph was the photograph that was the most widely printed, because we printed two billion copies of this photograph, and we took them hand to hand, door to door, to show people and ask them if there was smallpox in their house, because that was our surveillance system. We didn't have Google, we didn't have web crawlers, we didn't have computers. By day nine — you look at this picture and you're horrified; I look at this picture and I say, "Thank God," because it's clear that this is only an ordinary case of smallpox, and I know this child will live. And by day 13, the lesions are scabbing, his eyelids are swollen, but you know this child has no other secondary infection. And by day 20, while he will be scarred for life, he will live. There are other kinds of smallpox that are not like that. This is confluent smallpox, in which there isn't a single place on the body where you could put a finger and not be covered by lesions. Flat smallpox, which killed 100 percent of people who got it. And hemorrhagic smallpox, the most cruel of all, which had a predilection for pregnant women. I've probably had 50 women die. They all had hemorrhagic smallpox. I've never seen anybody die from it who wasn't a pregnant woman. In 1967, the WHO embarked on what was an outrageous program to eradicate a disease. In that year, there were 34 countries affected with smallpox. By 1970, we were down to 18 countries. 1974, we were down to five countries. But in that year, smallpox exploded throughout India. And India was the place where smallpox made its last stand. In 1974, India had a population of 600 million. There are 21 linguistic states in India, which is like saying 21 different countries. There are 20 million people on the road at any time, in buses and trains, walking; 500,000 villages, 120 million households, and none of them wanted to report if they had a case of smallpox in their house, because they thought that smallpox was the visitation of a deity, Shitala Mata, the cooling mother, and it was wrong to bring strangers into your house when the deity was in the house. No incentive to report smallpox. It wasn't just India that had smallpox deities; smallpox deities were prevalent all over the world. So, how we eradicated smallpox was — mass vaccination wouldn't work. You could vaccinate everybody in India, but one year later there'd be 21 million new babies, which was then the population of Canada. It wouldn't do just to vaccinate everyone. You had to find every single case of smallpox in the world at the same time, and draw a circle of immunity around it. And that's what we did. In India alone, my 150,000 best friends and I went door to door, with that same picture, to every single house in India. We made over one billion house calls. And in the process, I learned something very important. Every time we did a house-to-house search, we had a spike in the number of reports of smallpox. When we didn't search, we had the illusion that there was no disease. When we did search, we had the illusion that there was more disease. A surveillance system was necessary, because what we needed was early detection, early response. So we searched and we searched, and we found every case of smallpox in India. We had a reward. We raised the reward. We continued to increase the reward. We had a scorecard that we wrote on every house. And as we did that, the number of reported cases in the world dropped to zero. And in 1980, we declared the globe free of smallpox. It was the largest campaign in United Nations history, until the Iraq war. 150,000 people from all over the world — doctors of every race, religion, culture and nation, who fought side by side, brothers and sisters, with each other, not against each other, in a common cause to make the world better. But smallpox was the fourth disease that was intended for eradication. We failed three other times. We failed against malaria, yellow fever and yaws. But soon we may see polio eradicated. But the key to eradicating polio is early detection, early response. This may be the year we eradicate polio. That will make it the second disease in history. And David Heymann, who's watching this on the webcast — David, keep on going. We're close! We're down to four countries. (Applause) I feel like Hank Aaron. Barry Bonds can replace me any time. Let's get another disease off the list of terrible things to worry about. I was just in India working on the polio program. The polio surveillance program is four million people going door to door. That is the surveillance system. But we need to have early detection, early response. Blindness, the same thing. The key to discovering blindness is doing epidemiological surveys and finding out the causes of blindness, so you can mount the correct response. The Seva Foundation was started by a group of alumni of the Smallpox Eradication Programme, who, having climbed the highest mountain, tasted the elixir of the success of eradicating a disease, wanted to do it again. And over the last 27 years, Seva's programs in 15 countries have given back sight to more than two million blind people. Seva got started because we wanted to apply these lessons of surveillance and epidemiology to something which nobody else was looking at as a public health issue: blindness, which heretofore had been thought of only as a clinical disease. In 1980, Steve Jobs gave me that computer, which is Apple number 12, and it's still in Kathmandu, and it's still working, and we ought to go get it and auction it off and make more money for Seva. And we conducted the first Nepal survey ever done for health, and the first nationwide blindness survey ever done, and we had astonishing results. Instead of finding out what we thought was the case — that blindness was caused mostly by glaucoma and trachoma — we were astounded to find out that blindness was caused instead by cataract. You can't cure or prevent what you don't know is there. In your TED packages there's a DVD, "Infinite Vision," about Dr. V and the Aravind Eye Hospital. I hope that you will take a look at it. Aravind, which started as a Seva project, is now the world's largest and best eye hospital. This year, that one hospital will give back sight to more than 300,000 people in Tamil Nadu, India. (Applause) Bird flu. I stand here as a representative of all terrible things — this might be the worst. The key to preventing or mitigating pandemic bird flu is early detection and rapid response. We will not have a vaccine or adequate supplies of an antiviral to combat bird flu if it occurs in the next three years. WHO stages the progress of a pandemic. We are now at stage three on the pandemic alert stage, with just a little bit of human-to-human transmission, but no human-to-human-to-human sustained transmission. The moment WHO says we've moved to category four — this will not be like Katrina. The world as we know it will stop. There'll be no airplanes flying. Would you get in an airplane with 250 people you didn't know, coughing and sneezing, when you knew that some of them might carry a disease that could kill you, for which you had no antivirals or vaccine? I did a study of the top epidemiologists in the world in October. I asked them — these are all fluologists and specialists in influenza — and I asked them the questions you'd like to ask them: What do you think the likelihood is that there'll be a pandemic? If it happens, how bad do you think it will be? Fifteen percent said they thought there'd be a pandemic within three years. But much worse than that, 90 percent said they thought there'd be a pandemic within your children or your grandchildren's lifetime. And they thought that if there was a pandemic, a billion people would get sick. As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression as our just-in-time inventory system and the tight rubber band of globalization broke, and the cost to our economy of one to three trillion dollars would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their job and their healthcare benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable. And it's getting worse, because travel is getting so much better. Let me show you a simulation of what a pandemic looks like. So we know what we're talking about. Let's assume, for example, that the first case occurs in South Asia. It initially goes quite slowly. You get two or three discrete locations. Then there'll be secondary outbreaks, and the disease will spread from country to country so fast that you won't know what hit you. Within three weeks it will be everywhere in the world. Now, if we had an "undo" button, and we could go back and isolate it and grab it when it first started — if we could find it early, and we had early detection and early response, and we could put each one of those viruses in jail — that's the only way to deal with something like a pandemic. And let me show you why that is. We have a joke. This is an epidemic curve, and everyone in medicine, I think, ultimately gets to know what it is. But the joke is, an epidemiologist likes to arrive at an epidemic right here and ride to glory on the downhill curve. (Laughter) But you don't get to do that usually. You usually arrive right about here. What we really want is to arrive right here, so we can stop the epidemic. But you can't always do that. But there's an organization that has been able to find a way to learn when the first cases occur, and that is called GPHIN; it's the Global Public Health Information Network. And that simulation that I showed you that you thought was bird flu — that was SARS. And SARS is the pandemic that did not occur. And it didn't occur because GPHIN found the pandemic-to-be of SARS three months before WHO actually announced it, and because of that, we were able to stop the SARS pandemic. And I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to GPHIN and to Ron St. John, who I hope is in the audience some place — over there — who's the founder of GPHIN. (Applause) Hello, Ron! (Applause) And TED has flown Ron here from Ottawa, where GPHIN is located, because not only did GPHIN find SARS early, but you may have seen last week that Iran announced that they had bird flu in Iran, but GPHIN found the bird flu in Iran not February 14 — but last September. We need an early-warning system to protect us against the things that are humanity's worst nightmare. And so my TED wish is based on the common denominator of these experiences. Smallpox — early detection, early response. Blindness, polio — early detection, early response. Pandemic bird flu — early detection, early response. It is a litany. It is so obvious that our only way of dealing with these new diseases is to find them early and to kill them before they spread. So, my TED wish is for you to help build a global system — an early-warning system — to protect us against humanity's worst nightmares. And what I thought I would call it is "Early Detection," But it should really be called ... "Total Early Detection." [TED] (Laughter) What? (Applause) What? (Applause) But in all seriousness, because this idea is birthed in TED, I would like it to be a legacy of TED, and I'd like to call it the "International System for Total Early Disease Detection." [INSTEDD] And INSTEDD then becomes our mantra. So instead of a hidden pandemic of bird flu, we find it and immediately contain it. Instead of a novel virus caused by bio-terror or bio-error, or shift or drift, we find it and we contain it. Instead of industrial accidents like oil spills or the catastrophe in Bhopal, we find them, and we respond to them. Instead of famine, hidden until it is too late, we detect it, and we respond. And instead of a system which is owned by a government, and hidden in the bowels of government, let's build an early detection system that's freely available to anyone in the world in their own language. Let's make it transparent, non-governmental, not owned by any single country or company, housed in a neutral country, with redundant backup in a different time zone and a different continent. And let's build it on GPHIN. Let's start with GPHIN. Let's increase the websites that they crawl from 20,000 to 20 million. Let's increase the languages they crawl from seven to 70, or more. Let's build in outbound confirmation messages, using text messages or SMS or instant messaging to find out from people who are within 100 meters of the rumor that you hear, if it is, in fact, valid. And let's add satellite confirmation. And we'll add Gapminder's amazing graphics to the front end. And we'll grow it as a moral force in the world, finding out those terrible things before anybody else knows about them, and sending our response to them, so that next year, instead of us meeting here, lamenting how many terrible things there are in the world, we will have pulled together, used the unique skills and the magic of this community, and be proud that we have done everything we can to stop pandemics, other catastrophes, and change the world, beginning right now. (Applause) Chris Anderson: An amazing presentation. First of all, just so everyone understands: you're saying that by creating web crawlers, looking on the Internet for patterns, they can detect something suspicious before WHO, before anyone else can see it? Give an example of how that could possibly be true. Larry Brilliant: You're not mad about the copyright violation? CA: No. I love it. (Laughter) LB: Well, as Ron St. John — I hope you'll go and meet him in the dinner afterwards and talk to him. When he started GPHIN — In 1997, there was an outbreak of bird flu — H5N1. It was in Hong Kong. And a remarkable doctor in Hong Kong responded immediately, by slaughtering 1.5 million chickens and birds, and they stopped that outbreak in its tracks. Immediate detection, immediate response. Then a number of years went by, and there were a lot of rumors about bird flu. Ron and his team in Ottawa began to crawl the web — only crawling 20,000 different websites, mostly periodicals — and they read about and heard about a concern, of a lot of children who had high fever and symptoms of bird flu. They reported this to WHO. WHO took a little while taking action, because WHO will only receive a report from a government, because it's the United Nations. But they were able to point to WHO and let them know that there was this surprising and unexplained cluster of illnesses that looked like bird flu. That turned out to be SARS. That's how the world found out about SARS. And because of that, we were able to stop SARS. Now, what's really important is that, before there was GPHIN, 100 percent of all the world's reports of bad things — whether you're talking about famine or you're talking about bird flu or you're talking about Ebola — 100 percent of all those reports came from nations. The moment these guys in Ottawa — on a budget of 800,000 dollars a year — got cracking, 75 percent of all the reports in the world came from GPHIN, 25 percent of all the reports in the world came from all the other 180 nations. Now, here's what's really interesting: after they'd been working for a couple years, what do you think happened to those nations? They felt pretty stupid. So they started sending in their reports early. And now, their reporting percentage is down to 50 percent, because other nations have started to report. So, can you find diseases early by crawling the web? Of course you can. Can you find it even earlier than GPHIN does now? Of course you can. You saw that they found SARS using their Chinese web crawler a full six weeks before they found it using their English web crawler. Well, they're only crawling in seven languages. These bad viruses really don't have any intention of showing up first in English or Spanish or French. (Laughter) So yes, I want to take GPHIN, I want to build on it. I want to add all the languages of the world that we possibly can. I want to make this open to everybody, so that the health officer in Nairobi or in Patna, Bihar will have as much access to it as the folks in Ottawa or in CDC. And I want to make it part of our culture that there is a community of people who are watching out for the worst nightmares of humanity, and that it's accessible to everyone.

My wish: A call for open-source architecture

Cameron Sinclair

{0: 'Cameron Sinclair'}

{0: ['co-founder', 'architecture for humanity']}

{0: "2006 TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair is co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, a nonprofit that seeks architecture solutions to global crises -- and acts as a conduit between the design community and the world's humanitarian needs."}

2006-02-26

2006-07-25

TED2006

en

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['activism', 'architecture', 'collaboration', 'culture', 'design', 'disaster relief', 'global issues', 'invention', 'open-source', 'philanthropy']

{1749: 'Architecture for the people by the people', 2183: 'Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by ... you', 31: 'How architecture can connect us', 6496: 'The next generation of African architects and designers', 9687: 'How architecture can create dignity for all', 2532: "Architecture that's built to heal"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_sinclair_my_wish_a_call_for_open_source_architecture/

Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. He unveils his TED Prize wish for a network to improve global living standards through collaborative design.

I'm going to take you on a journey very quickly. To explain the wish, I'm going to have to take you somewhere where many people haven't been, and that's around the world. When I was about 24 years old, Kate Stohr and myself started an organization to get architects and designers involved in humanitarian work, not only about responding to natural disasters, but involved in systemic issues. We believe that where the resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable design can really make a difference in people's lives. So I started my life as an architect, or training as an architect, and I was always interested in socially responsible design, and how you can really make an impact. But when I went to architecture school, it seemed that I was a black sheep in the family. Many architects seemed to think that when you design, you design a jewel, and it's a jewel that you try and crave for; whereas I felt that when you design, you either improve or you create a detriment to the community in which you're designing. So you're not just doing a building for the residents or for the people who are going to use it, but for the community as a whole. And in 1999, we started by responding to the issue of the housing crisis for returning refugees in Kosovo. And I didn't know what I was doing — like I said, mid-20s — and I'm the Internet generation, so we started a website. We put a call out there, and to my surprise, in a couple of months, we had hundreds of entries from around the world. That led to a number of prototypes being built and really experimenting with some ideas. Two years later we started doing a project on developing mobile health clinics in sub-Saharan Africa, responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. That led to 550 entries from 53 countries. We also have designers from around the world that participate. And we had an exhibit of work that followed that. 2004 was the tipping point for us. We started responding to natural disasters and getting involved in Iran, in Bam, also following up on our work in Africa. Working within the United States — most people look at poverty and they see the face of a foreigner. But I live in Bozeman, Montana — go up to the north plains on the reservations, or go down to Alabama or Mississippi, pre-Katrina, and I could have shown you places that have far worse conditions than many developing countries that I've been to. So we got involved in and worked in inner cities and elsewhere; and also, I will go into some more projects. 2005: Mother Nature kicked our ass. I think we can pretty much assume that 2005 was a horrific year when it comes to natural disasters. And because of the Internet, and because of connections to blogs and so forth, within literally hours of the tsunami, we were already raising funds, getting involved, working with people on the ground. We run from a couple of laptops, and in the first couple of days, I had 4,000 emails from people needing help. So we began to get involved in projects there, and I'll talk about some others. And then of course, this year we've been responding to Katrina, as well as following up on our reconstruction work. So this is a brief overview. In 2004, I really couldn't manage the number of people who wanted to help, or the number of requests that I was getting. It was all coming into my laptop and cell phone. So we decided to embrace an open-source model of business — so that anyone, anywhere in the world, could start a local chapter, and they can get involved in local problems. Because I believe there is no such thing as Utopia. All problems are local. All solutions are local. So that means, you know, somebody who's based in Mississippi knows more about Mississippi than I do. So what happened is, we used Meetup and all these other Internet tools, and we ended up having 40 chapters starting up, thousands of architects in 104 countries. So the bullet point — sorry, I never do a suit, so I knew that I was going to take this off. OK, because I'm going to do it very quick. This isn't just about nonprofit. What it showed me is that there's a grassroots movement going on, of socially responsible designers who really believe that this world has got a lot smaller, and that we have the opportunity — not the responsibility, but the opportunity — to really get involved in making change. (Laughter) (Laughter) I'm adding that to my time. (Laughter) So what you don't know is, we've got these thousands of designers working around the world, connected basically by a website, and we have a staff of three. The fact that nobody told us we couldn't do it, we did it. And so there's something to be said about naïveté. So seven years later, we've developed so that we've got advocacy, instigation and implementation. We advocate for good design, not only through student workshops and lectures and public forums, op-eds; we have a book on humanitarian work; but also disaster mitigation and dealing with public policy. We can talk about FEMA, but that's another talk. Instigation, developing ideas with communities and NGOs, doing open-source design competitions. Referring, matchmaking with communities. And then implementing — actually going out there and doing the work, because when you invent, it's never a reality until it's built. So it's really important that if we're designing and trying to create change, we build that change. So here's a select number of projects. Kosovo. This is Kosovo in '99. We did an open design competition, like I said. It led to a whole variety of ideas. And this wasn't about emergency shelter, but transitional shelter that would last five to 10 years, that would be placed next to the land the resident lived in, and that they would rebuild their own home. This wasn't imposing an architecture on a community; this was giving them the tools and the space to allow them to rebuild and regrow the way they want to. We had from the sublime to the ridiculous, but they worked. This is an inflatable hemp house. It was built; it works. This is a shipping container. Built and works. And a whole variety of ideas that not only dealt with architectural building, but also the issues of governance, and the idea of creating communities through complex networks. So we've engaged not just designers, but also a whole variety of technology-based professionals. Using rubble from destroyed homes to create new homes. Using straw bale construction, creating heat walls. And then something remarkable happened in '99. We went to Africa originally to look at the housing issue. Within three days, we realized the problem was not housing; it was the growing pandemic of HIV/AIDS. And it wasn't doctors telling us this; it was actual villagers that we were staying with. And so we came up with the bright idea that instead of getting people to walk 10, 15 kilometers to see doctors, you get the doctors to the people. And we started engaging the medical community, and you know, we thought we were real bright sparks — "We've come up with this great idea: mobile health clinics, widely distributed throughout sub-Saharan Africa." And the medical community there said, "We've said this for the last decade. We know this. We just don't know how to show this." So in a way, we had taken pre-existing needs and shown solutions. And so again, we had a whole variety of ideas that came in. This one I personally love, because the idea is that architecture is not just about solutions, but about raising awareness. This is a kenaf clinic. You get seed and you grow it in a plot of land, and it grows 14 feet in a month. And on the fourth week, the doctors come and they mow out an area, put a tensile structure on the top, and when the doctors have finished treating and seeing patients and villagers, you cut down the clinic and you eat it. It's an eat-your-own-clinic. So it's dealing with the fact that if you have AIDS, you also need to have nutrition rates, and the idea of nutrition is as important as getting antiretrovirals out there. So you know, this is a serious solution. This one I love. The idea is it's not just a clinic, it's a community center. This looked at setting up trade routes and economic engines within the community, so it can be a self-sustaining project. Every one of these projects is sustainable. That's not because I'm a tree-hugging green person. It's because when you live on four dollars a day, you're living on survival and you have to be sustainable. You have to know where your energy is coming from, you have to know where your resource is coming from, and you have to keep the maintenance down. So this is about getting an economic engine, and then at night, it turns into a movie theater. So it's not an AIDS clinic. It's a community center. So you can see ideas. And these ideas developed into prototypes, and they were eventually built. And currently, as of this year, there are clinics rolling out in Nigeria and Kenya. From that, we also developed Siyathemba. The community came to us and said, "The problem is that the girls don't have education." And we're working in an area where young women between the ages of 16 and 24 have a 50 percent HIV/AIDS rate. And that's not because they're promiscuous, it's because there's no knowledge. And so we decided to look at the idea of sports, and create a youth sports center that doubled as an HIV/AIDS outreach center, and the coaches of the girls' team were also trained doctors. So that there would be a very slow way of developing confidence in health care. And we picked nine finalists, and then those nine finalists were distributed throughout the entire region, and then the community picked their design. They said, this is our design, because it's not only about engaging a community; it's about empowering a community, and about getting them to be a part of the rebuilding process. So, the winning design is here. And then, of course, we actually go and work with the community and the clients. So this is the designer. He's out there working with the first ever women's soccer team in KwaZulu-Natal, Siyathemba. And they can tell it better. (A cappella singing in a South African language) Video: Well, my name is Cee Cee Mkhonza. I work at the Africa Centre, I'm an IT user consultant. I'm also the national football player for South Africa, Banyana Banyana. And I also play in the Vodacom League, for the team called Tembisa, which has now changed to Siyathemba. This is our home ground. Cameron Sinclair: I'm going to show that later because I'm running out of time. I can see Chris looking at me slyly. This was a connection, just a meeting with somebody who wanted to develop Africa's first telemedicine center, in Tanzania. And we met, literally, a couple of months ago. We've already developed a design. The team is over there, working in partnership. This was a matchmaking, thanks to a couple of TEDsters — Sun [Microsystems], Cheryl Heller and Andrew Zolli, who connected me with this amazing African woman. And we start construction in June, and it will be opened by TEDGlobal. So when you come to TEDGlobal, you can check it out. But what we're known probably most for is dealing with disasters and development, and we've been involved in a lot of issues, such as the tsunami and also things like Hurricane Katrina. This is a 370-dollar shelter that can be easily assembled. This is a community-designed community center. And what that means is we actually live and work with the community, and they're part of the design process. The kids actually get involved in mapping out where the community center should be. And then eventually, the community, through skills training, end up building the building with us. Here is another school. This is what the UN gave these guys for six months — 12 plastic tarps. This was in August. This was the replacement; that's supposed to last for two years. When the rain comes down, you can't hear a thing, and in the summer, it's about 140 degrees inside. So we said, if the rain's coming down, let's get fresh water. So every one of our schools has a rainwater collection system. Very low cost: three classrooms and rainwater collection is 5,000 dollars. This was raised by hot chocolate sales in Atlanta. It's built by the parents of the kids. The kids are out there on-site, building the buildings. And it opened a couple of weeks ago, and there's 600 kids that are now using the schools. (Applause) So, disaster hits home. We see the bad stories on CNN and Fox and all that, but we don't see the good stories. Here is a community that got together, and they said "no" to waiting. They formed a partnership, a diverse partnership of players, to actually map out East Biloxi, to figure out who's getting involved. We've had over 1,500 volunteers rebuilding, rehabbing homes. Figuring out what FEMA regulations are, not waiting for them to dictate to us how you should rebuild. Working with residents, getting them out of their homes, so they don't get ill. This is what they're cleaning up on their own. Designing housing. This house is going in in a couple of weeks. This is a rehabbed home, done in four days. This is a utility room for a woman who is on a walker. She's 70 years old. This is what FEMA gave her. 600 bucks, happened two days ago. We put together, very quickly, a washroom. It's built, it's running and she just started a business today, where she's washing other people's clothes. These are the Calhouns. They're photographers who had documented the Lower Ninth for the last 40 years. That was their home, and these are the photographs they took. And we're helping, working with them to create a new building. Projects we've done. Projects we've been a part of, support. Why don't aid agencies do this? This is the UN tent. This is the new UN tent, just introduced this year. Quick to assemble. It's got a flap — that's the invention. It took 20 years to design this and get it implemented in the field. I was 12 years old. There's a problem here. Luckily, we're not alone. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of architects and designers and inventors around the world that are getting involved in humanitarian work. More hemp houses — it's a theme in Japan, apparently. I'm not sure what they're smoking. (Laughter) This is a Grip Clip, designed by somebody who said, "All you need is some way to attach membrane structures to physical support beams." This guy designed for NASA, is now doing housing. I'm going to whip through this quickly, because I know I've got only a couple of minutes. So this is all done in the last two years. I showed you something that took 20 years to do. And this is just a selection of things that were built in the last couple of years. From Brazil to India, Mexico, Alabama, China, Israel, Palestine, Vietnam. The average age of a designer who gets involved in this project is 32 — that's how old I am. So it's a young — I just have to stop here, because Arup is in the room, and this is the best-designed toilet in the world. If you're ever, ever in India, go use this toilet. (Laughter) Chris Luebkeman will tell you why. I'm sure that's how he wanted to spend the party. But the future is not going to be the sky-scraping cities of New York, but this. And when you look at this, you see crisis. What I see is many, many inventors. One billion people live in abject poverty. We hear about them all the time. Four billion live in growing but fragile economies. One in seven live in unplanned settlements. If we do nothing about the housing crisis that's about to happen, in 20 years, one in three people will live in an unplanned settlement or a refugee camp. Look left, look right: one of you will be there. How do we improve the living standards of five billion people? With 10 million solutions. So I wish to develop a community that actively embraces innovative and sustainable design to improve the living conditions for everyone. Chris Anderson: Wait a sec — that's your wish? CS: That's my wish. CA: That's his wish! (Applause) CS: We started Architecture for Humanity with 700 dollars and a website. So Chris somehow decided to give me 100,000. So why not this many people? Open-source architecture is the way to go. You have a diverse community of participants — and we're not just talking about inventors and designers, but we're talking about the funding model. My role is not as a designer; it's as a conduit between the design world and the humanitarian world. And what we need is something that replicates me globally, because I haven't slept in seven years. (Laughter) Secondly, what will this thing be? Designers want to respond to issues of humanitarian crisis, but they don't want some company in the West taking their idea and basically profiting from it. So Creative Commons has developed the Developing Nations license. And what that means is that a designer can — The Siyathemba project I showed was the first ever building to have a Creative Commons license on it. As soon as that is built, anyone in Africa or any developing nation can take the construction documents and replicate it for free. (Applause) So why not allow designers the opportunity to do this, but still protect their rights here? We want to have a community where you can upload ideas, and those ideas can be tested in an earthquake, in flood, in all sorts of austere environments. The reason that's important is I don't want to wait for the next Katrina to find out if my house works. That's too late, we need to do it now. So doing that globally — and I want this whole thing to work multi-lingually. When you look at the face of an architect, most people think a gray-haired white guy. I don't see that; I see the face of the world. So I want everyone from all over the planet to be able to be a part of this design and development. The idea of needs-based competitions — XPRIZE for the other 98 percent, if you want to call it that. We also want to look at ways of matchmaking and putting funding partners together, and the idea of integrating manufacturers — fab labs in every country. When I hear about the $100 laptop and it's going to educate every child — educate every designer in the world. Put one in every favela, every slum settlement. Because you know what? Innovation will happen. And I need to know that. It's called the leap-back. We talk about leapfrog technologies. I write with Worldchanging, and the one thing we've been talking about is, I learn more on the ground than I've ever learned here. So let's take those ideas, adapt them, and we can use them. These ideas are supposed to be adaptable; they should have the potential for evolution; they should be developed by every nation in the world and useful for every nation in the world. What will it take? There should be a sheet. I don't have time to read this, because I'm going to be yanked off. CA: Let's just leave it up for a sec. CS: Well, what will it take? You guys are smart. So it's going to take a lot of computing power, because I want the idea that any laptop anywhere in the world can plug into the system and be able to not only participate in developing these designs, but utilize the designs. Also, a process of reviewing the designs. I want every Arup engineer in the world to check and make sure that we're doing stuff that's standing, because those guys are the best in the world. Plug. And so, you know, I want these — I just should note: I have two laptops and one of them is there, and that has 3000 designs on it. If I drop that laptop ... What happens? So it's important to have these proven ideas put up there, easy to use, easy to get ahold of. My mom once said, "There's nothing worse than being all mouth and no trousers." (Laughter) I'm fed up of talking about making change. You only make it by doing it. We've changed FEMA guidelines; we've changed public policy; we've changed international response — based on building things. So for me, it's important that we create a real conduit for innovation, and that it's free innovation. Think of free culture — this is free innovation. Somebody said this a couple of years back. I will give points for those who know it. But I think the man was maybe 25 years too early. So let's do it. Thank you. (Applause)

One Laptop per Child

Nicholas Negroponte

{0: 'Nicholas Negroponte'}

{0: ['tech visionary']}

{0: "The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world. "}

2006-02-23

2006-08-01

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['children', 'design', 'education', 'entrepreneur', 'global issues', 'philanthropy', 'social change', 'technology']

{2043: 'A 30-year history of the future', 255: 'The thinking behind 50x15', 1678: 'Build a School in the Cloud', 2182: 'How to run a company with (almost) no rules', 66: 'Do schools kill creativity?', 865: 'Bring on the learning revolution!'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_one_laptop_per_child/

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Laboratory, describes how the One Laptop Per Child project will build and distribute the "$100 laptop."

I've been at MIT for 44 years. I went to TED I. There's only one other person here, I think, who did that. All the other TEDs — and I went to them all, under Ricky's regime — I talked about what the Media Lab was doing, which today has almost 500 people in it. And if you read the press, last week it actually said I quit the Media Lab. I didn't quit the Media Lab, I stepped down as chairman — which was a kind of ridiculous title, but someone else has taken it on — and one of the things you can do as a professor is you stay on as a professor. And I will now do for the rest of my life the One Laptop Per Child, which I've sort of been doing for a year and a half, anyway. So I'm going to tell you about this, use my 18 minutes to tell you why we're doing it, how we're doing it and then what we're doing. And at some point I'll even pass around what the $100 laptop might be like. I was asked by Chris to talk about some of the big issues, and so I figured I'd start with the three that at least drove me to do this. And the first is pretty obvious. It's amazing when you meet a head of state, and you say, "What is your most precious natural resource?" They will not say "children" at first, and then when you say, "children," they will pretty quickly agree with you. And so that isn't very hard. (Laughter) Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they include education, sometimes can be just education and can never be without some element of education. So that's certainly part of it. And the third is a little bit less obvious. And that is that we all in this room learned how to walk, how to talk, not by being taught how to talk, or taught how to walk, but by interacting with the world, by having certain results as a consequence of being able to ask for something, or being able to stand up and reach it. Whereas at about the age six, we were told to stop learning that way, and that all learning from then on would happen through teaching, whether it's people standing up, like I'm doing now, or a book, or something. But it was really through teaching. And one of the things in general that computers have provided to learning is that it now includes a kind of learning which is a little bit more like walking and talking, in the sense that a lot of it is driven by the learner himself or herself. So with those as the principles — some of you may know Seymour Papert. This is back in 1982, when we were working in Senegal. Because some people think that the $100 laptop just happened a year ago, or two years ago, or we were struck by lightning — this actually has gone back a long time, and in fact, back to the '60s. Here we're in the '80s. Steve Jobs had given us some laptops. We were in Senegal. It didn't scale but it at least was bringing computers to developing countries and learning pretty quickly that these kids, even though English wasn't their language, the Latin alphabet barely was their language, but they could just swim like fish. They could play these like pianos. A little bit more recently, I got involved personally. And these are two anecdotes — one was in Cambodia, in a village that has no electricity, no water, no television, no telephone, but has broadband Internet now. And these kids, their first English word is "Google" and they only know Skype. They've never heard of telephony. They just use Skype. And they go home at night — they've got a broadband connection in a hut that doesn't have electricity. The parents love it, because when they open up the laptops, it's the brightest light source in the house. And talk about where metaphors and reality mix — this is the actual school. In parallel with this, Seymour Papert got the governor of Maine to legislate one laptop per child in the year 2002. Now at the time, I think it's fair to say that 80 percent of the teachers were — let me say, apprehensive. Really, they were actually against it. And they really preferred that the money would be used for higher salaries, more schools, whatever. And now, three and a half years later, guess what? They're reporting five things: drop of truancy to almost zero, attending parent-teacher meetings — which nobody did and now almost everybody does — drop in discipline problems, increase in student participation. Teachers are now saying it's kind of fun to teach. Kids are engaged — they have laptops! — and then the fifth, which interests me the most, is that the servers have to be turned off at certain times at night because the teachers are getting too much email from the kids asking them for help. So when you see that kind of thing — this is not something that you have to test. The days of pilot projects are over, when people say, "We'd like to do three or four thousand in our country to see how it works." Screw you. Go to the back of the line and someone else will do it, and then when you figure out that this works, you can join as well. And this is what we're doing. (Laughter) (Applause) So, One Laptop Per Child was formed about a year and a half ago. It's a nonprofit association. It raised about 20 million dollars to do the engineering to just get this built, and then have it produced afterwards. Scale is truly important. And it's not important because you can buy components at a lower price, OK? It's because you can go to a manufacturer — and I will leave the name out — but we wanted a small display, doesn't have to have perfect color uniformity. It can even have a pixel or two missing. It doesn't have to be that bright. And this particular manufacturer said, "We're not interested in that. We're interested in the living room. We're interested in perfect color uniformity. We're interested in big displays, bright displays. You're not part of our strategic plan." And I said, "That's kind of too bad, because we need 100 million units a year." (Laughter) And they said, "Oh, well, maybe we could become part of your strategic plan." And that's why scale counts. And that's why we will not launch this without five to 10 million units in the first run. And the idea is to launch with enough scale that the scale itself helps bring the price down, and that's why I said seven to 10 million there. And we're doing it without a sales-and-marketing team. I mean, you're looking at the sales-and-marketing team. We will do it by going to seven large countries and getting them to agree and launch it, and then the others can follow. We have partners. It's not hard to guess Google would be one. The others are all playing to pending. And this has been in the press a great deal. It's the so-called Green Machine that we introduced with Kofi Annan in November at the World Summit that was held in Tunisia. Now once people start looking at this, they say, "Ah, this is a laptop project." Well, no, it's not a laptop project. It's an education project. And the fun part — and I'm quite focused on it — I tell people I used to be a light bulb, but now I'm a laser — I'm just going to get that thing built, and it turns out it's not so hard. Because laptop economics are the following: I say 50 percent here — it's more like 60, 60 percent of the cost of your laptop is sales, marketing, distribution and profit. Now we have none of those, OK? None of those figure into our cost, because first of all, we sell it at cost, and the governments distribute it. It gets distributed to the school system like a textbook. So that piece disappears. Then you have display and everything else. Now the display on your laptop costs, in rough numbers, 10 dollars a diagonal inch. That can drop to eight; it can drop to seven but it's not going to drop to two, or to one and a half, unless we do some pretty clever things. It's the rest — that little brown box — that is pretty fascinating, because the rest of your laptop is devoted to itself. It's a little bit like an obese person having to use most of their energy to move their obesity. (Laughter) And we have a situation today which is incredible. I've been using laptops since their inception. And my laptop runs slower, less reliably and less pleasantly than it ever has before. And this year is worse. (Applause) People clap, sometimes you even get standing ovations, and I say, "What the hell's wrong with you? Why are we all sitting there?" And somebody — to remain nameless — called our laptop a "gadget" recently. And I said, "God, our laptop's going to go like a bat out of hell. When you open it up, it's going to go 'bing.'" It'll be on. It'll be just like it was in 1985, when you bought an Apple Macintosh 512. It worked really well. And we've been going steadily downhill. Now, people ask all the time what it is. That's what it is. The two pieces that are probably notable: it'll be a mesh network, so when the kids open up their laptops, they all become a network, and then just need one or two points of backhaul. You can serve a couple of thousand kids with two megabits. So you really can bring into a village, and then the villages can connect themselves, and you really can do it quite well. The dual mode display — the idea is to have a display that both works outdoors — isn't it fun using your cell phone outdoors in the sunlight? Well, you can't see it. And one of the reasons you can't see it is because it's backlighting most of the time, most cell phones. Now, what we're doing is, we're doing one that will be both frontlit and backlit. And whether you manually switch it or you do it in the software is to be seen. But when it's backlit, it's color. And when it's frontlit, it's black and white at three times the resolution. Is it all worked out? No. That's why a lot of our people are more or less living in Taiwan right now. And in about 30 days, we'll know for sure whether this works. Probably the most important piece there is that the kids really can do the maintenance. And this is again something that people don't believe, but I really think it's quite true. That's the machine we showed in Tunis. This is more the direction that we're going to go. And it's something that we didn't think was possible. Now, I'm going to pass this around. This isn't a design, OK? So this is just a mechanical engineering sort of embodiment of it for you to play with. And it's clearly just a model. The working one is at MIT. I'm going to pass it to this handsome gentleman. At least you can decide whether it goes left or — Chris Anderson: Before you do it, for the people down in simulcast — Nicholas Negroponte: Sorry! I forgot. CA: Just show it off a bit. So wherever the camera is — OK, good point. Thank you, Chris. The idea was that it would be not only a laptop, but that it could transform into an electronic book. So it's sort of an electronic book. This is where when you go outside, it's in black and white. The games buttons are missing, but it'll also be a games machine, book machine. Set it up this way, and it's a television set. Etc., etc. — is that enough for simulcast? OK, sorry. I'll let Jim decide which way to send it afterwards. OK. Seven countries. (Laughter) I say "maybe" for Massachusetts, because they actually have to do a bid. By law you've got to bid, and so on and so forth. So I can't quite name them. In the other cases, they don't have to do bids. They can decide — it's the federal government in each case. It's kind of agonizing, because a lot of people say, "Let's do it at the state level," because states are more nimble than the feds, just because of size. And yet we count. We're really dealing with the federal government. We're really dealing with ministries of education. And if you look at governments around the world, ministries of education tend to be the most conservative, and also the ones that have huge payrolls. Everybody thinks they know about education, a lot of culture is built into it as well. It's really hard. And so it's certainly the hard road. If you look at the countries, they're pretty geoculturally distributed. Have they all agreed? No, not completely. Probably Thailand, Brazil and Nigeria are the three that are the most active and most agreed. We're purposely not signing anything with anybody until we actually have the working ones. And since I visit each one of those countries within at least every three months, I'm just going around the world every three weeks. Here's sort of the schedule and I put at the bottom we might give some away free in two years at this meeting. Everybody says it's a $100 laptop — you can't do it. Well, guess what, we're not. We're coming in probably at 135, to start, then drift down. And that's very important, because so many things hit the market at a price and then drift up. It's kind of the loss leader, and then as soon as it looks interesting, it can't be afforded, or it can't be scaled out. So we're targeting 50 dollars in 2010. The gray market's a big issue. And one of the ways — just one — but one of the ways to help in the case of the gray market is to make something that is so utterly unique — It's a little bit like the fact that automobiles — thousands of automobiles are stolen every day in the United States. Not one single post-office truck is stolen. (Laughter) And why? Because there's no market for post-office trucks. It looks like a post-office truck. You can spray paint it. You can do anything you want. I just learned recently: in South Africa, no white Volvos are stolen. Period. None. Zero. So we want to make it very much like a white Volvo. Each government has a task force. This perhaps is less interesting, but we're trying to get the governments to all work together and it's not easy. The economics of this is to start with the federal governments and then later, to subsequently go to other — whether it's child-to-child funding, so a child in this country buys one for a child in the developing world, maybe of the same gender, maybe of the same age. An uncle gives a niece or a nephew that as a birthday present. I mean, there are all sorts of things that will happen, and they'll be very, very exciting. And everybody says — I say — it's an education project. Are we providing the software? The answer is: The system certainly has software, but no, we're not providing the education content. That is really done in the countries. But we are certainly constructionists. And we certainly believe in learning by doing and everything from Logo, which was started in 1968, to more modern things, like Scratch, if you've ever even heard of it, are very, very much part of it. And that's the rollout. Are we dreaming? Is this real? It actually is real. The only criticism, and people really don't want to criticize this, because it is a humanitarian effort, a nonprofit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid, actually. (Laughter) But the one thing that people could criticize was, "Great idea, but these guys can't do it." And that could either mean these guys, professors and so on couldn't do it, or that it's not possible. Well, on December 12, a company called Quanta agreed to build it, and since they make about one-third of all the laptops on the planet today, that question disappeared. So it's not a matter of whether it's going to happen. It is going to happen. And if it comes out at 138 dollars, so what? If it comes out six months late, so what? That's a pretty soft landing. Thank you. (Applause)

The radical promise of the multi-touch interface

Jeff Han

{0: 'Jeff Han'}

{0: ['human-computer interface designer']}

{0: 'After years of research on touch-driven computer displays, Jeff Han has created a simple, multi-touch, multi-user screen interface that just might herald the end of the point-and-click era. '}

2006-02-06

2006-08-01

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['demo', 'design', 'interface design', 'technology']

{685: 'The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology', 872: 'Pointing to the future of UI', 1984: 'The best computer interface? Maybe ... your hands', 2410: 'Shape-shifting tech will change work as we know it', 1705: 'The technology of touch', 40636: 'Everything around you can become a computer'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_the_multi_touch_interface/

Jeff Han shows off a cheap, scalable multi-touch and pressure-sensitive computer screen interface that may spell the end of point-and-click.

I'm really excited to be here today. I'll show you some stuff that's just ready to come out of the lab, literally, and I'm really glad that you guys are going to be among the first to see it in person, because I really think this is going to really change the way we interact with machines from this point on. Now, this is a rear-projected drafting table. It's about 36 inches wide and it's equipped with a multi-touch sensor. Normal touch sensors that you see, like on a kiosk or interactive whiteboards, can only register one point of contact at a time. This thing allows you to have multiple points at the same time. They can use both my hands; I can use chording actions; I can just go right up and use all 10 fingers if I wanted to. You know, like that. Now, multi-touch sensing isn't completely new. People like Bill Buxton have been playing around with it in the '80s. However, the approach I built here is actually high-resolution, low-cost, and probably most importantly, very scalable. So, the technology, you know, isn't the most exciting thing here right now, other than probably its newfound accessibility. What's really interesting here is what you can do with it and the kind of interfaces you can build on top of it. So let's see. So, for instance, we have a lava lamp application here. Now, you can see, I can use both of my hands to kind of squeeze and put the blobs together. I can inject heat into the system here, or I can pull it apart with two of my fingers. It's completely intuitive; there's no instruction manual. The interface just kind of disappears. This started out as a screensaver app that one of the Ph.D. students in our lab, Ilya Rosenberg, made. But I think its true identity comes out here. Now what's great about a multi-touch sensor is that, you know, I could be doing this with as many fingers here, but of course multi-touch also inherently means multi-user. Chris could be interacting with another part of Lava, while I play around with it here. You can imagine a new kind of sculpting tool, where I'm kind of warming something up, making it malleable, and then letting it cool down and solidifying in a certain state. Google should have something like this in their lobby. (Laughter) I'll show you a little more of a concrete example here, as this thing loads. This is a photographer's light-box application. Again, I can use both of my hands to interact and move photos around. But what's even cooler is that if I have two fingers, I can actually grab a photo and then stretch it out like that really easily. I can pan, zoom and rotate it effortlessly. I can do that grossly with both of my hands, or I can do it just with two fingers on each of my hands together. If I grab the canvas, I can do the same thing — stretch it out. I can do it simultaneously, holding this down, and gripping on another one, stretching this out. Again, the interface just disappears here. There's no manual. This is exactly what you expect, especially if you haven't interacted with a computer before. Now, when you have initiatives like the $100 laptop, I kind of cringe at the idea of introducing a whole new generation to computing with this standard mouse-and-windows-pointer interface. This is something that I think is really the way we should be interacting with machines from now on. (Applause) Now, of course, I can bring up a keyboard. (Laughter) And I can bring that around, put that up there. Obviously, this is a standard keyboard, but of course I can rescale it to make it work well for my hands. That's really important, because there's no reason in this day and age that we should be conforming to a physical device. That leads to bad things, like RSI. We have so much technology nowadays that these interfaces should start conforming to us. There's so little applied now to actually improving the way we interact with interfaces from this point on. This keyboard is probably actually the really wrong direction to go. You can imagine, in the future, as we develop this kind of technology, a keyboard that kind of automatically drifts as your hand moves away, and really intelligently anticipates which key you're trying to stroke. So — again, isn't this great? (Laughter) Audience: Where's your lab? Jeff Han: I'm a research scientist at NYU in New York. Here's an example of another kind of app. I can make these little fuzz balls. It'll remember the strokes I'm making. Of course I can do it with all my hands. It's pressure-sensitive. What's neat about that is, I showed that two-finger gesture that zooms in really quickly. Because you don't have to switch to a hand tool or the magnifying glass tool, you can just continuously make things in real multiple scales, all at the same time. I can create big things out here, but I can go back and really quickly go back to where I started, and make even smaller things here. This is going to be really important as we start getting to things like data visualization. For instance, I think we all enjoyed Hans Rosling's talk, and he really emphasized the fact I've been thinking about for a long time: We have all this great data, but for some reason, it's just sitting there. We're not accessing it. And one of the reasons why I think that is will be helped by things like graphics and visualization and inference tools, but I also think a big part of it is going to be having better interfaces, to be able to drill down into this kind of data, while still thinking about the big picture here. Let me show you another app here. This is called WorldWind. It's done by NASA. We've all seen Google Earth; this is an open-source version of that. There are plug-ins to be able to load in different data sets that NASA's collected over the years. As you can see, I can use the same two-fingered gestures to go down and go in really seamlessly. There's no interface, again. It really allows anybody to kind of go in — and it just does what you'd expect, you know? Again, there's just no interface here. The interface just disappears. I can switch to different data views. That's what's neat about this app here. NASA's really cool. These hyper-spectral images are false-colored so you can — it's really good for determining vegetative use. Well, let's go back to this. The great thing about mapping applications — it's not really 2D, it's 3D. So, again, with a multi-point interface, you can do a gesture like this — so you can be able to tilt around like that — (Surprised laughter) It's not just simply relegated to a kind of 2D panning and motion. This gesture is just putting two fingers down — it's defining an axis of tilt — and I can tilt up and down that way. We just came up with that on the spot, it's probably not the right thing to do, but there's such interesting things you can do with this interface. It's just so much fun playing around with it, too. (Laughter) And so the last thing I want to show you is — I'm sure we can all think of a lot of entertainment apps that you can do with this thing. I'm more interested in the creative applications we can do with this. Now, here's a simple application here — I can draw out a curve. And when I close it, it becomes a character. But the neat thing about it is I can add control points. And then what I can do is manipulate them with both of my fingers at the same time. And you notice what it does. It's kind of a puppeteering thing, where I can use as many fingers as I have to draw and make — Now, there's a lot of actual math going on under here for this to control this mesh and do the right thing. This technique of being able to manipulate a mesh here, with multiple control points, is actually state of the art. It was released at SIGGRAPH last year. It's a great example of the kind of research I really love: all this compute power to make things do the right things, intuitive things, to do exactly what you expect. So, multi-touch interaction research is a very active field right now in HCI. I'm not the only one doing it, a lot of other people are getting into it. This kind of technology is going to let even more people get into it, I'm looking forward to interacting with all of you over the next few days and seeing how it can apply to your respective fields. Thank you. (Applause)

Improvising on piano, aged 14

Jennifer Lin

{0: 'Jennifer Lin'}

{0: ['pianist', 'composer']}

{0: 'Concert pianist and composer Jennifer Lin was only 14 when she performed at TED, drawing tears with her extraordinary improvisation.'}

2004-02-26

2006-08-08

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'mn', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['creativity', 'entertainment', 'music', 'performance', 'piano', 'wunderkind', 'live music']

{2273: 'An 11-year-old prodigy performs old-school jazz', 2100: 'Why I take the piano on the road ... and in the air', 1298: 'There are no mistakes on the bandstand', 1446: 'Beethoven the businessman', 2764: 'Why should you listen to Vivaldi\'s "Four Seasons"?', 286: 'The transformative power of classical music'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_lin_improvising_on_piano_aged_14/

Pianist and composer Jennifer Lin gives a magical performance, talks about the process of creativity and improvises a moving solo piece based on a random sequence of notes.

(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you! (Applause continues) Thank you very much. Like the speaker before me — I am a TED virgin, I guess. I'm also the first time here, and ... (Laughter) I don't know what to say! (Applause) I'm really happy that Mr. Anderson invited me. I'm really grateful that I get a chance to play for everyone. And the song that I just played was by Josef Hofmann. It's called "Kaleidoscope." And Hofmann is a Polish pianist and composer of the late 19th century, and he's widely considered one of the greatest pianists of all time. I have another piece that I'd like to play for you. It's called "Abegg Variations," by Robert Schumann, a German 19th-century composer. The name "Abegg" is actually A-B-E-G-G, and that's the main theme in the melody. (Plays the notes A, B, E, G and G) That comes from the last name of one of Schumann's female friends. (Laughter) But he wrote that for his wife. (Laughter) So actually, if you listen carefully, there are supposed to be five variations on this Abegg theme. It's written around 1834, so even though it's old, I hope you'll like it. (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Now comes the part that I hate. Well, because Mr. Anderson told me that this session is called "Sync and Flow," I was wondering, "What do I know that these geniuses don't?" (Laughter) So, I'll talk about musical composition, even though I don't know where to start. How do I compose? I think Yamaha does a really good job of teaching us how to compose. What I do first is, I make a lot of little musical ideas you can just improvise here at the piano — and I choose one of those to become my main theme, my main melody, like the Abegg that you just heard. And once I choose my main theme, I have to decide: Out of all the styles in music, what kind of style do I want? And this year, I composed a Romantic style. So for inspiration, I listened to Liszt and Tchaikovsky and all the great Romantic composers. Next, I make the structure of the entire piece with my teachers. They help me plan out the whole piece. And then the hard part is filling it in with musical ideas, because then you have to think. (Laughter) And then, when the piece takes somewhat of a solified form — solidified, excuse me — solidified form, you're supposed to actually polish the piece, polish the details, and then polish the overall performance of the composition. And another thing that I enjoy doing is drawing. Drawing, because I like to draw, you know, Japanese anime art. I think that's a craze among teens right now. And once I realized it, there's a parallel between creating music and creating art, because for your motive, or your little initial idea for your drawing, it's your character — you want to decide who you want to draw, or if you want to draw an original character. And then you want to decide: How are you going to draw the character? Like, am I going to use one page? Am I going to draw it on the computer? Am I going to use a two-page spread like a comic book? For a more grandiose effect, I guess. And then you have to do the initial sketch of the character, which is like your structure of a piece, and then you add pen and pencil, and whatever details that you need — that's polishing the drawing. And another thing that both of these have in common is your state of mind, because I know I'm one of those teenagers that are really easily distracted. So if I'm trying to do homework and I don't feel like it, I'll try to draw or, you know, waste my time. And then what happens is, sometimes I absolutely can't draw or I can't compose at all, and then it's like there's too much on your mind. You can't focus on what you're supposed to do. And sometimes, if you manage to use your time wisely and work on it, you'll get something out of it, but it doesn't come naturally. What happens is, if something magical happens, if something natural happens to you, you're able to produce all this beautiful stuff instantly, and then that's what I consider "flow," because that's when everything clicks and you're able to do anything. You feel like you're on top of your game and you can do anything you want. I'm not going to play my own composition today because, although I did finish it, it's way too long. Instead, I'd like to try something called "improvisation." I have here seven note cards, one with each note of the musical alphabet. And I'd like someone to come up here and choose five — anyone to come up here and choose five — and then I can make it into some sort of melody, and I'll improvise it. Wow. A volunteer, yay! (Laughter) (Applause) Jennifer Lin: Nice to meet you. Goldie Hawn: Thank you. Choose five? JL: Yes, five cards. Any five cards. GH: OK, one. JL: OK. GH: Two. JL: Yes. GH: Three. GH: Oh, D and F — too familiar. (Laughter) JL: One more. GH: OK. "E" for "effort." JL: Would you mind reading them out in the order that you chose them? GH: OK — C, G, B, A and E. JL: Thank you very much! GH: You're welcome. And what about these? JL: I won't use them. Thank you! (Applause) Now, she chose C, G, B, A, E. I'm going to try to put that in some sort of order. (Plays notes) OK, that's nice. So, I'm going to have a moment to think, and I'll try to make something out of it. (Plays the five notes) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) The next song, or the encore that I'm going to play is called "Bumble Boogie," by Jack Fina. (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause)

An 11-year-old's magical violin

Sirena Huang

{0: 'Sirena Huang'}

{0: ['violinist']}

{0: 'Sirena Huang started taking violin lessons at age 4 and made her professional solo debut at 9 with the Taiwan Symphony Orchestra. She has won top prizes in numerous international competitions, delighting audiences worldwide with her virtuosity and charm. '}

2006-02-23

2006-08-08

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['entertainment', 'music', 'performance', 'violin', 'wunderkind', 'youth', 'live music']

{2273: 'An 11-year-old prodigy performs old-school jazz', 2242: 'The dancer, the singer, the cellist ... and a moment of creative magic', 1156: 'On violin and cello, "Passacaglia"', 1446: 'Beethoven the businessman', 286: 'The transformative power of classical music', 2764: 'Why should you listen to Vivaldi\'s "Four Seasons"?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/sirena_huang_an_11_year_old_s_magical_violin/

Violinist Sirena Huang gives a technically brilliant and emotionally nuanced performance. In a charming interlude, the 11-year-old praises the timeless design of her instrument.

(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Applause ends) Hi, everyone. I'm Sirena. I'm 11 years old and from Connecticut. (Audience cheers) (Applause) Well, I'm not really sure why I'm here. (Laughter) I mean, what does this have to do with technology, entertainment and design? Well, I count my iPod, cellphone and computer as technology, but this has nothing to do with that. So I did a little research on it. Well, this is what I found. Of course, I hope I can memorize it. (Clears throat) The violin is made of a wood box and four metal strings. By pulling a string, it vibrates and produces a sound wave, which passes through a piece of wood called a bridge, and goes down to the wood box and gets amplified, but ... let me think. (Laughter) Placing your finger at different places on the fingerboard changes the string length, and that changes the frequency of the sound wave. (Sighs) Oh, my gosh! (Laughter) OK, this is sort of technology, but I can call it a 16th-century technology. But actually, the most fascinating thing that I found was that even the audio system or wave transmission nowadays are still based on the same principle of producing and projecting sound. Isn't that cool? (Laughter) (Applause) Design — I love its design. I remember when I was little, my mom asked me, "Would you like to play the violin or the piano?" I looked at that giant monster and said to myself — "I am not going to lock myself on that bench the whole day!" (Laughter) This is small and lightweight. I can play from standing, sitting or walking. And, you know what? The best of all is that if I don't want to practice, (Whispering) I can hide it. (Laughter) The violin is very beautiful. Some people relate it as the shape of a lady. But whether you like it or not, it's been so for more than 400 years, unlike modern stuff [that] easily looks dated. But I think it's very personal and unique that, although each violin looks pretty similar, no two violins sound the same — even from the same maker or based on the same model. Entertainment — I love the entertainment. But actually, the instrument itself isn't very entertaining. I mean, when I first got my violin and tried to play around on it, it was actually really bad, because it didn't sound the way I'd heard from other kids — it was so horrible and so scratchy. So, it wasn't entertaining at all. But besides, my brother found this very funny: Yuk! Yuk! Yuk! (Laughter) A few years later, I heard a joke about the greatest violinist, Jascha Heifetz. After Mr. Heifetz's concert, a lady came over and complimented him: "Oh, Mr. Heifetz, your violin sounded so great tonight!" And Mr. Heifetz was a very cool person, so he picked up his violin and said, "Funny — I don't hear anything." (Laughter) Now I realize that as the musician, we human beings, with our great mind, artistic heart and skill, can change this 16th-century technology and a legendary design to a wonderful entertainment. Now I know why I'm here. (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) At first, I thought I was just going to be here to perform, but unexpectedly, I learned and enjoyed much more. But ... although some of the talks were quite up there for me. (Laughter) Like the multi-dimension stuff. I mean, honestly, I'd be happy enough if I could actually get my two dimensions correct in school. (Laughter) But actually, the most impressive thing to me is that — well, actually, I would also like to say this for all children is to say thank you to all adults, for actually caring for us a lot, and to make our future world much better. Thank you. (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Applause ends) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause)

Simple designs to save a life

Amy Smith

{0: 'Amy Smith'}

{0: ['inventor', 'engineer']}

{0: 'Amy Smith designs cheap, practical fixes for tough problems in developing countries. Among her many accomplishments, the MIT engineer received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2004 and was the first woman to win the Lemelson-MIT Prize for turning her ideas into inventions.'}

2006-02-24

2006-08-15

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['MacArthur grant', 'alternative energy', 'design', 'engineering', 'global issues', 'industrial design', 'invention', 'simplicity']

{1561: 'Energy from floating algae pods', 1072: "Using nature's genius in architecture", 1184: 'Cooking as never seen before', 1406: 'Inventing is the easy part. Marketing takes work', 767: 'Innovating to zero!', 285: 'A mobile fridge for vaccines'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_smith_simple_designs_to_save_a_life/

Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. MIT engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for turning farm waste into clean-burning charcoal.

In terms of invention, I'd like to tell you the tale of one of my favorite projects. I think it's one of the most exciting that I'm working on, but I think it's also the simplest. It's a project that has the potential to make a huge impact around the world. It addresses one of the biggest health issues on the planet, the number one cause of death in children under five. Which is ...? Water-borne diseases? Diarrhea? Malnutrition? No. It's breathing the smoke from indoor cooking fires — acute respiratory infections caused by this. Can you believe that? I find this shocking and somewhat appalling. Can't we make cleaner burning cooking fuels? Can't we make better stoves? How is it that this can lead to over two million deaths every year? I know Bill Joy was talking to you about the wonders of carbon nanotubes, so I'm going to talk to you about the wonders of carbon macro-tubes, which is charcoal. (Laughter) So this is a picture of rural Haiti. Haiti is now 98 percent deforested. You'll see scenes like this all over the island. It leads to all sorts of environmental problems and problems that affect people throughout the nation. A couple years ago there was severe flooding that led to thousands of deaths — that's directly attributable to the fact that there are no trees on the hills to stabilize the soil. So the rains come — they go down the rivers and the flooding happens. Now one of the reasons why there are so few trees is this: people need to cook, and they harvest wood and they make charcoal in order to do it. It's not that people are ignorant to the environmental damage. They know perfectly well, but they have no other choice. Fossil fuels are not available, and solar energy doesn't cook the way that they like their food prepared. And so this is what they do. You'll find families like this who go out into the forest to find a tree, cut it down and make charcoal out of it. So not surprisingly, there's a lot of effort that's been done to look at alternative cooking fuels. About four years ago, I took a team of students down to Haiti and we worked with Peace Corps volunteers there. This is one such volunteer and this is a device that he had built in the village where he worked. And the idea was that you could take waste paper; you could compress it and make briquettes that could be used for fuel. But this device was very slow. So our engineering students went to work on it and with some very simple changes, they were able to triple the throughput of this device. So you could imagine they were very excited about it. And they took the briquettes back to MIT so that they could test them. And one of the things that they found was they didn't burn. So it was a little discouraging to the students. (Laughter) And in fact, if you look closely, right here you can see it says, "US Peace Corps." As it turns out, there actually wasn't any waste paper in this village. And while it was a good use of government paperwork for this volunteer to bring it back with him to his village, it was 800 kilometers away. And so we thought perhaps there might be a better way to come up with an alternative cooking fuel. What we wanted to do is we wanted to make a fuel that used something that was readily available on the local level. You see these all over Haiti as well. They're small-scale sugar mills. And the waste product from them after you extract the juice from the sugarcane is called "bagasse." It has no other use. It has no nutritional value, so they don't feed it to the animals. It just sits in a pile near the sugar mill until eventually they burn it. What we wanted to do was we wanted to find a way to harness this waste resource and turn it into a fuel that would be something that people could easily cook with, something like charcoal. So over the next couple of years, students and I worked to develop a process. So you start with the bagasse, and then you take a very simple kiln that you can make out of a waste fifty five-gallon oil drum. After some time, after setting it on fire, you seal it to restrict the oxygen that goes into the kiln, and then you end up with this carbonized material here. However, you can't burn this. It's too fine and it burns too quickly to be useful for cooking. So we had to try to find a way to form it into useful briquettes. And conveniently, one of my students was from Ghana, and he remembered a dish his mom used to make for him called "kokonte," which is a very sticky porridge made out of the cassava root. And so what we did was we looked, and we found that cassava is indeed grown in Haiti, under the name of "manioc." In fact, it's grown all over the world — yucca, tapioca, manioc, cassava, it's all the same thing — a very starchy root vegetable. And you can make a very thick, sticky porridge out of it, which you can use to bind together the charcoal briquettes. So we did this. We went down to Haiti. These are the graduates of the first Ecole de Charbon, or Charcoal Institute. And these — (Laughter) That's right. So I'm actually an instructor at MIT as well as CIT. And these are the briquettes that we made. Now I'm going to take you to a different continent. This is India and this is the most commonly used cooking fuel in India. It's cow dung. And more than in Haiti, this produces really smoky fires, and this is where you see the health impacts of cooking with cow dung and biomass as a fuel. Kids and women are especially affected by it, because they're the ones who are around the cooking fires. So we wanted to see if we could introduce this charcoal-making technology there. Well, unfortunately, they didn't have sugarcane and they didn't have cassava, but that didn't stop us. What we did was we found what were the locally available sources of biomass. And there was wheat straw and there was rice straw in this area. And what we could use as a binder was actually small amounts of cow manure, which they used ordinarily for their fuel. And we did side-by-side tests, and here you can see the charcoal briquettes and here the cow dung. And you can see that it's a lot cleaner burning of a cooking fuel. And in fact, it heats the water a lot more quickly. And so we were very happy, thus far. But one of the things that we found was when we did side-by-side comparisons with wood charcoal, it didn't burn as long. And the briquettes crumbled a little bit and we lost energy as they fell apart as they were cooking. So we wanted to try to find a way to make a stronger briquette so that we could compete with wood charcoal in the markets in Haiti. So we went back to MIT, we took out the Instron machine and we figured out what sort of forces you needed in order to compress a briquette to the level that you actually are getting improved performance out of it? And at the same time that we had students in the lab looking at this, we also had community partners in Haiti working to develop the process, to improve it and make it more accessible to people in the villages there. And after some time, we developed a low-cost press that allows you to produce charcoal, which actually now burns not only — actually, it burns longer, cleaner than wood charcoal. So now we're in a situation where we have a product, which is actually better than what you can buy in Haiti in the marketplace, which is a very wonderful place to be. In Haiti alone, about 30 million trees are cut down every year. There's a possibility of this being implemented and saving a good portion of those. In addition, the revenue generated from that charcoal is 260 million dollars. That's an awful lot for a country like Haiti — with a population of eight million and an average income of less than 400 dollars. So this is where we're also moving ahead with our charcoal project. And one of the things that I think is also interesting, is I have a friend up at UC Berkeley who's been doing risk analysis. And he's looked at the problem of the health impacts of burning wood versus charcoal. And he's found that worldwide, you could prevent a million deaths switching from wood to charcoal as a cooking fuel. That's remarkable, but up until now, there weren't ways to do it without cutting down trees. But now we have a way that's using an agricultural waste material to create a cooking fuel. One of the really exciting things, though, is something that came out of the trip that I took to Ghana just last month. And I think it's the coolest thing, and it's even lower tech than what you just saw, if you can imagine such a thing. Here it is. So what is this? This is corncobs turned into charcoal. And the beauty of this is that you don't need to form briquettes — it comes ready made. This is my $100 laptop, right here. And actually, like Nick, I brought samples. (Laughter) So we can pass these around. They're fully functional, field-tested, ready to roll out. (Laughter) And I think one of the things which is also remarkable about this technology, is that the technology transfer is so easy. Compared to the sugarcane charcoal, where we have to teach people how to form it into briquettes and you have the extra step of cooking the binder, this comes pre-briquetted. And this is about the most exciting thing in my life right now, which is perhaps a sad commentary on my life. (Laughter) But once you see it, like you guys in the front row — All right, yeah, OK. So anyway — (Laughter) Here it is. And this is, I think, a perfect example of what Robert Wright was talking about in those non-zero-sum things. So not only do you have health benefits, you have environmental benefits. But this is one of the incredibly rare situations where you also have economic benefits. People can make their own cooking fuel from waste products. They can generate income from this. They can save the money that they were going to spend on charcoal and they can produce excess and sell it in the market to people who aren't making their own. It's really rare that you don't have trade-offs between health and economics, or environment and economics. So this is a project that I just find extremely exciting and I'm really looking forward to see where it takes us. So when we talk about, now, the future we will create, one of the things that I think is necessary is to have a very clear vision of the world that we live in. And now, I don't actually mean the world that we live in. I mean the world where women spend two to three hours everyday grinding grain for their families to eat. I mean the world where advanced building materials means cement roofing tiles that are made by hand, and where, when you work 10 hours a day, you're still only earning 60 dollars in a month. I mean the world where women and children spend 40 billion hours a year fetching water. That's as if the entire workforce of the state of California worked full time for a year doing nothing but fetching water. It's a place where, for example, if this were India, in this room, only three of us would have a car. If this were Afghanistan, only one person in this room would know how the use the Internet. If this were Zambia — 300 of you would be farmers, 100 of you would have AIDS or HIV. And more than half of you would be living on less than a dollar a day. These are the issues that we need to come up with solutions for. These are the issues that we need to be training our engineers, our designers, our business people, our entrepreneurs to be facing. These are the solutions that we need to find. I have a few areas that I believe are especially important that we address. One of them is creating technologies to promote micro-finance and micro-enterprise, so that people who are living below the poverty line can find a way to move out — and that they're not doing it using the same traditional basket making, poultry rearing, etc. But there are new technologies and new products that they can make on a small scale. The next thing I believe is that we need to create technologies for poor farmers to add value to their own crops. And we need to rethink our development strategies, so that we're not promoting educational campaigns to get them to stop being farmers, but rather to stop being poor farmers. And we need to think about how we can do that effectively. We need to work with the people in these communities and give them the resources and the tools that they need to solve their own problems. That's the best way to do it. We shouldn't be doing it from outside. So we need to create this future, and we need to start doing it now. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you, incredible. Stay here. Tell us — just while we see if someone has a question — just tell us about one of the other things that you've worked on. Amy Smith: Some of the other things we're working on are ways to do low-cost water quality testing, so that communities can maintain their own water systems, know when they're working, know when they treat them, etc. We're also looking at low-cost water-treatment systems. One of the really exciting things is looking at solar water disinfection and improving the ability to be able to do that. CA: What's the bottleneck preventing this stuff getting from scale? Do you need to find entrepreneurs, or venture capitalists, or what do you need to take what you've got and get it to scale? AS: I think it's large numbers of people moving it forward. It's a difficult thing — it's a marketplace which is very fragmented and a consumer population with no income. So you can't use the same models that you use in the United States for making things move forward. And we're a pretty small staff, which is me. (Laughter) So, you know, I do what I can with the students. We have 30 students a year go out into the field and try to implement this and move it forward. The other thing is you have to do things with a long time frame, as, you know, you can't expect to get something done in a year or two years; you have to be looking five or 10 years ahead. But I think with the vision to do that, we can move forward.

Organic design, inspired by nature

Ross Lovegrove

{0: 'Ross Lovegrove'}

{0: ['industrial designer']}

{0: 'Known as "Captain Organic," Ross Lovegrove embraces nature as the inspiration for his "fat-free" design. Each object he creates -- be it bottle, chair, staircase or car -- is reduced to its essential elements. His pieces offer minimal forms of maximum beauty.'}

2005-02-25

2006-08-15

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['DNA', 'biology', 'creativity', 'design', 'industrial design', 'invention', 'nature', 'product design', 'science and art']

{2251: 'Magical houses, made of bamboo', 174: 'My green agenda for architecture', 614: 'Biomimicry in action', 430: 'Organic algorithms in architecture', 1015: 'Creative houses from reclaimed stuff', 2274: 'The first secret of design is ... noticing'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/ross_lovegrove_organic_design_inspired_by_nature/

Designer Ross Lovegrove expounds his philosophy of "fat-free" design and offers insight into several of his extraordinary products, including the Ty Nant water bottle and the Go chair.

My name is Lovegrove. I only know nine Lovegroves, two of which are my parents. They are first cousins, and you know what happens when, you know — (Laughter) So there's a terribly weird freaky side to me, which I'm fighting with all the time. So to try and get through today, I've kind of disciplined myself with an 18-minute talk. I was hanging on to have a pee. I thought perhaps if I was hanging on long enough, that would guide me through the 18 minutes. (Laughter) OK. I am known as Captain Organic and that's a philosophical position as well as an aesthetic position. But today what I'd like to talk to you about is that love of form and how form can touch people's soul and emotion. Not very long ago, not many thousands of years ago, we actually lived in caves, and I don't think we've lost that coding system. We respond so well to form. But I'm interested in creating intelligent form. I'm not interested at all in blobism or any of that superficial rubbish that you see coming out as design. This artificially induced consumerism — I think it's atrocious. My world is the world of people like Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, James Watson. I'm in that world, but I work purely instinctively. I'm not a scientist. I could have been, perhaps, but I work in this world where I trust my instincts. So I am a 21st-century translator of technology into products that we use everyday and relate beautifully and naturally with. And we should be developing things — we should be developing packaging for ideas which elevate people's perceptions and respect for the things that we dig out of the earth and translate into products for everyday use. So, the water bottle. I'll begin with this concept of what I call DNA. DNA: Design, Nature, Art. These are the three things that condition my world. Here is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, 500 years ago, before photography. It shows how observation, curiosity and instinct work to create amazing art. Industrial design is the art form of the 21st century. People like Leonardo — there have not been many — had this amazingly instinctive curiosity. I work from a similar position. I don't want to sound pretentious saying that, but this is my drawing made on a digital pad a couple of years ago — well into the 21st century, 500 years later. It's my impression of water. Impressionism being the most valuable art form on the planet as we know it: 100 million dollars, easily, for a Monet. I use, now, a whole new process. A few years ago I reinvented my process to keep up with people like Greg Lynn, Thom Mayne, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas — all these people that I think are persevering and pioneering with fantastic new ideas of how to create form. This is all created digitally. Here you see the machining, the milling of a block of acrylic. This is what I show to the client to say, "That's what I want to do." At that point, I don't know if that's possible at all. It's a seductor, but I just feel in my bones that that's possible. So we go, we look at the tooling. We look at how that is produced. These are the invisible things that you never see in your life. This is the background noise of industrial design. That is like an Anish Kapoor flowing through a Richard Serra. It is more valuable than the product in my eyes. I don't have one. When I do make some money, I'll have one machined for myself. This is the final product. When they sent it to me, I thought I'd failed. It felt like nothing. It has to feel like nothing. It was when I put the water in that I realized that I'd put a skin on water itself. It's an icon of water itself, and it elevates people's perception of contemporary design. Each bottle is different, meaning the water level will give you a different shape. It's mass individualism from a single product. It fits the hand. It fits arthritic hands. It fits children's hands. It makes the product strong, the tessellation. It's a millefiori of ideas. In the future, they will look like that, because we need to move away from those type of polymers and use that for medical equipment and more important things, perhaps, in life. Biopolymers, these new ideas for materials, will come into play in probably a decade. It doesn't look as cool, does it? But I can live up to that. I don't have a problem with that. I design for that condition, biopolymers. It's the future. I took this video in Cape Town last year. This is the freaky side coming out. I have this special interest in things like this, which blow my mind. I don't know whether to, you know, drop to my knees, cry; I don't know what I think. But I just know that nature — nature improves with ever-greater purpose that which once existed, and that strangeness is a consequence of innovative thinking. When I look at these things, they look pretty normal to me. But these things evolved over many years, and what we're trying to do — I get three weeks to design a telephone. How the hell do I do that, when you get these things that take hundreds of millions of years to evolve? How do you condense that? It comes back to instinct. I'm not talking about designing telephones that look like that and I'm not looking at designing architecture like that. I'm just interested in natural growth patterns and the beautiful forms that only nature really creates. How that flows through me and how that comes out is what I'm trying to understand. This is a scan through the human forearm. It's then blown up through rapid prototyping to reveal its cellular structure. I have these in my office. My office is a mixture of the Natural History Museum and a NASA space lab. It's a weird, kind of freaky place. This is one of my specimens. This is made — bone is made from a mixture of inorganic minerals and polymers. I studied cooking in school for four years, and in that experience, which was called "domestic science," it was a bit of a cheap trick for me to try and get a science qualification. (Laughter) Actually, I put marijuana in everything I cooked — (Laughter) And I had access to all the best girls. It was fabulous. All the guys in the rugby team couldn't understand. Anyway — this is a meringue. This is another sample I have. A meringue is made exactly the same way, in my estimation, as a bone. It's made from polysaccharides and proteins. If you pour water on that, it dissolves. Could we be manufacturing from foodstuffs in the future? Not a bad idea. I don't know. I need to talk to Janine and a few other people about that, but I believe instinctively that that meringue can become something, a car — I don't know. I'm also interested in growth patterns: the unbridled way that nature grows things so you're not restricted by form at all. These interrelated forms, they do inspire everything I do, although I might end up making something incredibly simple. This is a detail of a chair that I've designed in magnesium. It shows this interlocution of elements and the beauty of, kind of, engineering and biological thinking, shown pretty much as a bone structure. Any one of those elements you could sort of hang on the wall as some kind of art object. It's the world's first chair made in magnesium. It cost 1.7 million dollars to develop. It's called "Go," by Bernhardt, USA. It went into Time magazine in 2001 as the new language of the 21st century. Boy. For somebody growing up in Wales in a little village, that's enough. It shows how you make one holistic form, like the car industry, and then you break up what you need. This is an absolutely beautiful way of working. It's a godly way of working. It's organic and it's essential. It's an absolutely fat-free design, and when you look at it, you see human beings. When that moves into polymers, you can change the elasticity, the fluidity of the form. This is an idea for a gas-injected, one-piece polymer chair. What nature does is it drills holes in things. It liberates form. It takes away anything extraneous. That's what I do. I make organic things which are essential. And they look funky, too — but I don't set out to make funky things because I think that's an absolute disgrace. I set out to look at natural forms. If you took the idea of fractal technology further, take a membrane, shrinking it down constantly like nature does — that could be a seat for a chair. It could be a sole for a sports shoe. It could be a car blending into seats. Wow. Let's go for it. That's the kind of stuff. This is what exists in nature. Observation now allows us to bring that natural process into the design process every day. That's what I do. This is a show that's currently on in Tokyo. It's called "Superliquidity." It's my sculptural investigation. It's like 21st-century Henry Moore. When you see a Henry Moore, still, your hair stands up. There's some amazing spiritual connect. If he was a car designer, phew, we'd all be driving one. In his day, he was the highest taxpayer in Britain. That is the power of organic design. It contributes immensely to our — sense of being, our sense of relationships with things, our sensuality and, you know, the sort of — even the sort of socio-erotic side, which is very important. This is my artwork. This is all my process. These actually are sold as artwork. They're very big prints. But this is how I get to that object. Ironically, that object was made by the Killarney process, which is a brand-new process here for the 21st century, and I can hear Greg Lynn laughing his socks off as I say that. I'll tell you about that later. When I look into these data images, I see new things. It's self-inspired. Diatomic structures, radiolaria, the things that we couldn't see but we can do now — these, again, are cored out. They're made virtually from nothing. They're made from silica. Why not structures from cars like that? Coral, all these natural forces, take away what they don't need and they deliver maximum beauty. We need to be in that realm. I want to do stuff like that. This is a new chair which should come on the market in September. It's for a company called Moroso in Italy. It's a gas-injected polymer chair. Those holes you see there are very filtered-down, watered-down versions of the extremity of the diatomic structures. It goes with the flow of the polymer and you'll see — there's an image coming up right now that shows the full thing. It's great to have companies in Italy who support this way of dreaming. If you see the shadows that come through that, they're actually probably more important than the product, but it's the minimum it takes. The coring out of the back lets you breathe. It takes away any material you don't need and it actually garners flexure too. I was going to break into a dance then. This is some current work I'm doing. I'm looking at single-surface structures and how they stretch and flow. It's based on furniture typologies, but that's not the end motivation. It's made from aluminum ... as opposed to aluminium, and it's grown. It's grown in my mind, and then it's grown in terms of the whole process that I go through. This is two weeks ago in CCP in Coventry, who build parts for Bentleys and so on. It's being built as we speak and it will be on show in Phillips next year in New York. I have a big show with Phillips Auctioneers. When I see these animations, oh Jesus, I'm blown away. This is what goes on in my studio everyday. I walk — I'm traveling. I come back. Some guy's got that on a computer — there's this like, oh my goodness. So I try to create this energy of invention every day in my studio. This kind of effervescent — fully charged sense of soup that delivers ideas. Single-surface products. Furniture's a good one. How you grow legs out of a surface. I would love to build this one day and perhaps I'd like to build it also out of flour, sugar, polymer, wood chips — I don't know, human hair. I don't know. I'd love a go at that. I don't know. If I just got some time. That's the weird side coming out again. A lot of companies don't understand that. Three weeks ago I was with Sony in Tokyo. They said, "Give us the dream. What is our dream? How do we beat Apple?" I said, "You don't copy Apple, that's for sure. You get into biopolymers." They looked straight through me. What a waste. Anyway. (Laughter) No, it's true. Fuck them. You know, I mean — (Laughter) I'm delivering; they're not taking. I've had this image 20 years. I've had this image of a water droplet for 20 years, sitting on a hot bed. That is an image of a car for me. That's the car of the future. It's a water droplet. I've been banging on about this like I can't believe. Cars are all wrong. I'm going to show you something a bit weird now. They laughed everywhere over the world I showed this. The only place that didn't laugh was Moscow. Cars are made from 30,000 components. How ridiculous is that? Couldn't you make that from 300? It's got a vacuum-formed, carbon-nylon pan. Everything's holistically integrated. It opens and closes like a bread bin. There is no engine. There's a solar panel on the back and there are batteries in the wheels; they're fitted like Formula 1. You take them off your wall, you plug them in. Off you go. A three-wheeled car: slow, feminine, transparent, so you can see the people in there. You drive different. You see that thing. You do. You do. And not anesthetized, separated from life. There's a hole at the front and there's a reason for that. It's a city car. You drive along. You get out. You drive on to a proboscis. You get out. It lifts you up. It presents the solar panel to the sun, and at night, it's a street lamp. (Applause) That's what happens if you get inspired by the street lamp first, and do the car second. I can see these bubbles with these hydrogen packages, floating around on the ground, driven by AI. When I showed this in South Africa, everybody afterwards was going, "Hey, car on a stick. Like this." Can you imagine? A car on a stick. (Laughter) If you put it next to contemporary architecture, it feels totally natural to me. And that's what I do with my furniture. I'm not putting Charles Eames' furniture in buildings anymore. I'm trying to build furniture which fits architecture. I'm trying to build transportation systems. I work on aircraft for Airbus, I do all this sort of stuff trying to force these natural, inspired-by-nature dreams home. I'm going to finish on two things. This is the stereolithography of a staircase. It's a little bit of a dedication to James, James Watson. I built this thing for my studio. It cost me 250,000 dollars to build this. Most people go and buy the Aston Martin. I built this. This is the data that goes with that. Incredibly complex. Took about two years, because I'm looking for fat-free design. Lean, efficient things. Healthy products. This is built by composites. It's a single element which rotates around to create a holistic element, and this is a carbon-fiber handrail which is only supported in two places. Modern materials allow us to do modern things. This is a shot in the studio. This is how it looks pretty much every day. You wouldn't want to have a fear of heights coming down it. There is virtually no handrail. It doesn't pass any standards. (Laughter) Who cares? (Laughter) And it has an internal handrail which gives it its strength. It's this holistic integration. That's my studio. It's subterranean. It's in Notting Hill, next to all the crap — the prostitutes and all that stuff. It's next to David Hockney's original studio. It has a lighting system that changes throughout the day. My guys go out for lunch. The door's open. They come back in, because it's normally raining and they prefer to stay in. This is my studio. Elephant skull from Oxford University, 1988. I bought that last year. They're very difficult to find. If anybody's got a whale skeleton they want to sell me, I'll put it in the studio. So I'm just going to interject a little bit with some of the things that you'll see in the video. It's a homemade video, made it myself at three o'clock in the morning just to show you how my real world is. You never see that. You never see architects or designers showing you their real world. This is called a "Plasnet." It's a new bio-polycarbonate chair I'm doing in Italy. World's first bamboo bike with folding handlebars. We should all be riding one of these. As China buys all these crappy cars, we should be riding things like this. Counterbalance. Like I say, it's a cross between Natural History Museum and a NASA laboratory. It's full of prototypes and objects. It's self-inspirational, again. I mean, the rare times when I'm there, I do enjoy it. And I get lots and lots of kids coming. I'm a contaminator for all those children of investment bankers — wankers. Sorry. (Laughter) That's a solar seed. It's a concept for new architecture. That thing on the top is the world's first solar-powered garden lamp — the first produced. Giles Revell should be talking here today — amazing photography of things you can't see. The first sculptural model I made for that thing in Tokyo. Lots of stuff. There's a little leaf chair — that golden looking thing is called "Leaf." It's made from Kevlar. On the wall is my book called "Supernatural," which allows me to remember what I've done, because I forget. There's an aerated brick I did in Limoges last year, in Concepts for New Ceramics in Architecture. Gernot Oberfell, working at three o'clock in the morning — and I don't pay overtime. Overtime is the passion of design, so join the club or don't. (Laughter) No, it's true. People like Tom and Greg — we're traveling like you can't — we fit it all in. I don't know how we do it. Next week I'm at Electrolux in Sweden, then I'm in Beijing on Friday. You work that one out. And when I see Ed's photographs, I think, why the hell am I going to China? It's true. It's true. Because there's a soul in this whole thing. We need to have a new instinct for the 21st century. We need to combine all this stuff. If all the people who were talking over this period worked on a car together, it would be a joy, absolute joy. So there's a new X-light system I'm doing in Japan. There's Tuareg shoes from North Africa. There's a Kifwebe mask. These are my sculptures. A copper jelly mold. (Laughter) It sounds like some quiz show or something, doesn't it? So, it's going to end. Thank you, James, for your great inspiration. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The birth of Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales

{0: 'Jimmy Wales'}

{0: ['founder of wikipedia']}

{0: 'With a vision for a free online encyclopedia, Wales assembled legions of volunteer contributors, gave them tools for collaborating, and created the self-organizing, self-correcting, ever-expanding, multilingual encyclopedia of the future.'}

2005-07-14

2006-08-21

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'lv', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'uk', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'collaboration', 'culture', 'invention', 'media', 'open-source', 'technology', 'wikipedia']

{640: 'The Web as random acts of kindness', 362: 'The Web as a city', 1295: 'Massive-scale online collaboration', 1268: '6 ways to save the internet', 46600: 'Inside the bizarre world of internet trolls and propagandists', 2474: 'The surprising habits of original thinkers'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_wales_the_birth_of_wikipedia/

Jimmy Wales recalls how he assembled "a ragtag band of volunteers," gave them tools for collaborating and created Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished online encyclopedia.

Charles Van Doren, who was later a senior editor of Britannica, said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical — it should stop being safe. But if you know anything about the history of Britannica since 1962, it was anything but radical: still a very completely safe, stodgy type of encyclopedia. Wikipedia, on the other hand, begins with a very radical idea, and that's for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. And that's what we're doing. So Wikipedia — you just saw the little demonstration of it — it's a freely licensed encyclopedia. It's written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in many, many languages. It's written using wiki software — which is the type of software he just demonstrated — so anyone can quickly edit and save, and it goes live on the Internet immediately. And everything about Wikipedia is managed by virtually an all-volunteer staff. So when Yochai is talking about new methods of organization, he's exactly describing Wikipedia. And what I'm going to do today is tell you a little bit more about how it really works on the inside. So Wikipedia's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded, a nonprofit organization. And our goal, the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation, is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. And so, if you think about what that means, it means a lot more than just building a cool website. We're really interested in all the issues of the digital divide, poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need to make good decisions. And so we're going to have to do a lot of work that goes beyond just the Internet. And so that's a big part of why we've chosen the free licensing model, because that empowers local entrepreneurs or anyone who wants to — they can take our content and do anything they like with it — you can copy it, redistribute it — and you can do it commercially or non-commercially. So there's a lot of opportunities that are going to arise around Wikipedia all over the world. We're funded by donations from the public, and one of the more interesting things about that is how little money it actually takes to run Wikipedia. So Yochai showed you the graph of what the cost of a printing press was. And I'm going to tell you what the cost of Wikipedia is. But first, I'll show you how big it is. So we've got over 600,000 articles in English. We've got two million total articles across many, many different languages. The biggest languages are German, Japanese, French — all the Western-European languages are quite big. But only around one-third of all of our traffic to our web clusters to the English Wikipedia, which is surprising to a lot of people. A lot of people think in a very English-centric way on the Internet, but for us, we're truly global. We're in many, many languages. How popular we've gotten to be — we're a top-50 website and we're more popular than the New York Times. So this is where we get to Yochai's discussion. This shows the growth of Wikipedia — we're the blue line there — and this is the New York Times over there. And what's interesting about this is the New York Times website is a huge, enormous corporate operation with I have no idea how many hundreds of employees. We have exactly one employee, and that employee is our lead software developer. And he's only been our employee since January 2005, all the other growth before that ... So the servers are managed by a ragtag band of volunteers. All the editing is done by volunteers. And the way that we're organized is not like any traditional organization you can imagine. People are always asking, "Well, who's in charge of this?" or "Who does that?" And the answer is: anybody who wants to pitch in. It's a very unusual and chaotic thing. We've got over 90 servers now in three locations. These are managed by volunteer system administrators who are online. I can go online any time of the day or night and see eight to 10 people waiting for me to ask a question or something, anything about the servers. You could never afford to do this in a company. You could never afford to have a standby crew of people 24 hours a day and do what we're doing at Wikipedia. So we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly, so it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers. And the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars. And that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee. We hired Brian because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia, so we actually hired him, so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes. So the big question when you've got this really chaotic organization is, why isn't it all rubbish? Why is the website as good as it is? First of all, how good is it? Well, it's pretty good. It isn't perfect, but it's much better than you would expect, given our completely chaotic model. So when you saw him make a ridiculous edit to the page about me, you think, "Oh, this is obviously just going to degenerate into rubbish." But when we've seen quality tests — and there haven't been enough of these yet and I'm really encouraging people to do more, comparing Wikipedia to traditional things — we win hands down. So a German magazine compared German Wikipedia, which is much, much smaller than English, to Microsoft Encarta and to Brockhaus multimedial, and we won across the board. They hired experts to come and look at articles and compare the quality, and we were very pleased with that result. So a lot of people have heard about the Wikipedia Bush-Kerry controversy. The media has covered this somewhat extensively. It started out with an article in Red Herring. The reporters called me up and they — I mean, I have to say they spelled my name right, but they really wanted to say the Bush-Kerry election is so contentious, it's tearing apart the Wikipedia community. And so they quote me as saying, "They're the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia." What I actually said is they're not contentious at all. So it's a slight misquote. (Laughter) The articles were edited quite heavily. And it is true that we did have to lock the articles on a couple of occasions. Time magazine recently reported that "Extreme action sometimes has to be taken, and Wales locked the entries on Kerry and Bush for most of 2004." This came after I told the reporter that we had to lock it for — occasionally a little bit here and there. So the truth in general is that the kinds of controversies that you would probably think we have within the Wikipedia community are not really controversies at all. Articles on controversial topics are edited a lot, but they don't cause much controversy within the community. And the reason for this is that most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities. The actual truth about the specific Bush-Kerry incident is that the Bush-Kerry articles were locked less than one percent of the time in 2004, and it wasn't because they were contentious; it was just because there was routine vandalism — which happens sometimes even on stage ... (Laughter) Sometimes even reporters have reported to me that they vandalized Wikipedia and were amazed that it was fixed so quickly. And I said — you know, I always say, please don't do that. That's not a good thing. So how do we do this? How do we manage the quality control? How does it work? So there's a few elements, mostly social policies and some elements of the software. So the biggest and the most important thing is our neutral point of view policy. This is something that I set down, from the very beginning, as a core principle of the community that's completely not debatable. It's a social concept of cooperation, so we don't talk a lot about truth and objectivity. The reason for this is if we say we're only going to write the "truth" about some topic, that doesn't do us a damn bit of good of figuring out what to write, because I don't agree with you about what's the truth. But we have this jargon term of neutrality, which has its own long history within the community, which basically says, any time there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue. We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it. So this neutrality policy is really important for us because it empowers a community that is very diverse to come together and actually get some work done. So we have very diverse contributors in terms of political, religious, cultural backgrounds. By having this firm neutrality policy, which is non-negotiable from the beginning, we ensure that people can work together and that the entries don't become simply a war back and forth between the left and the right. If you engage in that type of behavior, you'll be asked to leave the community. So, real-time peer review. Every single change on the site goes to the "Recent changes" page. So as soon as he made his change, it went to the "Recent changes" page. That recent changes page was also fed into an IRC channel, which is an Internet chat channel that people are monitoring with various software tools. And people can get RSS feeds — they can get email notifications of changes. And then users can set up their own personal watch list. So my page is on quite a few volunteers' watch lists, because it is sometimes vandalized. And therefore, what happens is someone will notice the change very quickly, and then they'll just simply revert the change. There's a "new pages feed," for example, so you can go to a certain page of Wikipedia and see every new page as it's created. This is really important because a lot of new pages are just garbage that has to be deleted, you know, "ASDFASDF." But also, that's some of the most interesting and fun things, some of the new articles. People will start an article on some interesting topic, other people will find that intriguing and jump in and help and make it much better. So we do have edits by anonymous users, which is one of the most controversial and intriguing things about Wikipedia. So, Chris was able to do his change — he didn't have to log in or anything; he just went on the website and made a change. But it turns out that only about 18 percent of all the edits to the website are done by anonymous users. And that's a really important thing to understand: the vast majority of the edits that go on on the website are from a very close-knit community of maybe 600 to 1,000 people who are in constant communication. And we have over 40 IRC channels, 40 mailing lists. All these people know each other. They communicate. We have off-line meetings. These are the people who are doing the bulk of the site, and they are, in a sense, semi-professionals at what they're doing. The standards we set for ourselves are equal to or higher than professional standards of quality. We don't always meet those standards, but that's what we're striving for. And so that tight community is who really cares for the site, and these are some of the smartest people I've ever met. It's my job to say that, but it's actually true. The type of people who were drawn to writing an encyclopedia for fun tend to be pretty smart people. The tools and the software: there's lots of tools that allow us — allow us, meaning the community — to self-monitor and to monitor all the work. This is an example of a page history on "flat Earth," and you can see some changes that were made. What's nice about this page is you can immediately take a look at this and see, "OK, I understand now." When somebody goes and looks at — they see that someone, an anonymous IP number, made an edit to my page. That sounds suspicious. Who is this person? Somebody looks at it — they can immediately see highlighted in red all of the changes that took place — to see, OK, well, these words have changed, things like this. So that's one tool that we can use to very quickly monitor the history of a page. Another thing that we do within the community is we leave everything very open-ended. Most of the social rules and the methods of work are left completely open-ended in the software. All of that stuff is just on Wiki pages. And so there's nothing in the software that enforces the rules. The example I've got up here is the Votes for Deletion page. So, I mentioned earlier, people type "ASDFASDF" — it needs to be deleted. Cases like that, the administrators just delete it. There's no reason to have a big argument about it. But you can imagine there's a lot of other areas where the question is, is this notable enough to go in an encyclopedia? Is the information verifiable? Is it a hoax? Is it true? Is it what? So we needed a social method for figuring out the answer to this. And so the method that arose organically within the community is the Votes For Deletion page. And in the particular example we have here, it's a film, "Twisted Issues," and the first person says, "Now this is supposedly a film. It fails the Google test miserably." The Google test is you look in Google and see if it's there, because if something's not even in Google, it probably doesn't exist at all. It's not a perfect rule, but it's a nice starting point for quick research. So somebody says, "Delete it, please. Delete it — it's not notable." And then somebody says, "Wait, I found it. I found it in a book, 'Film Threat Video Guide: the 20 Underground Films You Must See.'" So the next persons says, "Clean it up." Somebody says, "I've found it on IMDB. Keep, keep, keep." And what's interesting about this is that the software is — these votes are just text typed into a page. This is not really a vote so much as it is a dialogue. Now it is true that at the end of the day, an administrator can go through here and take a look at this and say, "OK, 18 deletes, two keeps: we'll delete it." But in other cases, this could be 18 deletes and two keeps, and we would keep it, because if those last two keeps say, "Wait a minute. Nobody else saw this but I found it in a book, and I found a link to a page that describes it, and I'm going to clean it up tomorrow, so please don't delete it," then it would survive. And it also matters who the people are who are voting. Like I say, it's a tight-knit community. Down here at the bottom, "Keep, real movie," RickK. RickK is a very famous Wikipedian who does an enormous amount of work with vandalism, hoaxes and votes for deletion. His voice carries a lot of weight within the community because he knows what he's doing. So how is all this governed? People really want to know about administrators, things like that. So the Wikipedia governance model, the governance of the community, is a very confusing, but workable mix of consensus — meaning we try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral — some amount of democracy — all of the administrators — these are the people who have the ability to delete pages. That doesn't mean that they have the right to delete pages. They still have to follow all the rules — but they're elected by the community. Sometimes people — random trolls on the Internet — like to accuse me of handpicking the administrators to bias the content of the encyclopedia. I always laugh at this, because I have no idea how they're elected, actually. There's a certain amount of aristocracy. You got a hint of that when I mentioned, like, RickK's voice would carry a lot more weight than someone we don't know. I give this talk sometimes with Angela, who was just re-elected to the board from the community — to the Board of the Foundation, with more than twice the votes of the person who didn't make it. And I always embarrass her because I say, "Well, Angela, for example, could get away with doing absolutely anything within Wikipedia, because she's so admired and so powerful." But the irony is, of course, that Angela can do this because she's the one person who you know would never, ever break any rules of Wikipedia. And I also like to say she's the only person who actually knows all the rules of Wikipedia, so ... And then there's monarchy, and that's my role on the community, so ... (Laughter) I was describing this in Berlin once, and the next day in the newspaper the headline said, "I am the Queen of England." (Laughter) And that's not exactly what I said, but — (Laughter) the point is my role in the community — Within the free software world, there's been a long-standing tradition of the "benevolent dictator" model. So if you look at most of the major free software projects, they have one single person in charge who everyone agrees is the benevolent dictator. Well, I don't like the term "benevolent dictator," and I don't think that it's my job or my role in the world of ideas to be the dictator of the future of all human knowledge compiled by the world. It just isn't appropriate. But there is a need still for a certain amount of monarchy, a certain amount of — sometimes we have to make a decision and we don't want to get bogged down too heavily in formal decision-making processes. So as an example of how this can be important: we recently had a situation where a neo-Nazi website discovered Wikipedia, and they said, "Oh, well, this is horrible, this Jewish conspiracy of a website, and we're going to get certain articles deleted that we don't like. And we see they have a voting process, so we're going to send — we have 40,000 members and we're going to send them over and they're all going to vote and get these pages deleted." Well, they managed to get 18 people to show up. That's neo-Nazi math for you. They always think they've got 40,000 members when they've got 18. But they managed to get 18 people to come and vote in a fairly absurd way to delete a perfectly valid article. Of course, the vote ended up being about 85 to 18, so there was no real danger to our democratic processes. On the other hand, people said, "But what are we going to do? I mean, this could happen. What if some group gets really seriously organized and comes in and wants to vote?" Then I said, "Well, fuck it, we'll just change the rules." That's my job in the community: to say we won't allow our openness and freedom to undermine the quality of the content. And so, as long as people trust me in my role, then that's a valid place for me. Of course, because of the free licensing, if I do a bad job, the volunteers are more than happy to take and leave — I can't tell anyone what to do. So the final point here is that to understand how Wikipedia works, it's important to understand that our wiki model is the way we work, but we are not fanatical web anarchists. In fact, we're very flexible about the social methodology, because ultimately, the passion of the community is for the quality of the work, not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it. Thank you. (Applause) Ben Saunders: Yeah, hi, Ben Saunders. Jimmy, you mentioned impartiality being a key to Wikipedia's success. It strikes me that much of the textbooks that are used to educate our children are inherently biased. Have you found Wikipedia being used by teachers and how do you see Wikipedia changing education? Jimmy Wales: Yeah, so, a lot of teachers are beginning to use Wikipedia. There's a media storyline about Wikipedia, which I think is false. It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers. And the storyline is, there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia, but academics hate it and teachers hate it. And that turns out to not be true. The last time I got an email from a journalist saying, "Why do academics hate Wikipedia?" I sent it from my Harvard email address because I was recently appointed a fellow there. And I said, "Well, they don't all hate it." (Laughter) But I think there's going to be huge impacts. And we actually have a project that I'm personally really excited about, which is the Wikibooks project, which is an effort to create textbooks in all the languages. And that's a much bigger project. It's going to take 20 years or so to come to fruition. But part of that is to fulfill our mission of giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. We don't mean we're going to Spam them with AOL-style CDs. We mean we're going to give them a tool that they can use. And for a lot of people in the world, if I give you an encyclopedia that's written at a university level, it doesn't do you any good without a whole host of literacy materials to build you up to the point where you can actually use it. The Wikibooks project is an effort to do that. And I think that we're going to see — it may not even come from us; there's all kinds of innovation going on. But freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.

The birth of the open-source learning revolution

Richard Baraniuk

{0: 'Richard Baraniuk'}

{0: ['education visionary']}

{0: 'Richard Baraniuk founded Connexions -- now called OpenStax -- a free, open-source, global clearinghouse of course materials. Students and educators tap into its vast store of texts on everything from engineering to ornithology to music, adapting the content as they see fit.'}

2006-02-23

2006-08-21

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'collaboration', 'culture', 'global issues', 'library', 'open-source', 'technology']

{1913: 'Why massive open online courses (still) matter', 1531: "What we're learning from online education", 1570: 'The self-organizing computer course', 37: 'The birth of Wikipedia', 1377: 'The power of introverts', 1295: 'Massive-scale online collaboration'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_baraniuk_the_birth_of_the_open_source_learning_revolution/

In 2006, open-learning visionary Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions (now called OpenStax), an open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.

I'm Rich Baraniuk and what I'd like to talk a little bit about today are some ideas that I think have just tremendous resonance with all the things that have been talked about the last two days. So many different points of resonance that it's going to be difficult to bring them all up, but I'll try to do my best. Does anybody remember these? (Laughter) OK, so these are LP records and they've been replaced, right? They've been swept away over the last two decades by these types of world-flattening digitization technologies, right? And I think it was best witnessed when Thomas was playing the music as we came in the room today. What's happened in the music world is there's a culture, or an ecosystem that's been created that, if you take some words from Apple, the catchphrase — that we create, rip, mix and burn. What I mean by that is that anyone in the world is free and allowed to create new music and musical ideas. Anyone in the world is allowed to rip or copy musical ideas, use them in innovative ways. Anyone is allowed to mix them in different types of ways, draw connections between musical ideas, and people can burn them or create final products and continue the circle. And what that's done is it's created, like I said, a vibrant community that's very inclusive, with people continually working to connect musical ideas, innovate them and keep things constantly up to date. Today's hit single is not last year's hit single. But I'm not here to talk about music today. I'm here to talk about books. In particular, textbooks and the kind of educational materials that we use every day in school. Has anyone here ever been to school? (Laughter) OK, does anybody realize there's a crisis in our schools, around the world? I'm not going to spend too much time on that, but what I want to talk about is some of the disconnects that appear when an author publishes a book. That in fact, the publishing process — just because of the fact that it's complicated, it's heavy, books are expensive — creates a sort of a wall between authors of books and the ultimate users of books, be they teachers, students or just general readers. And this is even more true if you happen to speak a language other than one of the world's major languages, and especially English. I'm going to call these people below the barrier "shutouts" because they're really shut out of the process of being able to share their knowledge with the world. And so what I want to talk about today is trying to take these ideas that we've seen in the musical culture and try to bring these towards reinventing the way we think about writing books, using them and teaching from them. So, that's what I'd like to talk about and, really, how we get from where we are now to where we need to go. The first thing I'd like you to do is a little thought experiment. Imagine taking all the world's books. OK, everybody imagine books and imagine just tearing out the pages. So, liberating these pages and imagine digitizing them and then storing them in a vast, interconnected, global repository. Think of it as a massive iTunes for book-type content. And then take that material and imagine making it all open, so that people can modify it, play with it, improve it. Imagine making it free, so that anyone in the world can have access to all of this knowledge, and imagine using information technology so that you can update this content, improve it, play with it, on a timescale that's more on the order of seconds instead of years. Instead of editions of a book coming out every two years, imagine them coming out every 25 seconds. So, imagine we could do that and imagine we could put people into this. So that we could truly build an ecosystem with not just authors, but all the people who could be or want to be authors in all the different languages of the world, and I think if you could do this, it would be called — I'm just going to refer to it as a knowledge ecosystem. So, really, this is the dream, and in a sense what you can think of it is we're trying to enable anyone in the world, I mean anyone in the world — (Laughter) to be their own educational DJ, creating educational materials, sharing them with the world, constantly innovating on them. So, this is the dream. In fact, this dream is actually being realized. Over the last six-and-a-half years, we've been working really hard at Rice University on a project called Connexions, and so what I'd like to do for the rest of the talk is just tell you a little bit about what people are doing with Connexions, which you can kind of think of as the counterpoint to Nicholas Negroponte's talk yesterday, where they're working on the hardware of bringing education to the world. We're working on the open-source tools and the content. So, that's sort of to put it in perspective here. So, create. What are some of the people that are using these kind of tools? Well, the first thing is, there's a community of engineering professors, from Cambridge to Kyoto, who are developing engineering content in electrical engineering to develop what you can think of as a massive, super textbook that covers the entire area of electrical engineering. And not only that — it can be customized for use in each of their own individual institutions. If people like Kitty Jones, a shut-out — a private music teacher and mom from Champagne, Illinois, who wanted to share her fantastic music content with the world, on how to teach kids how to play music — Her material is now used over 600,000 times per month. Tremendous use. In fact, a lot of this use coming from United States K-12 schools, because anyone who's involved in a school scale back, the first thing that's cut is the music curriculum. And so this is just indicating the tremendous thirst for this kind of open, free content. A lot of teachers are using this stuff. What about ripping? What about copying, reusing? A team of volunteers at the University of Texas at El Paso — graduate students translating this engineering super textbook ideas. And within about a week, having this be some of our most popular material in widespread use all over Latin America, and in particular in Mexico, because of the open, extensible nature of this. People, volunteers and even companies that are translating materials into Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Thai, to spread the knowledge even further. OK, what about people who are mixing? What does "mixing" mean? "Mixing" means building customized courses, means building customized books. Companies like National Instruments, who are embedding very powerful, interactive simulations into the materials, so that we can go way beyond our regular kind of textbook to an experience that all the teaching materials are things you can actually interact with and play around with and actually learn as you do. We've been working with Teachers Without Borders, who are very interested in mixing our materials. They're going to be using Connexions as their platform to develop and deliver teaching materials for teaching teachers how to teach in 84 countries around the world. TWB is currently in Iraq, training 20,000 teachers supported by USAID. And to them, this idea of being able to remix and customize to the local context is extraordinarily important, because just providing free content to people has actually been likened by people in the developing world to a kind of cultural imperialism — that if you don't empower people with the ability to re-contextualize the material, translate it into their own language and take ownership of it, it's not good. OK, other organizations we've been working with, UC Merced — people know about UC Merced. It's a new university in California, in the Central Valley, working very closely with community colleges. They're actually developing a lot of their science and engineering curriculum to spread widely around the world in our system. And they're also trying to develop all of their software tools completely open-source. We've been working with AMD, which has a project called 50x15, which is trying to bring Internet connectivity to 50 percent of the world's population by 2015. We're going to be providing content to them in a whole range of different languages. And we've also been working with a number of other organizations. In particular, a bunch of the projects that are funded by Hewlett Foundation, who have taken a real leadership role in this area of open content. OK, burn — I think this is, sort of, quite interesting. "Burn" is the idea of trying to create the physical instantiation of one of these courses. And I think a lot of you received — I think all of you received one of these music books in your gift pack. A little present for you. Just to tell you quickly about it: this is an engineering textbook. It's about 300 pages long, hardbound. This costs — anybody guess? How much would it cost in a bookstore? (Audience) 65 dollars. Richard Baraniuk: OK. This costs 22 dollars to the student. Why does it cost 22 dollars? Because it's published on demand and it's developed from this repository of open materials. If this book were to be published by a regular publisher, it would cost at least 122 dollars. So what we're seeing is moving this burning or publication process from the regular, sort of single-authored book towards community-authored materials that are modular, that are customized to each individual class and published on demand very inexpensively, either pushed out through Amazon or published directly through an on-demand press, like QOOP. And I think that this is an extraordinarily interesting area because there is tremendous area under this long tail in publishing. We're not talking about the Harry Potter end, right at the left side. We're talking about books on hypergeometric partial differential equations. Books that might sell 100 copies a year, 1,000 copies a year. There is tremendous sustaining revenue under this long tail to sustain open projects like ours, but also to sustain this new emergence of on-demand publishers, like QOOP, who produced these two books. And I think one of the things that you should take away from this talk is that there's an impending cut-out-the-middle-man disintermediation, that's going to be happening in the publishing industry. And it's going to reach a crescendo over the next few years, and I think that it's for our benefit, really, and for the world's benefit. OK, so what are the enablers? What's really making all of this happen? There's tons of technology, and the only piece of technology that I really want to talk about is XML. How many people know about XML? Oh, great. So it's the future of the web, right? It's semantic representation of content. And what you can really think of XML in this case is it's the packaging that we're putting around these pages. Remember we took the book, tore the pages out? Well, what the XML is going to do is it's going to turn those pages into Lego blocks. XML are the nubs on the Lego that allow us to combine the content together in a myriad different ways, and it provides us a framework to share content. So, it lets you take this ecosystem in its primordial state of all this content, all the pages you've torn out of books, and create highly sophisticated learning machines: books, courses, course packs. It gives you the ability to personalize the learning experience to each individual student, so that every student can have a book or a course that's customized to their learning style, their context, their language and the things that excite them. It lets you reuse the same materials in multiple different ways, and surprising new ways. It lets you interconnect ideas, indicating how fields relate to each other. And I'll just give you my personal story. We came up with this six-and-a-half years ago because I teach the stuff in the red box. And my day job, as Chris said — I'm an electrical engineering professor. I teach signal processing and my challenge was to show that this math — Wow, about half of you have already fallen asleep just looking at the equation. (Laughter) But this seemingly dry math is actually the center of this tremendously powerful web that links technology — that links really cool applications like music synthesizers to tremendous economic opportunities, but also governed by intellectual property. And the thing that I realized is there was no way that I, as an engineer, could write this book that would get all of this across. We needed a community to do it and we needed new tools to be able to interconnect these ideas. And I think that really, in a sense, what we're trying to do is make Minsky's dream come to a reality, where you can imagine all the books in a library actually starting to talk to each other. And people who are teachers out here — whoever taught, you know this — it's the interconnections between ideas that teaching is really all about. OK, back to math. Imagine — this is possible: that every single equation that you click on in one of your new e-texts is something that you're going to be able to explore and experiment with. So imagine your kid's algebra textbook in seventh grade. You can click on every single equation and bring up a little tool to be able to experiment with it, tinker with it, understand it. Because we really don't understand until we do. The same type of mark-up, like MathML, for chemistry. Imagine chemistry textbooks that actually understand the structure of how molecules are formed. Imagine Music XML that actually lets you delve into the semantic structure of music, play with it, understand it. It's no wonder that everybody's getting into it, right? Even the three wise men. (Laughter) OK, the second big enabler, and this is where I told a big lie. The second big enabler is intellectual property. Because, in fact, I got up here and I talked about how great the music culture is. We can share and rip, mix and burn, but in fact, that's all illegal. And we would be accused of [piracy] for doing that, because this music has been propertized. It's now owned, much of it by big industries. So, really, the key thing here is we can't let this happen. We can't let this Napster thing happen here. So, what we have to do is get it right from the very beginning. And what we have to do is find an intellectual property framework that makes sharing safe and makes it easily understandable. And the inspiration here is taken from open-source software. Things like Linux and the GPL. The Creative Commons licenses. How many people have heard of creative commons? If you have not, you must learn about it. Creativecommons.org. At the bottom of every piece of material in Connexions and in lots of other projects, you can find their logo. Clicking on that logo takes you to an absolute no-nonsense, human-readable document, a deed, that tells you exactly what you can do with this content. In fact, you're free to share it, to do all of these things: to copy it, to change it, even to make commercial use of it, as long as you attribute the author. Because in academic publishing and much of educational publishing, it's really this idea of sharing knowledge and making impact. That's why people write, not necessarily making bucks. We're not talking about Harry Potter, right? We're at the long tail end here. Behind that is the legal code, very carefully constructed. And Creative Commons is taking off — over 43 million things out there, licensed with a Creative Commons license. Not just text, but music, images, video. And there's actually a tremendous uptake of the number of people that are actually licensing music to make it free for people who do this whole idea of re-sampling, ripping, mixing, burning and sharing. OK, I'd like to conclude with just the last few points. So, we've built this idea of a commons. People are using it. We get over 500,000 unique visitors per month, just to our particular site. MIT OpenCourseWare, which is another large open-content site, gets a similar number of hits. But how do we protect this? How do we protect it into the future? And the first thing that people are probably thinking is quality control, right? Because we're saying that anybody can contribute things to this commons. Anybody can contribute anything. So that could be a problem. It didn't take long until people started contributing materials, for example, on lingerie, which is actually a pretty good module. The only problem is it's plagiarized from a major French feminist journal, and when you go to the supposed course website, it points to a lingerie-selling website. So this is a little bit of a problem. So we clearly need some kind of idea of quality control and this is really where the idea of review and peer review comes in. You come to TED. Why do you come to TED? Because Chris and his team have ensured that things are very, very high quality, right? And so we need to be able to do the same thing. And we need to be able to design structures, and what we're doing is designing social software to enable anyone to build their own peer review process, and we call these things "lenses." And basically what they allow is anyone out there can develop their own peer-review process, so that they can focus on the content in the repository that they think is really important. And you can think of TED as a potential lens. So I'd just like to end by saying: you can really view this as a call to action. Connexions and open content is all about sharing knowledge. All of you here are tremendously imbued with tremendous amounts of knowledge, and what I'd like to do is invite each and every one of you to contribute to this project and other projects of its type, because I think together we can truly change the landscape of education and educational publishing. So, thanks very much.

Nerdcore comedy

Ze Frank

{0: 'Ze Frank'}

{0: ['web humorist']}

{0: 'Ze Frank has been involved in online comedy, web toys and virtually shared experiences for the past 20 years as an influencer, performer, executive and mischief maker.'}

2004-02-24

2006-08-25

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'da', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sl', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['collaboration', 'comedy', 'community', 'culture', 'dance', 'demo', 'entertainment', 'software', 'performance', 'humor']

{148: 'The 4 a.m. mystery', 981: 'My web playroom', 2049: 'Are you human?', 2792: 'How to find a wonderful idea', 50574: 'The pride and power of representation in film', 396: 'Fashion and creativity'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/ze_frank_nerdcore_comedy/

Performer and web toymaker Ze Frank delivers a hilarious nerdcore standup routine, then tells us what he's seriously passionate about: helping people create and interact using simple, addictive web tools.

You know, when Chris first approached me to speak at TED, I said no, because I felt like I wasn't going to be able to make that personal connection, you know, that I wanted to. It's such a large conference. But he explained to me that he was in a bind, and that he was having trouble finding the kind of sex appeal and star power that the conference was known for. So I said fine, Ted — I mean Chris. I'll come on two conditions. One: I want to speak as early in the morning as possible. And two: I want to pick the theme for TED 2006. And luckily he agreed. And the theme, in two years, is going to be "Cute Pictures Of Puppies." (Video) (Music) [How to Dance Properly BASIC TWIRL] [NEW SCHOOL] [OLD SCHOOL] [WHO'S YOUR DADDY?] ["RIDE THE PONY"] [MAKE LOVE TO THE CROWD] [SMACKING THAT ASS] [STIR THE POT OF LOVE] [HANGING OUT ... CASUAL] [WORD.] (Applause) I invented the Placebo Camera. (Laughter) It doesn't actually take pictures, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper, and you still feel like you were there. (Laughter) (Clears his throat) (Laughter) "Dear Sir, good day, compliments of the day, and my best wishes to you and family. (Breathes in) I know this letter will come to you surprisingly, but let it not be a surprise to you, for nature has a way of arriving unannounced, and, as an adage says, originals are very hard to find, but their echoes sound ouder. So I decided to contact you myself, for you to assure me of safety and honesty, if I have to entrust any amount of money under your custody. I am Mr Micheal Bangura, the son of late Mr Thaimu Bangura who was the Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone but was killed during the civil war. (Laughter) Knowing your country to be economical conducive for investment, and your people as transparent and trustworthy to engage in business, on which premise I write you. (Laughter) Before my father death, he had the sum of 23 million United States dollars, which he kept away from the rebel leaders during the course of the war. (Laughter) This fund was supposed to be used for the rehabilitation of water reserves all over the country, before the outbreak of war. When the war broke out, the rebel leader demanded the fund be given to him, my father insisted it was not in his possession, and he was killed because of his refusal to release the fund. Meanwhile, my mother and I is the only person who knows about it because my father always confide in me. (Sighs) I made an arrangement with a Red Cross relief worker, who used his official van to transport the money to Lungi Airport, Freetown, although he did not know the real contents of the box. (Laughter) The fund was deposited as a family reasure, in a safe, reliable security company in Dakar, Senegal, where I was only given temporary asylum. I do not wish to invest the money in Senegal due to unfavorable economic climate, and so close to my country. The only assistance I need from you, which I know you would do for me, are the following: one, be a silent partner and receive the funds in your account in trust; two, provide a bank account under your control to which the funds will be remitted; three, receive the funds into your account in trust; take out your commission; and leave the rest of the money until I arrive, after the transfer is complete. Sincerely, Mr Micheal Bangura." (Laughter) (Applause) This is really embarrassing. I was told backstage that I have 18 minutes. I only prepared 15. (Laughter) So if it's cool, I'd like to just wait for three. (Laughter) (Laughter ends) I'm really sorry. (Laughter) (Applause) What's your name? (Laughter) Mark Surfas. It's pretty cool, huh? Pursuing happiness. (Laughter) Are you a virgin? Virgin? I mean — no, I mean like in the TED sense? (Laughter) Are you? Oh, yeah? So what are you, like, a thousand, two thousand, somewhere in there? Huh? Oh? You don't know what I'm talking about? (Laughter) Ah, Mark — (Laughter) Surfas. (Laughter) 1,860 — am I good? And that's nothing to be ashamed of. That's nothing to be ashamed of. (Applause) Yeah, I was hanging out with some Google guys last night. Really cool, we were getting wasted. (Laughter) And they were telling me that Google software has gotten so advanced that, based on your interaction with Google over your lifetime, they can actually predict what you are going to say — (Laughter) next. And I was like, "Get the fuck out of here. That's crazy." (Laughter) But they said, "No, but don't show anyone." But they slipped up. And they said that I could just type in "What was I going to say next?" and my name, and it would tell me. And I have to tell you, this is an unadulterated piece of software, this is a real Internet browser and this is the actual Google site, and we're going to test it out live today. What was I going to say next? And "Ze Frank" — that's me. Am I feeling lucky? (Laughter) (Shouting) Am I feeling lucky? Audience: Yes! Yeah! (Sighs) (Laughter) Ze Frank: Oh! Amazing. (Laughter) In March of 2001 — (Laughter) I filmed myself dancing to Madonna's "Justify My Love." On a Thursday, I sent out a link to a website that featured those clips to 17 of my closest friends, as part of an invitation to my — an invitation to my th — th — 26th birthday party. (Laughter) (Clears throat) By Monday, over a million people were coming to this site a day. (Sighs) (Laughter) Within a week, I received a call from Earthlink that said, due to a 10 cents per megabyte overage charge, I owed them 30,000 dollars. (Laughter) Needless to say, I was able to leave my job. [WAS LAID OFF] (Laughter) And, finally, you know, become freelance. (Laughter) [UNEMPLOYED] But some people refer to me more as, like, an Internet guru or — [JACKASS] swami. (Laughter) I knew I had something. I'd basically distilled a very difficult-to-explain and complex philosophy, which I won't get into here, because it's a little too deep for all of you, but — (Laughter) It's about what makes websites popular, and, you know, it's — [DANCE LIKE AN IDIOT AND DON'T SELL ANYTHING] It's unfortunate that I don't have more time. Maybe I can come back next year, or something like that. (Laughter) I'm obsessed with email. I get a lot of it. Four years later, I still get probably two or three hundred emails a day from people I don't know, and it's been an amazing opportunity to kind of get to know different cultures, you know? It's like a microscope to the rest of the world. You can kind of peer into other people's lives. And I also feel like I get a lot of inspiration from the average user. For example, somebody wrote, "Hey Ze, if you ever come to Boulder, you should rock out with us," and I said, "Why wait?" [rocking out] (Video) (Music) And they said, "Hey Ze, thanks for rocking out, but I meant the kind of rocking out where we'd be naked." (Laughter) And that was embarrassing. But you know, it's kind of a collaboration between me and the fans, so I said, "Sure." [rocking out naked] (Video) (Music) (Laughter) I hear a lot of you whispering. (Laughter) And I know what you're saying, "Holy crap! How is his presentation so smooth?" (Laughter) And I have to say that it's not all me this year. I guess Chris has to take some credit here, because in years past, I guess there's been some sort of subpar speakers at TED. I don't know. And so, this year, Chris sent us a TED conference simulator. (Laughter) Which really allowed us as speakers to get there, in the trenches, and practice at home so that we would be ready for this experience. And I've got to say that, you know, it's really, really great to be here. (Pre-recorded applause) I'd like to tell all of you a little joke. (Pre-recorded applause and cheering) Not just the good stuff, though. You can do heckler mode. Voice: Hey, moron, get off the stage! ZF: You get off the stage. (Laughter) Voice: We want Malcolm Gladwell. (Laughter) (Baby cooing) (Huge crowd applauding) In case you run over time. (Heroic music) Just one last thing I'd like to say, I'd, really — (Laughter) I'd like to thank all of you for being here. (Loud music) (Laughter) And frog mode. (Singing) (Sings) "Ah, the first time that I made love to a rock shrimp —" (Laughter) [Spam jokes are the new airplane jokes] (Sighs) It's true. Some people say to me, "Ze, you're doing all this stuff, this Internet stuff, and you're not making any money." (Laughter) "Why?" And I say, "Mom, Dad — (Laughter) I'm trying." I don't know if you're all aware of this, but the video game market, kids are playing these video games, but, supposedly, there's tons of money. I mean, like, I think, 100,000 dollars or so a year is being spent on these things. So I decided to try my hand. I came up with a few games. (Laughter) This is called "Atheist." I figured it would be popular with the young kids. OK. Look, I'll move around and say some things. (Sighs) [Game over. There is no replay.] (Laughter) So that didn't go over so well. (Laughter) I don't really understand why you're laughing. (Laughter) Should have done this before I tried to pitch it. "Buddhist," of course, looks very, very similar to "Atheist." (Laughter) But you come back as a duck. (Laughter) And this is great because, you know, for a quarter, you can play this for a long time. (Laughter) And Chris had said in an email that we should really bring something new to TED, something that we haven't shown anyone. So, I made this for TED. It's "Christian." It's the third in the series. I'm hoping it's going to do well this year. (Sighs) (Laughter) Do you have a preference? (Laughter) Good choice. (Laughter) So you can wait for the Second Coming, which is a random number between one and 500 million. (Laughter) So really, what are we talking about here? Oh, tech joy. (Laughter) Tech joy, to me, means something, because I get a lot of joy out of tech. And in fact, making things using technology — and I'm being serious here, even though I'm using my sarcastic voice — I won't — hold on. Making things, you know — making things actually does give me a lot of joy. It's the process of creation that keeps me sort of a bubble and a half above perpetual anxiety in my life, and it's that feeling of being about 80 percent complete on a project — where you know you still have something to do, but it's not finished, and you're not starting something — that really fills my entire life. And so, what I've done is, I started getting interested in creating online social spaces to share that feeling with people who don't consider themselves artists. We're in a culture of guru-ship. It's so hard to use some software because, you know, it's unapproachable, people feel like they have to read the manual. So I try to create these very minimal activities that allow people to express themselves, and, hopefully — ("The End" by The Doors) Whoa! I'm like — on the page, but it doesn't exist. (Laughter) It's, like — seriously, though — (Laughter) I try to create meaningful environments for people to express themselves. (Laughter) Here I created a contest called, "When Office Supplies Attack," which, I think, really resonated with the working population. (Laughter) Over 500 entries in three weeks. Toilet paper fashion. (Laughter) Again, people from all over the country. The watch is particularly incredible. (Laughter) Online drawing tools — you've probably seen a lot of them. I think they're wonderful. It's a chance for people to get to play with crayons and all that kind of stuff. But I'm interested in the process of creating, as the real event that I'm interested in. And the problem is that a lot of people suck at drawing, and they get bummed out at this, sort of, you know, stick figure, awful little thing that they created. And eventually, it just makes them stop playing with it, or they draw penises and things like that. (Laughter) So, the Scribbler is an attempt to create a generative tool. In other words, it's a helping tool. You can draw your simple stick figure, and it collaborates with you to create sort of a post-war German etching. (Laughter) In fact, it's tuned to be better at drawing things that look worse. So, we go ahead, and we start scribbling. So the idea is that you can really, you know, partake in this process, but watch something really crappy look beautiful. And here are some of my favorites. This is the little trap marionette that was submitted to me. Very cool. (Laughter) Darling. Beautiful stuff. I mean this is incredible. An 11-year-old girl drew this and submitted it. It's just gorgeous. (Laughter) I'm dead serious here. This is not a joke. (Laughter) But, I think it's a really fun and wonderful thing. So this is called the "Fiction Project." This is an online space, which is basically a refurbished message board that encourages collaborative fiction writing. These are haikus. None of the haikus were written by the same person. In fact, each line is contributed by a different person at a different time. I think that the "now tied up, tied down, mistress cruel approaches me, now tied down, it's up." It's an amazing way, and I'll tell you, if you come home, and your spouse, or whoever it is, says, "Let's talk" — That, like, chills you to the very core. (Laughter) But it's peripheral activities like these that allow people to get together, doing fun things. They actually get to know each other, and it's sort of like low-threshold peripheral activities that I think are the key to bringing up some of our bonding social capital that we're lacking. And very, very quickly — I love puppets. Here's a puppet. It dances to music. Lotte Reiniger, an amazing shadow puppeteer in the 20s, that started doing more elaborate things. I became interested in puppets, and I just want to show one last thing to you. Oh, this is how you make puppets. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Ze Frank. (Applause)

Meet the founder of the blog revolution

Mena Trott

{0: 'Mena Trott'}

{0: ['blogger; cofounder', 'six apart']}

{0: 'Mena Trott and her husband Ben founded Six Apart in a spare bedroom after the blogging software they developed grew beyond a hobby. With products Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox, the company has helped lead the "social media" revolution.'}

2006-02-23

2006-08-25

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'communication', 'community', 'culture', 'design', 'entertainment', 'software', 'storytelling']

{144: "The Web's secret stories", 1282: 'The technology of storytelling', 1379: 'The clues to a great story', 87: 'Nerdcore comedy', 2302: 'When online shaming goes too far', 46600: 'Inside the bizarre world of internet trolls and propagandists'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/mena_trott_meet_the_founder_of_the_blog_revolution/

The founding mother of the blog revolution, Movable Type's Mena Trott, talks about the early days of blogging, when she realized that giving regular people the power to share our lives online is the key to building a friendlier, more connected world.

Over the past couple of days, as I've been preparing for my speech, I've become more and more nervous about what I'm going to say and about being on the same stage as all these fascinating people. Being on the same stage as Al Gore, who was the first person I ever voted for. And — (Laughter) So I was getting pretty nervous and, you know, I didn't know that Chris sits on the stage, and that's more nerve-racking. But then I started thinking about my family. I started thinking about my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather, and I realized that I had all of these Teds going through my bloodstream — (Laughter) that I had to consider this "my element." So, who am I? Chris kind of mentioned I started a company with my husband. We have about 125 people internationally. If you looked in the book, you saw this ... (Laughter) which I really was appalled by. (Laughter) And because I wanted to impress you all with slides, since I saw the great presentations yesterday with graphs, I made a graph that moves, and I talk about the makeup of me. (Laughter) So, besides this freakish thing, this is my science slide. This is math, and this is science, this is genetics. This is my grandmother, and this is where I get this mouth. (Laughter) So — I'm a blogger, which, probably, to a lot of you, means different things. You may have heard about the Kryptonite lock brouhaha, where a blogger talked about how you hack or break into a Kryptonite lock using a ballpoint pen, and it spread all over. Kryptonite had to adjust the lock, and they had to address it to avoid too many customer concerns. You may have heard about Rathergate, which was basically the result of bloggers realizing that the "th" in 111 is not typeset on an old typewriter; it's on Word. Bloggers exposed this, or they worked hard to expose this. You know, blogs are scary. This is what you see. I see this, and I'm sure scared — I swear on stage — shitless about blogs, because this is not something that's friendly. But there are blogs that are changing the way we read news and consume media, and these are great examples. These people are reaching thousands, if not millions, of readers, and that's incredibly important. During the hurricane, you had MSNBC posting about the hurricane on their blog, updating it frequently. This was possible because of the easy nature of blogging tools. You have my friend, who has a blog on PVRs, personal recorders. He makes enough money just by running ads, to support his family up in Oregon. That's all he does now, and this is something that blogs have made possible. And then you have something like this, which is Interplast. It's a wonderful organization of people and doctors who go to developing nations to offer plastic surgery to those who need it. Children with cleft palates get it, and they document their story. This is wonderful. I am not that caring. (Laughter) I talk about myself. That's what I am. I'm a blogger. I have always decided that I was going to be an expert on one thing, and I am an expert on this person, and so I write about it. So, the short story about my blog: it started in 2001, I was 23. I wasn't happy with my job, because I was a designer, but I wasn't being really stimulated. I was an English major in college. I didn't have any use for it, but I missed writing. So, I started to write a blog and I started to create things like these little stories. This was an illustration about my camp experience when I was 11 years old, and how I went to a YMCA camp, Christian camp, and basically by the end, I had made my friends hate me so much that I hid in a bunk, They couldn't find me, they sent a search party, and I overheard people saying they wish I had killed myself — jumped off Bible Peak. You can laugh, this is OK. (Laughter) This is me. This is what happened to me. And when I started my blog, it was really this one goal — I said, "I am not going to be famous to the world, but I could be famous to people on the Internet." And I set a goal. I said, "I'm going to win an award," because I had never won an award in my entire life. And I said, "I'm going to win the South by Southwest Weblog award." And I won it — I reached all of these people, and I had tens of thousands of people reading about my life every day. And then I wrote a post about a banjo. I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo — a $300 banjo, which is a lot of money. And I don't play instruments; I don't know anything about music. I like music, and I like banjos, and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing, and I said, "I could do that." And I said to my husband, "Ben, can I buy a banjo?" And he's like, "No." And my husband — (Laughter) this is my husband, who is very hot — he won an award for being hot. (Laughter) He told me, "You cannot buy a banjo. You're just like your dad," who collects instruments. And I wrote a post about how I was so mad at him, he was such a tyrant — he would not let me buy this banjo. And those people who know me understood my joke — this is Mena, this is how I make a joke at people. Because the joke in this is that this person is not a tyrant, this person is so loving and so sweet that he lets me dress him up and post pictures of him to my blog. (Laughter) And if he knew I was showing this right now — I put this in today — he would kill me. But the thing was, my friends read it, and they're like, "Oh, that Mena, she wrote a post about wanting a stupid thing and being stupid." But I got emails from people that said, "Oh my God, your husband is such an asshole. How much money does he spend on beer in a year? You could take that money and buy your banjo. Why don't you open a separate account?" I've been with him since I was 17, we've never had a separate bank account. They said, "Separate your bank account. Spend your money; spend his money, that's it." And then I got people saying, "Leave him." (Laughter) I was like, "OK, what? Who are these people? And why are they reading this?" And I realized: I don't want to reach these people. I don't want to write for this public audience. And I started to kill my blog slowly. I'm like, I don't want to write this anymore. Slowly and slowly — And I did tell personal stories from time to time. I wrote this one, and I put this up because of Einstein today. I'm going to get choked up, because this is my first pet, and she passed away two years ago. And I decided to break from, "I don't really write about my public life," because I wanted to give her a little memorial. But anyways, it's these sorts of personal stories — You know, you read the blogs about politics or about media, and gossip and all these things. These are out there, but it's more of the personal that interests me, and this is who I am. You see Norman Rockwell, and you have art critics say, "Norman Rockwell is not art. Norman Rockwell hangs in living rooms and bathrooms, and this is not something to be considered high art." And I think this is one of the most important things to us as humans. These things resonate with us, and, if you think about blogs, you think of high art blogs, the history paintings about, you know, all the biblical stories, and then you have this. These are the blogs that interest me: the people that just tell stories. One story is about this baby, and his name is Odin. His father was a blogger. And he was writing his blog one day, and his wife gave birth to her baby at 25 weeks. And he never expected this. One day, it was normal; the next day, it was hell. And this is a one-pound baby. So Odin was documented every single day. Pictures were taken every day: day one, day two ... You have day nine — they're talking about his apnea; day 39 — he gets pneumonia. His baby is so small, and I've never encountered such a — just — a disturbing image, but just so heartfelt. And you're reading this as it happens, so on day 55, everybody reads that he's having failures: breathing failures and heart failures, and it's slowing down, and you don't know what to expect. But then it gets better. Day 96, he goes home. And you see this post. That's not something you're going to see in a paper or magazine but this is something this person feels, and people are excited about it — 28 comments. That's not a huge amount of people reading, but 28 people matter. And today, he is a healthy baby, who, if you read his blog — it's snowdeal.org, his father's blog — he is taking pictures of him still, because he is still his son and he is, I think, at his age level right now because he had received such great treatment from the hospital. So, blogs. So what? You've probably heard these things before. We talked about the WELL, and about all these sorts of things throughout our online history. But I think blogs are basically just an evolution, and that's where we are today. It's this record of who you are, your persona. You have your Google search, where you say, "What is Mena Trott?" And then you find these things and you're happy or unhappy. But then you also find people's blogs, and those are the records of people that are writing daily — not necessarily about the same topic, but things that interest them. And we talk about the world flattens, being in this panel, and I am very optimistic — whenever I think about blogs, I'm like, "We've got to reach all these people." Hundreds of millions and billions of people. We're getting into China, we want to be there, but there are so many people that won't have the access to write a blog. But to see something like the $100 computer is amazing, because blogging software is simple. We have a successful company because of timing, and because of perseverance, but it's simple stuff — it's not rocket science. And so, that's an amazing thing to consider. So — the life record of a blog is something that I find incredibly important. And we started with a slide of my Teds, and I had to add this slide, because I knew the minute I showed this, my mom — my mom will see this, because she does read my blog and she'll say, "Why wasn't there a picture of me?" This is my mom. So, I have all the people that I know of. But this is basically the extent of the family that I know in terms of my direct line. I showed a Norman Rockwell painting before, and this one, I grew up with, looking at constantly. I would spend hours looking at the connections, saying, "Oh, the little kid up at the top has red hair; so does that first generation up there." And it's just these little things. This is not science, but this was enough for me to be really interested in how we have evolved and how we can trace our line. So that has always influenced me. I have this record, this 1910 census, of another Grabowski — that's my maiden name — and there's a Theodore, because there's always a Theodore. This is all I have, a couple of facts about somebody. I have their date of birth, their age, what they did in their household, if they spoke English, and that's it, that's all I know of these people. And it's pretty sad, because I only go back five generations, and that's it. I don't even know what happens on my mom's side, because she's from Cuba and I don't have that many things. Just doing this, I spent time in the archives — that's why my husband's a saint — I spent time in the Washington archives, just sitting there, looking for these things. Now it's online, but he sat through that. And so you have this record and — This is my great-great-grandmother. This is the only picture I have. And to think of what we have the ability to do with our blogs; to think about the people that are on those $100 computers, talking about who they are, sharing these personal stories — this is an amazing thing. Another photo that has greatly influenced me, or a series of photos, is this project that's done by an Argentinean man and his wife. And he's basically taking a picture of his family every day for the past, what is '76? — 20 ... Oh my God, I'm '77 — 29 years? Twenty-nine years. There was a joke, originally, about my graph that I left out, which is: You see all this math? I'm just happy I was able to add it up to 100, because that's my skill set. (Laughter) So you have these people aging, and now this is them today, or last year. And that's a powerful thing to have, to be able to track this. I wish that I would have this of my family. I know that one day my children will be wondering — or my grandchildren, or my great-grandchildren, if I ever have children — what I am going to — who I was. So I do something that's very narcissistic — I am a blogger — that is an amazing thing for me, because it captures a moment in time every day. I take a picture of myself — I've been doing this since last year — every single day. And, you know, it's the same picture; it's basically the same person. Only a couple of people read it. I don't write this for this audience; I'm showing it now, but I would go insane if this was really public. About four people probably read it, and they tell me, "You haven't updated." I'm probably going to get people telling me I haven't updated. But this is amazing, because I can go back to a day — to April 2005, and say, what was I doing this day? I look at it, I know exactly. It's this visual cue that is so important to what we do. I put the bad pictures up too, because there are bad pictures. (Laughter) And I remember instantly: I am in Germany in this — I had to go for a one-day trip. I was sick, and I was in a hotel room, and I wanted not to be there. And so you see these things, it's not just always smiling. Now I've kind of evolved it, so I have this look. If you look at my driver's license, I have the same look, and it's a pretty disturbing thing, but it's something that is really important. And the last story I really want to tell is this story, because this is probably the one that means the most to me in all of what I'm doing. I'll probably get choked up, because I tend to when I talk about this. So, this woman, her name was Emma, and she was a blogger on our service, TypePad. And she was a beta tester, so she was there right when we opened — you know, there was 100 people. And she wrote about her life dealing with cancer. She was writing and writing, and we all started reading it, because we had so few blogs on the service, we could keep track of everyone. And she was writing one day, and then she disappeared for a little bit. And her sister came on, and she said that Emma had passed away. And all of our support staff who had talked to her were really emotional, and it was a very hard day at the company. And this was one of those instances where I realized how much blogging affects our relationship, and flattening this sort of world. That this woman is in England, and she lives — she lived — a life where she was talking about what she was doing. But the big thing that really influenced us was, her sister wrote to me, and she said — and she wrote on this blog — that writing her blog during the last couple of months of her life was probably the best thing that had happened to her, and being able to talk to people and to share what was going on, and being able to write and receive comments. And that was amazing, to be able to know that we had empowered that, and that blogging was something that she felt comfortable doing, and the idea that blogging doesn't have to be scary, that we don't always have to be attack of the blogs, that we can be people who are open, and wanting to help and talk to people. That was an amazing thing. And so I printed out and sent a PDF of her blog to her family, and they passed it out at her memorial service, and even in her obituary, they mentioned her blog, because it was such a big part of her life. And that's a huge thing. So, this is her legacy, and I think that my call to action to all of you is: think about blogs, think about what they are, think about what you've thought of them, and then actually do it, because it's something that's really going to change our lives. So, thank you. (Applause)

Why we love, why we cheat

Helen Fisher

{0: 'Helen Fisher'}

{0: ['anthropologist', 'expert on love']}

{0: 'Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies gender differences and the evolution of human emotions. She’s best known as an expert on romantic love.'}

2006-02-24

2006-09-06

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['cognitive science', 'culture', 'evolution', 'gender', 'love', 'psychology', 'relationships', 'science']

{307: 'The brain in love', 374: 'Aliens, love -- where are they?', 1669: 'The secret to desire in a long-term relationship', 2590: "Technology hasn't changed love. Here's why", 31375: '3 ways to build a happy marriage and avoid divorce', 2661: 'A better way to talk about love'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_why_we_love_why_we_cheat/

Anthropologist Helen Fisher takes on a tricky topic – love – and explains its evolution, its biochemical foundations and its social importance. She closes with a warning about the potential disaster inherent in antidepressant abuse.

I'd like to talk today about the two biggest social trends in the coming century, and perhaps in the next 10,000 years. But I want to start with my work on romantic love, because that's my most recent work. What I and my colleagues did was put 32 people, who were madly in love, into a functional MRI brain scanner. 17 who were madly in love and their love was accepted; and 15 who were madly in love and they had just been dumped. And so I want to tell you about that first, and then go on into where I think love is going. (Laughter) "What 'tis to love?" Shakespeare said. I think our ancestors — I think human beings have been wondering about this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago. I started out by trying to figure out what romantic love was by looking at the last 45 years of the psychological research and as it turns out, there's a very specific group of things that happen when you fall in love. The first thing that happens is, a person begins to take on what I call, "special meaning." As a truck driver once said to me, "The world had a new center, and that center was Mary Anne." George Bernard Shaw said it differently. "Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another." And indeed, that's what we do. (Laughter) And then you just focus on this person. You can list what you don't like about them, but then you sweep that aside and focus on what you do. As Chaucer said, "Love is blind." In trying to understand romantic love, I decided I would read poetry from all over the world, and I just want to give you one very short poem from eighth-century China, because it's an almost perfect example of a man who is focused totally on a particular woman. It's a little bit like when you are madly in love with somebody and you walk into a parking lot — their car is different from every other car in the parking lot. Their wine glass at dinner is different from every other wine glass at the dinner party. And in this case, a man got hooked on a bamboo sleeping mat. And it goes like this. It's by a guy called Yuan Zhen. "I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat. The night I brought you home, I watched you roll it out." He became hooked on a sleeping mat, probably because of elevated activity of dopamine in his brain, just like with you and me. But anyway, not only does this person take on special meaning, you focus your attention on them. You aggrandize them. But you have intense energy. As one Polynesian said, "I felt like jumping in the sky." You're up all night. You're walking till dawn. You feel intense elation when things are going well; mood swings into horrible despair when things are going poorly. Real dependence on this person. As one businessman in New York said to me, "Anything she liked, I liked." Simple. Romantic love is very simple. You become extremely sexually possessive. You know, if you're just sleeping with somebody casually, you don't really care if they're sleeping with somebody else. But the moment you fall in love, you become extremely sexually possessive of them. I think there's a Darwinian purpose to this. The whole point of this is to pull two people together strongly enough to begin to rear babies as a team. But the main characteristics of romantic love are craving: an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally. It would be nice to go to bed with them, but you want them to call you on the telephone, to invite you out, etc., to tell you that they love you. The other main characteristic is motivation. The motor in the brain begins to crank, and you want this person. And last but not least, it is an obsession. Before I put these people in the MRI machine, I would ask them all kinds of questions. But my most important question was always the same. It was: "What percentage of the day and night do you think about this person?" And indeed, they would say, "All day. All night. I can never stop thinking about him or her." And then, the very last question — I would always have to work myself up to this question, because I'm not a psychologist. I don't work with people in any kind of traumatic situation. My final question was always the same. I would say, "Would you die for him or her?" And, indeed, these people would say "Yes!" as if I had asked them to pass the salt. I was just staggered by it. So we scanned their brains, looking at a photograph of their sweetheart and looking at a neutral photograph, with a distraction task in between. So we could look at the same brain when it was in that heightened state and when it was in a resting state. And we found activity in a lot of brain regions. In fact, one of the most important was a brain region that becomes active when you feel the rush of cocaine. And indeed, that's exactly what happens. I began to realize that romantic love is not an emotion. In fact, I had always thought it was a series of emotions, from very high to very low. But actually, it's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind. The kind of part of the mind when you're reaching for that piece of chocolate, when you want to win that promotion at work. The motor of the brain. It's a drive. And in fact, I think it's more powerful than the sex drive. You know, if you ask somebody to go to bed with you, and they say, "No, thank you," you certainly don't kill yourself or slip into a clinical depression. But certainly, around the world, people who are rejected in love will kill for it. People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. In over 175 societies, people have left their evidence of this powerful brain system. I have come to think it's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow. And I've also come to think that it's one of three basically different brain systems that evolved from mating and reproduction. One is the sex drive: the craving for sexual gratification. W.H. Auden called it an "intolerable neural itch," and indeed, that's what it is. It keeps bothering you a little bit, like being hungry. The second of these three brain systems is romantic love: that elation, obsession of early love. And the third brain system is attachment: that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner. And I think that the sex drive evolved to get you out there, looking for a whole range of partners. You can feel it when you're just driving along in your car. It can be focused on nobody. I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy. And I think that attachment, the third brain system, evolved to enable you to tolerate this human being at least long enough to raise a child together as a team. So with that preamble, I want to go into discussing the two most profound social trends. One of the last 10,000 years and the other, certainly of the last 25 years, that are going to have an impact on these three different brain systems: lust, romantic love and deep attachment to a partner. The first is women working, moving into the workforce. I've looked at 130 societies through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations. Everywhere in the world, 129 out of 130 of them, women are not only moving into the job market — sometimes very, very slowly, but they are moving into the job market — and they are very slowly closing that gap between men and women in terms of economic power, health and education. It's very slow. For every trend on this planet, there's a counter-trend. We all know of them, but nevertheless — the Arabs say, "The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on." And, indeed, that caravan is moving on. Women are moving back into the job market. And I say back into the job market, because this is not new. For millions of years, on the grasslands of Africa, women commuted to work to gather their vegetables. They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal. The double income family was the standard. And women were regarded as just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men. In short, we're really moving forward to the past. Then, women's worst invention was the plow. With the beginning of plow agriculture, men's roles became extremely powerful. Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors, but then with the industrial revolution and the post-industrial revolution they're moving back into the job market. In short, they are acquiring the status that they had a million years ago, 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. We are seeing now one of the most remarkable traditions in the history of the human animal. And it's going to have an impact. I generally give a whole lecture on the impact of women on the business community. I'll say just a couple of things, and then go on to sex and love. There's a lot of gender differences; anybody who thinks men and women are alike simply never had a boy and a girl child. I don't know why they want to think that men and women are alike. There's much we have in common, but there's a whole lot that we do not have in common. We are — in the words of Ted Hughes, "I think that we are like two feet. We need each other to get ahead." But we did not evolve to have the same brain. And we're finding more and more gender differences in the brain. I'll only just use a couple and then move on to sex and love. One of them is women's verbal ability. Women can talk. Women's ability to find the right word rapidly, basic articulation goes up in the middle of the menstrual cycle, when estrogen levels peak. But even at menstruation, they're better than the average man. Women can talk. They've been doing it for a million years; words were women's tools. They held that baby in front of their face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. And, indeed, they're becoming a very powerful force. Even in places like India and Japan, where women are not moving rapidly into the regular job market, they're moving into journalism. And I think that the television is like the global campfire. We sit around it and it shapes our minds. Almost always, when I'm on TV, the producer who calls me, who negotiates what we're going to say, is a woman. In fact, Solzhenitsyn once said, "To have a great writer is to have another government." Today 54 percent of people who are writers in America are women. It's one of many, many characteristics that women have that they will bring into the job market. They've got incredible people skills, negotiating skills. They're highly imaginative. We now know the brain circuitry of imagination, of long-term planning. They tend to be web thinkers. Because the female parts of the brain are better connected, they tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers, what I call web thinkers. Men tend to — and these are averages — tend to get rid of what they regard as extraneous, focus on what they do, and move in a more step-by-step thinking pattern. They're both perfectly good ways of thinking. We need both of them to get ahead. In fact, there's many more male geniuses in the world. And there's also many more male idiots in the world. (Laughter) When the male brain works well, it works extremely well. And what I really think that we're doing is, we're moving towards a collaborative society, a society in which the talents of both men and women are becoming understood and valued and employed. But in fact, women moving into the job market is having a huge impact on sex and romance and family life. Foremost, women are starting to express their sexuality. I'm always astonished when people come to me and say, "Why is it that men are so adulterous?" "Why do you think more men are adulterous than women?" "Well, men are more adulterous!" And I say, "Who do you think these men are sleeping with?" (Laughter) And — basic math! Anyway. In the Western world, women start sooner at sex, have more partners, express less remorse for the partners that they do, marry later, have fewer children, leave bad marriages in order to get good ones. We are seeing the rise of female sexual expression. And, indeed, once again we're moving forward to the kind of sexual expression that we probably saw on the grasslands of Africa a million years ago, because this is the kind of sexual expression that we see in hunting and gathering societies today. We're also returning to an ancient form of marriage equality. They're now saying that the 21st century is going to be the century of what they call the "symmetrical marriage," or the "pure marriage," or the "companionate marriage." This is a marriage between equals, moving forward to a pattern that is highly compatible with the ancient human spirit. We're also seeing a rise of romantic love. 91 percent of American women and 86 percent of American men would not marry somebody who had every single quality they were looking for in a partner, if they were not in love with that person. People around the world, in a study of 37 societies, want to be in love with the person that they marry. Indeed, arranged marriages are on their way off this braid of human life. I even think that marriages might even become more stable because of the second great world trend. The first one being women moving into the job market, the second one being the aging world population. They're now saying that in America, that middle age should be regarded as up to age 85. Because in that highest age category of 76 to 85, as much as 40 percent of people have nothing really wrong with them. So we're seeing there's a real extension of middle age. For one of my books, I looked at divorce data in 58 societies. And as it turns out, the older you get, the less likely you are to divorce. So the divorce rate right now is stable in America, and it's actually beginning to decline. It may decline some more. I would even say that with Viagra, estrogen replacement, hip replacements and the incredibly interesting women — women have never been as interesting as they are now. Not at any time on this planet have women been so educated, so interesting, so capable. And so I honestly think that if there really was ever a time in human evolution when we have the opportunity to make good marriages, that time is now. However, there's always kinds of complications in this. These three brain systems — lust, romantic love and attachment — don't always go together. They can go together, by the way. That's why casual sex isn't so casual. With orgasm you get a spike of dopamine. Dopamine's associated with romantic love, and you can just fall in love with somebody who you're just having casual sex with. With orgasm, then you get a real rush of oxytocin and vasopressin — those are associated with attachment. This is why you can feel such a sense of cosmic union with somebody after you've made love to them. But these three brain systems: lust, romantic love and attachment, aren't always connected to each other. You can feel deep attachment to a long-term partner while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else, while you feel the sex drive for people unrelated to these other partners. In short, we're capable of loving more than one person at a time. In fact, you can lie in bed at night and swing from deep feelings of attachment for one person to deep feelings of romantic love for somebody else. It's as if there's a committee meeting going on in your head as you are trying to decide what to do. So I don't think, honestly, we're an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce. I think the happiness we find, we make. And I think, however, we can make good relationships with each other. So I want to conclude with two things. I want to conclude with a worry, and with a wonderful story. The worry is about antidepressants. Over 100 million prescriptions of antidepressants are written every year in the United States. And these drugs are going generic. They are seeping around the world. I know one girl who's been on these antidepressants, SSRIs, serotonin-enhancing antidepressants — since she was 13. She's 23. She's been on them ever since she was 13. I've got nothing against people who take them short term, when they're going through something horrible. They want to commit suicide or kill somebody else. I would recommend it. But more and more people in the United States are taking them long term. And indeed, what these drugs do is raise levels of serotonin. And by raising levels of serotonin, you suppress the dopamine circuit. Everybody knows that. Dopamine is associated with romantic love. Not only do they suppress the dopamine circuit, but they kill the sex drive. And when you kill the sex drive, you kill orgasm. And when you kill orgasm, you kill that flood of drugs associated with attachment. The things are connected in the brain. And when you tamper with one brain system, you're going to tamper with another. I'm just simply saying that a world without love is a deadly place. So now — (Applause) Thank you. I want to end with a story. And then, just a comment. I've been studying romantic love and sex and attachment for 30 years. I'm an identical twin; I am interested in why we're all alike. Why you and I are alike, why the Iraqis and the Japanese and the Australian Aborigines and the people of the Amazon River are all alike. And about a year ago, an Internet dating service, Match.com, came to me and asked me if I would design a new dating site for them. I said, "I don't know anything about personality. You know? I don't know. Do you think you've got the right person?" They said, "Yes." It got me thinking about why it is that you fall in love with one person rather than another. That's my current project; it will be my next book. There's all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another. Timing is important. Proximity is important. Mystery is important. You fall in love with somebody who's somewhat mysterious, in part because mystery elevates dopamine in the brain, probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love. You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your "love map," an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up. And I also think that you gravitate to certain people, actually, with somewhat complementary brain systems. And that's what I'm now contributing to this. But I want to tell you a story, to illustrate. I've been carrying on here about the biology of love. I wanted to show you a little bit about the culture of it, too, the magic of it. It's a story that was told to me by somebody who had heard it just from one — probably a true story. It was a graduate student — I'm at Rutgers and my two colleagues — Art Aron is at SUNY Stony Brook. That's where we put our people in the MRI machine. And this graduate student was madly in love with another graduate student, and she was not in love with him. And they were all at a conference in Beijing. And he knew from our work that if you go and do something very novel with somebody, you can drive up the dopamine in the brain, and perhaps trigger this brain system for romantic love. (Laughter) So he decided he'd put science to work. And he invited this girl to go off on a rickshaw ride with him. And sure enough — I've never been in one, but apparently they go all around the buses and the trucks and it's crazy and it's noisy and it's exciting. He figured that this would drive up the dopamine, and she'd fall in love with him. So off they go and she's squealing and squeezing him and laughing and having a wonderful time. An hour later they get down off of the rickshaw, and she throws her hands up and she says, "Wasn't that wonderful?" And, "Wasn't that rickshaw driver handsome!" (Laughter) (Applause) There's magic to love! (Applause) But I will end by saying that millions of years ago, we evolved three basic drives: the sex drive, romantic love and attachment to a long-term partner. These circuits are deeply embedded in the human brain. They're going to survive as long as our species survives on what Shakespeare called "this mortal coil." Thank you. Chris Anderson: Helen Fisher! (Applause)

Happiness in body and soul

Eve Ensler

{0: 'Eve Ensler'}

{0: ['playwright', 'activist']}

{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.'}

2004-02-04

2006-09-06

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'entertainment', 'gender', 'global issues', 'happiness', 'performance', 'storytelling', 'theater', 'women']

{217: 'What security means to me', 751: 'Embrace your inner girl', 1753: "Violence against women -- it's a men's issue", 2175: 'My mother’s strange definition of empowerment', 2288: 'Meet the women fighting on the front lines of an American war', 2394: 'A hilarious celebration of lifelong female friendship'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_happiness_in_body_and_soul/

Eve Ensler, creator of "The Vagina Monologues," shares how a discussion about menopause with her friends led to talking about all sorts of sexual acts onstage, waging a global campaign to end violence toward women and finding her own happiness.

I bet you're worried. (Laughter) I was worried. That's why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried what we think about vaginas and even more worried that we don't think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context, a culture, a community of other vaginas. There is so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them. Like the Bermuda Triangle, nobody ever reports back from there. (Laughter) In the first place, it's not so easy to even find your vagina. Women go days, weeks, months, without looking at it. I interviewed a high-powered businesswoman; she told me she didn't have time. "Looking at your vagina," she said, "is a full day's work." (Laughter) "You've got to get down there on your back, in front of a mirror, full-length preferred. You've got to get in the perfect position with the perfect light, which then becomes shadowed by the angle you're at. You're twisting your head up, arching your back, it's exhausting." She was busy; she didn't have time. So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas. They began as casual vagina interviews, and they turned into vagina monologues. I talked with over 200 women. I talked to older women, younger women, married women, lesbians, single women. I talked to corporate professionals, college professors, actors, sex workers. I talked to African-American women, Asian-American women, Native-American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. OK, at first women were a little shy, a little reluctant to talk. Once they got going, you couldn't stop them. Women love to talk about their vaginas, they do. Mainly because no one's ever asked them before. (Laughter) Let's just start with the word "vagina" — vagina, vagina. It sounds like an infection, at best. Maybe a medical instrument. "Hurry, nurse, bring the vagina!" (Laughter) Vagina, vagina, vagina. It doesn't matter how many times you say the word, it never sounds like a word you want to say. It's a completely ridiculous, totally un-sexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct, "Darling, would you stroke my vagina," you kill the act right there. (Laughter) I'm worried what we call them and don't call them. In Great Neck, New York, they call it a Pussycat. A woman told me there her mother used to tell her, "Don't wear panties, dear, underneath your pajamas. You need to air out your Pussycat." (Laughter) In Westchester, they call it a Pooki, in New Jersey, a twat. There's Powderbox, derriere, a Pooky, a Poochi, a Poopi, a Poopelu, a Pooninana, a Padepachetchki, a Pal, and a Piche. (Laughter) There's Toadie, Dee Dee, Nishi, Dignity, Coochi Snorcher, Cooter, Labbe, Gladys Seagelman, VA, Wee wee, Horsespot, Nappy Dugout, Mongo, Ghoulie, Powderbox, a Mimi in Miami, a Split Knish in Philadelphia ... (Laughter) and a Schmende in the Bronx. (Laughter) I am worried about vaginas. This is how the "Vagina Monologues" begins. But it really didn't begin there. It began with a conversation with a woman. We were having a conversation about menopause, and we got onto the subject of her vagina, which you'll do if you're talking about menopause. And she said things that really shocked me about her vagina — that it was dried-up and finished and dead — and I was kind of shocked. So I said to a friend casually, "Well, what do you think about your vagina?" And that woman said something more amazing, and then the next woman said something more amazing, and before I knew it, every woman was telling me I had to talk to somebody about their vagina because they had an amazing story, and I was sucked down the vagina trail. (Laughter) And I really haven't gotten off of it. I think if you had told me when I was younger that I was going to grow up, and be in shoe stores, and people would scream out, "There she is, the Vagina Lady!" I don't know that that would have been my life ambition. (Laughter) But I want to talk a little bit about happiness, and the relationship to this whole vagina journey, because it has been an extraordinary journey that began eight years ago. I think before I did the "Vagina Monologues," I didn't really believe in happiness. I thought that only idiots were happy, to be honest. I remember when I started practicing Buddhism 14 years ago, and I was told that the end of this practice was to be happy, I said, "How could you be happy and live in this world of suffering and live in this world of pain?" I mistook happiness for a lot of other things, like numbness or decadence or selfishness. And what happened through the course of the "Vagina Monologues" and this journey is, I think I have come to understand a little bit more about happiness. There are three qualities I want to talk about. One is seeing what's right in front of you, and talking about it, and stating it. I think what I learned from talking about the vagina and speaking about the vagina, is it was the most obvious thing — it was right in the center of my body and the center of the world — and yet it was the one thing nobody talked about. The second thing is that what talking about the vagina did is it opened this door which allowed me to see that there was a way to serve the world to make it better. And that's where the deepest happiness has actually come from. And the third principle of happiness, which I've realized recently: Eight years ago, this momentum and this energy, this "V-wave" started — and I can only describe it as a "V-wave" because, to be honest, I really don't understand it completely; I feel at the service of it. But this wave started, and if I question the wave, or try to stop the wave or look back at the wave, I often have the experience of whiplash or the potential of my neck breaking. But if I go with the wave, and I trust the wave and I move with the wave, I go to the next place, and it happens logically and organically and truthfully. And I started this piece, particularly with stories and narratives, and I was talking to one woman and that led to another woman and that led to another woman. And then I wrote those stories down, and I put them out in front of other people. And every single time I did the show at the beginning, women would literally line up after the show, because they wanted to tell me their stories. And at first I thought, "Oh great, I'll hear about wonderful orgasms, and great sex lives, and how women love their vaginas." But in fact, that's not what women lined up to tell me. What women lined up to tell me was how they were raped, and how they were battered, and how they were beaten, and how they were gang-raped in parking lots, and how they were incested by their uncles. And I wanted to stop doing the "Vagina Monologues," because it felt too daunting. I felt like a war photographer who takes pictures of terrible events, but doesn't intervene on their behalf. And so in 1997, I said, "Let's get women together. What could we do with this information that all these women are being violated?" And it turned out, after thinking and investigating, that I discovered — and the UN has actually said this recently — that one out of every three women on this planet will be beaten or raped in her lifetime. That's essentially a gender; that's essentially the resource of the planet, which is women. So in 1997 we got all these incredible women together and we said, "How can we use the play, this energy, to stop violence against women?" And we put on one event in New York City, in the theater, and all these great actors came — from Susan Sarandon, to Glenn Close, to Whoopi Goldberg — and we did one performance on one evening, and that catalyzed this wave, this energy. And within five years, this extraordinary thing began to happen. One woman took that energy and she said, "I want to bring this wave, this energy, to college campuses," and so she took the play and she said, "Let's use the play and have performances once a year, where we can raise money to stop violence against women in local communities all around the world." And in one year, it went to 50 colleges, and then it expanded. And over the course of the last six years, it's spread and it's spread and it's spread around the world. What I have learned is two things: one, that the epidemic of violence towards women is shocking; it's global; it is so profound and it is so devastating, and it is so in every little pocket of every little crater, of every little society that we don't even recognize it, because it's become ordinary. This journey has taken me to Afghanistan, where I had the extraordinary honor and privilege to go into parts of Afghanistan under the Taliban. I was dressed in a burqa and I went in with an extraordinary group, called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. And I saw firsthand how women had been stripped of every single right that was possible to strip women of — from being educated, to being employed, to being actually allowed to eat ice cream. For those of you who don't know, it was illegal to eat ice cream under the Taliban. And I actually saw and met women who had been flogged for being caught eating vanilla ice cream. I was taken to the secret ice cream-eating place in a little town, where we went to a back room, and women were seated and a curtain was pulled around us, and they were served vanilla ice cream. And women lifted their burqas and ate this ice cream. And I don't think I ever understood pleasure until that moment, and how women have found a way to keep their pleasure alive. It has taken me, this journey, to Islamabad, where I have witnessed and met women with their faces melted off. It has taken me to Juarez, Mexico, where I was a week ago, where I have literally been there in parking lots, where bones of women have washed up and been dumped next to Coca-Cola bottles. It has taken me to universities all over this country, where girls are date-raped and drugged. I have seen terrible, terrible, terrible violence. But I have also recognized, in the course of seeing that violence, that being in the face of things and seeing actually what's in front of us is the antidote to depression, and to a feeling that one is worthless and has no value. Because before the "Vagina Monologues," I will say that 80 percent of my consciousness was closed off to what was really going on in this reality, and that closing-off closed off my vitality and my life energy. What has also happened is in the course of these travels — and it's been an extraordinary thing — is that every single place that I have gone to in the world, I have met a new species. And I really love hearing about all these species at the bottom of the sea. And I was thinking about how being with these extraordinary people on this particular panel, that it's beneath, beyond and between, and the vagina kind of fits into all those categories. (Laughter) But one of the things I've seen is this species — and it is a species, and it is a new paradigm, and it doesn't get reported in the press or in the media because I don't think good news ever is news, and I don't think people who are transforming the planet are what gets the ratings on TV shows. But every single country I have been to — and in the last six years, I've been to about 45 countries, and many tiny little villages and cities and towns — I have seen something what I've come to call "vagina warriors." A "vagina warrior" is a woman, or a vagina-friendly man, who has witnessed incredible violence or suffered it, and rather than getting an AK-47 or a weapon of mass destruction or a machete, they hold the violence in their bodies; they grieve it; they experience it; and then they go out and devote their lives to making sure it doesn't happen to anybody else. I have met these women everywhere on the planet, and I want to tell a few stories, because I believe that stories are the way that we transmit information, where it goes into our bodies. And I think one of the things about being at TED that's been very interesting is that I live in my body a lot, and I don't live in my head very much anymore. And this is a very heady place. And it's been really interesting to be in my head for the last two days; I've been very disoriented — (Laughter) because I think the world, the V-world, is very much in your body. It's a body world, and the species really exists in the body. And I think there's a real significance in us attaching our bodies to our heads, that that separation has created a divide that is often separating purpose from intent. And the connection between body and head often brings those things into union. I want to talk about three particular people that I've met, vagina warriors, who really transformed my understanding of this whole principle and species, and one is a woman named Marsha Lopez. Marsha Lopez was a woman I met in Guatemala. She was 14 years old, and she was in a marriage and her husband was beating her on a regular basis. And she couldn't get out, because she was addicted to the relationship, and she had no money. Her sister was younger than her, and she applied — we had a "Stop Rape" contest a few years ago in New York — and she applied, hoping that she would become a finalist and she could bring her sister. She did become a finalist; she brought Marsha to New York. And at that time, we did this extraordinary V-Day at Madison Square Garden, where we sold out the entire testosterone-filled dome — 18,000 people standing up to say "Yes" to vaginas, which was really a pretty incredible transformation. And she came, and she witnessed this, and she decided that she would go back and leave her husband, and that she would bring V-Day to Guatemala. She was 21 years old. I went to Guatemala and she had sold out the National Theater of Guatemala. And I watched her walk up on stage in her red short dress and high heels, and she stood there and said, "My name is Marsha. I was beaten by my husband for five years. He almost murdered me. I left and you can, too." And the entire 2,000 people went absolutely crazy. There's a woman named Esther Chávez who I met in Juarez, Mexico. And Esther Chávez was a brilliant accountant in Mexico City. She was 72 years old and she was planning to retire. She went to Juarez to take care of an ailing aunt, and in the course of it, she began to discover what was happening to the murdered and disappeared women of Juarez. She gave up her life; she moved to Juarez. She started to write the stories which documented the disappeared women. 300 women have disappeared in a border town because they're brown and poor. There has been no response to the disappearance, and not one person has been held accountable. She began to document it. She opened a center called Casa Amiga, and in six years, she has literally brought this to the consciousness of the world. We were there a week ago, when there were 7,000 people in the street, and it was truly a miracle. And as we walked through the streets, the people of Juarez, who normally don't even come into the streets, because the streets are so dangerous, literally stood there and wept, to see that other people from the world had showed up for that particular community. There's another woman, named Agnes. And Agnes, for me, epitomizes what a vagina warrior is. I met her three years ago in Kenya. And Agnes was mutilated as a little girl; she was circumcised against her will when she was 10 years old, and she really made a decision that she didn't want this practice to continue anymore in her community. So when she got older, she created this incredible thing: it's an anatomical sculpture of a woman's body, half a woman's body. And she walked through the Rift Valley, and she had vagina and vagina replacement parts, where she would teach girls and parents and boys and girls what a healthy vagina looks like, and what a mutilated vagina looks like. And in the course of her travel — she walked literally for eight years through the Rift Valley, through dust, through sleeping on the ground, because the Maasai are nomads, and she would have to find them, and they would move, and she would find them again — she saved 1,500 girls from being cut. And in that time, she created an alternative ritual, which involved girls coming of age without the cut. When we met her three years ago, we said, "What could V-Day do for you?" And she said, "Well, if you got me a jeep, I could get around a lot faster." (Laughter) So we bought her a jeep. And in the year that she had the jeep, she saved 4,500 girls from being cut. So we said to her, "What else could we do for you?" She said, "Well, Eve, if you gave me some money, I could open a house and girls could run away, and they could be saved." And I want to tell this little story about my own beginnings, because it's very interrelated to happiness and Agnes. When I was a little girl — I grew up in a wealthy community; it was an upper-middle class white community, and it had all the trappings and the looks of a perfectly nice, wonderful, great life. And everyone was supposed to be happy in that community, and, in fact, my life was hell. I lived with an alcoholic father who beat me and molested me, and it was all inside that. And always as a child I had this fantasy that somebody would come and rescue me. And I actually made up a little character whose name was Mr. Alligator. I would call him up when things got really bad, and say it was time to come and pick me up. And I would pack a little bag and wait for Mr. Alligator to come. Now, Mr. Alligator never did come, but the idea of Mr. Alligator coming actually saved my sanity and made it OK for me to keep going, because I believed, in the distance, there would be someone coming to rescue me. Cut to 40-some odd years later, we go to Kenya, and we're walking, we arrive at the opening of this house. And Agnes hadn't let me come to the house for days, because they were preparing this whole ritual. I want to tell you a great story. When Agnes first started fighting to stop female genital mutilation in her community, she had become an outcast, and she was exiled and slandered, and the whole community turned against her. But being a vagina warrior, she kept going, and she kept committing herself to transforming consciousness. And in the Maasai community, goats and cows are the most valued possession. They're like the Mercedes-Benz of the Rift Valley. And she said two days before the house opened, two different people arrived to give her a goat each, and she said to me, "I knew then that female genital mutilation would end one day in Africa." Anyway, we arrived, and when we arrived, there were hundreds of girls dressed in red homemade dresses — which is the color of the Maasai and the color of V-Day — and they greeted us. They had made up these songs that they were singing, about the end of suffering and the end of mutilation, and they walked us down the path. It was a gorgeous day in the African sun, and the dust was flying and the girls were dancing, and there was this house, and it said, "V-Day Safe House for the Girls." And it hit me in that moment that it had taken 47 years, but that Mr. Alligator had finally shown up. And he had shown up, obviously, in a form that it took me a long time to understand, which is that when we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us. And I feel, in the last eight years, that this journey — this miraculous vagina journey — has taught me this really simple thing, which is that happiness exists in action; it exists in telling the truth and saying what your truth is; and it exists in giving away what you want the most. And I feel that knowledge and that journey has been an extraordinary privilege, and I feel really blessed to have been here today to communicate that to you. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Why the universe seems so strange

Richard Dawkins

{0: 'Richard Dawkins'}

{0: ['evolutionary biologist']}

{0: 'Oxford professor Richard Dawkins has helped steer evolutionary science into the 21st century, and his concept of the "meme" contextualized the spread of ideas in the information age. In recent years, his devastating critique of religion has made him a leading figure in the New Atheism.'}

2005-07-07

2006-09-12

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'lt', 'lv', 'mr', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['astronomy', 'biology', 'cognitive science', 'cosmos', 'evolution', 'physics', 'psychology', 'science']

{1276: 'Science versus wonder?', 1160: 'Making sense of a visible quantum object', 516: 'Stunning data visualization in the AlloSphere', 2862: 'The fascinating physics of everyday life', 15555: 'How I made friends with reality', 49223: 'Are we living in a simulation?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_why_the_universe_seems_so_strange/

Biologist Richard Dawkins makes a case for "thinking the improbable" by looking at how the human frame of reference limits our understanding of the universe.

My title: "Queerer than we can suppose: the strangeness of science." "Queerer than we can suppose" comes from J.B.S. Haldane, the famous biologist, who said, "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy." Richard Feynman compared the accuracy of quantum theories — experimental predictions — to specifying the width of North America to within one hair's breadth of accuracy. This means that quantum theory has got to be, in some sense, true. Yet the assumptions that quantum theory needs to make in order to deliver those predictions are so mysterious that even Feynman himself was moved to remark, "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory." It's so queer that physicists resort to one or another paradoxical interpretation of it. David Deutsch, who's talking here, in "The Fabric of Reality," embraces the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, because the worst that you can say about it is that it's preposterously wasteful. It postulates a vast and rapidly growing number of universes existing in parallel, mutually undetectable, except through the narrow porthole of quantum mechanical experiments. And that's Richard Feynman. The biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of modern physics is just an extreme example. Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. Every time you drink a glass of water, he points out, the odds are that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. (Laughter) It's just elementary probability theory. (Laughter) The number of molecules per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls, or bladdersful, in the world. And of course, there's nothing special about Cromwell or bladders — you have just breathed in a nitrogen atom that passed through the right lung of the third iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree. "Queerer than we can suppose." What is it that makes us capable of supposing anything, and does this tell us anything about what we can suppose? Are there things about the universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, but not beyond the grasp of some superior intelligence? Are there things about the universe that are, in principle, ungraspable by any mind, however superior? The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe. We're now so used to the idea that the Earth spins, rather than the Sun moves across the sky, it's hard for us to realize what a shattering mental revolution that must have been. After all, it seems obvious that the Earth is large and motionless, the Sun, small and mobile. But it's worth recalling Wittgenstein's remark on the subject: "Tell me," he asked a friend, "why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went 'round the Earth, rather than that the Earth was rotating?" And his friend replied, "Well, obviously, because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?" (Laughter) Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things, like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. So it would seem the hardest, solidest, densest rock is really almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn't count. Why, then, do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable? As an evolutionary biologist, I'd say this: our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude, of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands, precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. It's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like "solidity" and "impenetrability," because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world in which we have to navigate. Moving to the other end of the scale, our ancestors never had to navigate through the cosmos at speeds close to the speed of light. If they had, our brains would be much better at understanding Einstein. I want to give the name "Middle World" to the medium-scaled environment in which we've evolved the ability to take act — nothing to do with "Middle Earth" — Middle World. (Laughter) We are evolved denizens of Middle World, and that limits what we are capable of imagining. We find it intuitively easy to grasp ideas like, when a rabbit moves at the sort of medium velocity at which rabbits and other Middle World objects move, and hits another Middle World object like a rock, it knocks itself out. May I introduce Major General Albert Stubblebine III, commander of military intelligence in 1983. "...[He] stared at his wall in Arlington, Virginia, and decided to do it. As frightening as the prospect was, he was going into the next office. He stood up and moved out from behind his desk. 'What is the atom mostly made of?' he thought, 'Space.' He started walking. 'What am I mostly made of? Atoms.' He quickened his pace, almost to a jog now. 'What is the wall mostly made of?' (Laughter) 'Atoms!' All I have to do is merge the spaces. Then, General Stubblebine banged his nose hard on the wall of his office. Stubblebine, who commanded 16,000 soldiers, was confounded by his continual failure to walk through the wall. He has no doubt that this ability will one day be a common tool in the military arsenal. Who would screw around with an army that could do that?" That's from an article in Playboy, which I was reading the other day. (Laughter) I have every reason to think it's true; I was reading Playboy because I, myself, had an article in it. (Laughter) Unaided human intuition, schooled in Middle World, finds it hard to believe Galileo when he tells us a heavy object and a light object, air friction aside, would hit the ground at the same instant. And that's because in Middle World, air friction is always there. If we'd evolved in a vacuum, we would expect them to hit the ground simultaneously. If we were bacteria, constantly buffeted by thermal movements of molecules, it would be different. But we Middle-Worlders are too big to notice Brownian motion. In the same way, our lives are dominated by gravity, but are almost oblivious to the force of surface tension. A small insect would reverse these priorities. Steve Grand — he's the one on the left, Douglas Adams is on the right. Steve Grand, in his book, "Creation: Life and How to Make It," is positively scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself. We have this tendency to think that only solid, material things are really things at all. Waves of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem unreal. Victorians thought the waves had to be waves in some material medium: the ether. But we find real matter comforting only because we've evolved to survive in Middle World, where matter is a useful fiction. A whirlpool, for Steve Grand, is a thing with just as much reality as a rock. In a desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of the volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai, there's a dune made of volcanic ash. The beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. It's what's technically known as a "barchan," and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 meters per year. It retains its crescent shape and moves in the direction of the horns. What happens is that the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the other side, and then, as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down on the inside of the crescent, and so the whole horn-shaped dune moves. Steve Grand points out that you and I are, ourselves, more like a wave than a permanent thing. He invites us, the reader, to think of an experience from your childhood, something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: You weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important. So "really" isn't a word that we should use with simple confidence. If a neutrino had a brain, which it evolved in neutrino-sized ancestors, it would say that rocks really do consist of empty space. We have brains that evolved in medium-sized ancestors which couldn't walk through rocks. "Really," for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival. And because different species live in different worlds, there will be a discomforting variety of "reallys." What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world, but a model of the world, regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so it's useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of the model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of model from a walking, climbing or swimming animal. A monkey's brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional world of branches and trunks. A mole's software for constructing models of its world will be customized for underground use. A water strider's brain doesn't need 3D software at all, since it lives on the surface of the pond, in an Edwin Abbott flatland. I've speculated that bats may see color with their ears. The world model that a bat needs in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects must be pretty similar to the world model that any flying bird — a day-flying bird like a swallow — needs to perform the same kind of tasks. The fact that the bat uses echoes in pitch darkness to input the current variables to its model, while the swallow uses light, is incidental. Bats, I've even suggested, use perceived hues, such as red and blue, as labels, internal labels, for some useful aspect of echoes — perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces, furry or smooth and so on — in the same way as swallows or indeed, we, use those perceived hues — redness and blueness, etc. — to label long and short wavelengths of light. There's nothing inherent about red that makes it long wavelength. The point is that the nature of the model is governed by how it is to be used, rather than by the sensory modality involved. J.B.S. Haldane himself had something to say about animals whose world is dominated by smell. Dogs can distinguish two very similar fatty acids, extremely diluted: caprylic acid and caproic acid. The only difference, you see, is that one has an extra pair of carbon atoms in the chain. Haldane guesses that a dog would probably be able to place the acids in the order of their molecular weights by their smells, just as a man could place a number of piano wires in the order of their lengths by means of their notes. Now, there's another fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the other two, except that it has two more carbon atoms. A dog that had never met capric acid would, perhaps, have no more trouble imagining its smell than we would have trouble imagining a trumpet, say, playing one note higher than we've heard a trumpet play before. Perhaps dogs and rhinos and other smell-oriented animals smell in color. And the argument would be exactly the same as for the bats. Middle World — the range of sizes and speeds which we have evolved to feel intuitively comfortable with — is a bit like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see as light of various colors. We're blind to all frequencies outside that, unless we use instruments to help us. Middle World is the narrow range of reality which we judge to be normal, as opposed to the queerness of the very small, the very large and the very fast. We could make a similar scale of improbabilities; nothing is totally impossible. Miracles are just events that are extremely improbable. A marble statue could wave its hand at us; the atoms that make up its crystalline structure are all vibrating back and forth anyway. Because there are so many of them, and because there's no agreement among them in their preferred direction of movement, the marble, as we see it in Middle World, stays rock steady. But the atoms in the hand could all just happen to move the same way at the same time, and again and again. In this case, the hand would move, and we'd see it waving at us in Middle World. The odds against it, of course, are so great that if you set out writing zeros at the time of the origin of the universe, you still would not have written enough zeros to this day. Evolution in Middle World has not equipped us to handle very improbable events; we don't live long enough. In the vastness of astronomical space and geological time, that which seems impossible in Middle World might turn out to be inevitable. One way to think about that is by counting planets. We don't know how many planets there are in the universe, but a good estimate is about 10 to the 20, or 100 billion billion. And that gives us a nice way to express our estimate of life's improbability. We could make some sort of landmark points along a spectrum of improbability, which might look like the electromagnetic spectrum we just looked at. If life has arisen only once on any — life could originate once per planet, could be extremely common or it could originate once per star or once per galaxy or maybe only once in the entire universe, in which case it would have to be here. And somewhere up there would be the chance that a frog would turn into a prince, and similar magical things like that. If life has arisen on only one planet in the entire universe, that planet has to be our planet, because here we are talking about it. And that means that if we want to avail ourselves of it, we're allowed to postulate chemical events in the origin of life which have a probability as low as one in 100 billion billion. I don't think we shall have to avail ourselves of that, because I suspect that life is quite common in the universe. And when I say quite common, it could still be so rare that no one island of life ever encounters another, which is a sad thought. How shall we interpret "queerer than we can suppose?" Queerer than can in principle be supposed, or just queerer than we can suppose, given the limitations of our brain's evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World and achieve some sort of intuitive as well as mathematical understanding of the very small and the very large? I genuinely don't know the answer. I wonder whether we might help ourselves to understand, say, quantum theory, if we brought up children to play computer games beginning in early childhood, which had a make-believe world of balls going through two slits on a screen, a world in which the strange goings-on of quantum mechanics were enlarged by the computer's make-believe, so that they became familiar on the Middle-World scale of the stream. And similarly, a relativistic computer game, in which objects on the screen manifest the Lorentz contraction, and so on, to try to get ourselves — to get children into the way of thinking about it. I want to end by applying the idea of Middle World to our perceptions of each other. Most scientists today subscribe to a mechanistic view of the mind: we're the way we are because our brains are wired up as they are, our hormones are the way they are. We'd be different, our characters would be different, if our neuro-anatomy and our physiological chemistry were different. But we scientists are inconsistent. If we were consistent, our response to a misbehaving person, like a child-murderer, should be something like: this unit has a faulty component; it needs repairing. That's not what we say. What we say — and I include the most austerely mechanistic among us, which is probably me — what we say is, "Vile monster, prison is too good for you." Or worse, we seek revenge, in all probability thereby triggering the next phase in an escalating cycle of counter-revenge, which we see, of course, all over the world today. In short, when we're thinking like academics, we regard people as elaborate and complicated machines, like computers or cars. But when we revert to being human, we behave more like Basil Fawlty, who, we remember, thrashed his car to teach it a lesson, when it wouldn't start on "Gourmet Night." (Laughter) The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world. We swim through a sea of people — a social version of Middle World. We are evolved to second-guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant, intuitive psychologists. Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it's a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness. Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it's hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we're trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate, like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people, with the universe as a whole. (Laughter) If the universe is queerer than we can suppose, is it just because we've been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive in the Pleistocene of Africa? Or are our brains so versatile and expandable that we can train ourselves to break out of the box of our evolution? Or finally, are there some things in the universe so queer that no philosophy of beings, however godlike, could dream them? Thank you very much. (Applause)

Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars

David Deutsch

{0: 'David Deutsch'}

{0: ['physicist', 'author']}

{0: 'A pioneer in quantum computation and quantum information theory, David Deutsch now seeks to define the boundaries between the possible and the impossible.'}

2005-07-14

2006-09-12

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['climate change', 'cosmos', 'culture', 'environment', 'global issues', 'physics', 'science', 'technology', 'universe']

{2237: 'How I fell in love with quasars, blazars and our incredible universe', 701: 'The hunt for a supermassive black hole', 1095: 'The sound the universe makes', 1386: 'Questions no one knows the answers to', 50792: 'After billions of years of monotony, the universe is waking up', 242: 'Questioning the universe'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_chemical_scum_that_dream_of_distant_quasars/

Legendary scientist David Deutsch puts theoretical physics on the back burner to discuss a more urgent matter: the survival of our species. The first step toward solving global warming, he says, is to admit that we have a problem.

We've been told to go out on a limb and say something surprising. So I'll try and do that, but I want to start with two things that everyone already knows. And the first one, in fact, is something that has been known for most of recorded history, and that is, that the planet Earth, or the solar system, or our environment or whatever, is uniquely suited to sustain our evolution — or creation, as it used to be thought — and our present existence, and most important, our future survival. Nowadays, this idea has a dramatic name: Spaceship Earth. And the idea there is that outside the spaceship, the universe is implacably hostile, and inside is all we have, all we depend on, and we only get the one chance: if we mess up our spaceship, we've got nowhere else to go. Now, the second thing that everyone already knows is that, contrary to what was believed for most of human history, human beings are not, in fact, the hub of existence. As Stephen Hawking famously said, we're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star, which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy, and so on. Now, the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we're at a very untypical place, uniquely suited and so on. And the second one is saying that we're at a typical place. And, especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by and to inform your life decisions, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other. But that doesn't prevent them from both being completely false. (Laughter) And they are. So let me start with the second one: typical. Well, is this a typical place? Well, let's look around, you know, look in a random direction, and we see a wall and chemical scum — (Laughter) and that's not typical of the universe at all. All you've got to do is go a few hundred miles in that same direction and look back, and you won't see any walls or chemical scum at all — all you see is a blue planet. And if you go further than that, you'll see the Sun, the solar system and the stars and so on, but that's still not typical of the universe, because stars come in galaxies. And most places in the universe, a typical place in the universe, is nowhere near any galaxies. So let's go out further, till we're outside the galaxy, and look back, and yeah, there's the huge galaxy with spiral arms laid out in front of us. And at this point, we've come 100,000 light-years from here. But we're still nowhere near a typical place in the universe. To get to a typical place, you've got to go 1,000 times as far as that, into intergalactic space. And so, what does that look like — "typical?" What does a "typical" place in the universe look like? Well, at enormous expense, TED has arranged a high-resolution immersion virtual reality rendering of the view from intergalactic space. Can we have the lights off, please, so we can see it? Well, not quite, not quite perfect. You see, intergalactic space is completely dark, pitch dark. It's so dark, that if you were to be looking at the nearest star to you, and that star were to explode as a supernova, and you were to be staring directly at it at the moment when its light reached you, you still wouldn't be able to see even a glimmer. That's how big and how dark the universe is. And that's despite the fact that a supernova is so bright, so brilliant an event, that it would kill you stone dead at a range of several light-years. (Laughter) And yet, from intergalactic space, it's so far away you wouldn't even see it. It's also very cold out there — less than three degrees above absolute zero. And it's very empty. The vacuum there is one million times less dense than the highest vacuum that our best technology on Earth can currently create. So that's how different a typical place is from this place. And that is how untypical this place is. So can we have the lights back on please? Thank you. Now, how do we know about an environment that's so far away and so different and so alien from anything we're used to? Well, the Earth — our environment, in the form of us — is creating knowledge. Well, what does that mean? Well, look out even further than we've just been — I mean from here, with a telescope — and you'll see things that look like stars, they're called quasars. "Quasars" originally meant "quasi-stellar object," which means "things that look a bit like stars." (Laughter) But they're not stars. And we know what they are. Billions of years ago and billions of light-years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a supermassive black hole. And then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse and some of the matter back out in the form of tremendous jets, which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of — I think it's a trillion — suns. Now, the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet. We couldn't survive for an instant in it. Language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion, but at point-blank range and for millions of years at a time. (Laughter) And yet, that jet happened in precisely such a way that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe and model and predict and explain, above all — there's your reference — what was happening there, in reality. The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other, the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure. Now, that is knowledge. And if that weren't amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time. That is the growth of knowledge. So, the laws of physics have this special property, that physical objects as unlike each other as they could possibly be can, nevertheless, embody the same mathematical and causal structure and to do it more and more so over time. So we are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of everything. This place, and not other places in the universe, is a hub which contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the rest of physical reality. And so, far from being insignificant, the fact that the laws of physics allow this or even mandate that this can happen is one of the most important things about the physical world. Now, how does the solar system — our environment, in the form of us — acquire this special relationship with the rest of the universe? Well, one thing that's true about Stephen Hawking's remark — I mean, it is true, but it's the wrong emphasis — one thing that's true about it is that it doesn't do it with any special physics, there's no special dispensation, no miracles involved. It does it simply with three things that we have here in abundance. One of them is matter, because the growth of knowledge is a form of information processing. Information processing is computation, computation requires a computer, and there's no known way of making a computer without matter. We also need energy to make the computer, and most important, to make the media, in effect, onto which we record the knowledge that we discover. And then thirdly, less tangible but just as essential for the open-ended creation of knowledge, of explanations, is evidence. Now, our environment is inundated with evidence. We happened to get round to testing, let's say, Newton's law of gravity, about 300 years ago. But the evidence that we used to do that was falling down on every square meter of the Earth for billions of years before that, and we'll continue to fall for billions of years afterwards. And the same is true for all the other sciences. As far as we know, evidence to discover the most fundamental truths of all the sciences is here just for the taking, on our planet. Our location is saturated with evidence and also with matter and energy. Out in intergalactic space, those three prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge are at their lowest possible supply — as I said, it's empty, it's cold and it's dark out there. Or is it? Now actually, that's just another parochial misconception. (Laughter) Because imagine a cube out there in intergalactic space, the same size as our home, the solar system. Now, that cube is very empty by human standards, but that still means that it contains over a million tons of matter. And a million tons is enough to make, say, a self-contained space station, on which there's a colony of scientists that are devoted to creating an open-ended stream of knowledge, and so on. Now, it's way beyond present technology to even gather the hydrogen from intergalactic space and form it into other elements and so on. But the thing is, in a comprehensible universe, if something isn't forbidden by the laws of physics, then what could possibly prevent us from doing it, other than knowing how? In other words, it's a matter of knowledge, not resources. If we could do that, we'd automatically have an energy supply, because this transmutation would be a fusion reactor. And evidence? Well, again, it's dark out there to human senses, but all you've got to do is take a telescope, even one of present-day design, look out, and you'll see the same galaxies as we do from here. And with a more powerful telescope, you'll be able to see stars and planets in those galaxies, you'll be able to do astrophysics and learn the laws of physics. And locally there, you could build particle accelerators and learn elementary particle physics and chemistry, and so on. Probably the hardest science to do would be biology field trips — (Laughter) because it would take several hundred million years to get to the nearest life-bearing planet and back. But I have to tell you — and sorry, Richard — but I never did like biology field trips much — (Laughter) and I think we can just about make do with one every few hundred million years. (Laughter) So, in fact, intergalactic space does contain all the prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge. Any such cube anywhere in the universe could become the same kind of hub that we are, if the knowledge of how to do so were present there. So, we're not in a uniquely hospitable place. If intergalactic space is capable of creating an open-ended stream of explanations, then so is almost every other environment, so is the Earth. So is a polluted Earth. And the limiting factor, there and here, is not resources — because they're plentiful — but knowledge, which is scarce. Now, this cosmic knowledge-based view may — and, I think, ought to — make us feel very special. But it should also make us feel vulnerable, because it means that without the specific knowledge that's needed to survive the ongoing challenges of the universe, we won't survive them. All it takes is for a supernova to go off a few light-years away, and we'll all be dead! Martin Rees has recently written a book about our vulnerability to all sorts of things, from astrophysics, to scientific experiments gone wrong, and most importantly, to terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. And he thinks that civilization has only a 50 percent chance of surviving this century. I think he's going to talk about that later in the conference. Now, I don't think that probability is the right category to discuss this issue in, but I do agree with him about this: we can survive and we can fail to survive. But it depends, not on chance, but on whether we create the relevant knowledge in time. The danger is not at all unprecedented. Species go extinct all the time. Civilizations end. The overwhelming majority of all species and all civilizations that have ever existed are now history. And if we want to be the exception to that, then logically, our only hope is to make use of the one feature that distinguishes our species and civilization from all the others, namely, our special relationship with the laws of physics, our ability to create new explanations, new knowledge — to be a hub of existence. So let me now apply this to a current controversy, not because I want to advocate any particular solution, but just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean. And the controversy is global warming. Now, I'm a physicist, but I'm not the right kind of physicist. In regard to global warming, I'm just a layman. And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it's already too late to avoid a disaster, because, if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto Protocol, with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, or whatever it is, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it by a little. So it's already too late to avoid it, and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger. It was probably already too late in the 1970s, when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age, in which billions would die. Now, the lesson of that seems clear to me, and I don't know why it isn't informing public debate. It is that we can't always know. When we know of an impending disaster and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself, then there's not going to be much argument, really. But no precautions and no precautionary principle can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. Hence, we need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance. And it's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that's only if we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches. (Laughter) If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either. The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature and with plans to live at the higher temperature — and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. And some such plans exist, things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide. At the moment, these things are fringe research; they're not central to the human effort to face this problem or problems in general. And with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put right — not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely — is our only hope, not just of solving problems, but of survival. So, take two stone tablets and carve on them. On one of them, carve: "Problems are soluble." And on the other one, carve: "Problems are inevitable." Thank you. (Applause)

Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce

Malcolm Gladwell

{0: 'Malcolm Gladwell'}

{0: ['writer']}

{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."}

2004-02-26

2006-09-19

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'mk', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'choice', 'consumerism', 'culture', 'economics', 'food', 'marketing', 'media', 'storytelling']

{93: 'The paradox of choice', 28: 'How to get your ideas to spread', 1831: 'The unheard story of David and Goliath', 1437: 'Perspective is everything', 1706: 'What makes us feel good about our work?', 2182: 'How to run a company with (almost) no rules'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_and_spaghetti_sauce/

"Tipping Point" author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce -- and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

I think I was supposed to talk about my new book, which is called "Blink," and it's about snap judgments and first impressions. And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate. (Laughter) But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it's not really about happiness. So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years, a man who is a great personal hero of mine: someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce. Howard's about this high, and he's round, and he's in his 60s, and he has big huge glasses and thinning gray hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he's a great aficionado of medieval history. And by profession, he's a psychophysicist. Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is, although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics. Which should tell you something about that relationship. (Laughter) As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things. And Howard is very interested in measuring things. And he graduated with his doctorate from Harvard, and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York. And one of his first clients was Pepsi. This is many years ago, back in the early 70s. And Pepsi came to Howard and they said, "You know, there's this new thing called aspartame, and we would like to make Diet Pepsi. We'd like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi in order to have the perfect drink." Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that's what Howard thought. Because Pepsi told him, "We're working with a band between eight and 12 percent. Anything below eight percent sweetness is not sweet enough; anything above 12 percent sweetness is too sweet. We want to know: what's the sweet spot between 8 and 12?" Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it's very simple. What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness — eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12 — and we try this out with thousands of people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration, right? Really simple. Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve, and all of a sudden he realizes it's not a nice bell curve. In fact, the data doesn't make any sense. It's a mess. It's all over the place. Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. They think, "Well, you know, figuring out what people think about cola's not that easy." "You know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way." "You know, let's just make an educated guess," and they simply point and they go for 10 percent, right in the middle. Howard is not so easily placated. Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards. And this was not good enough for him, and this question bedeviled him for years. And he would think it through and say, "What was wrong? Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?" And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go trying to dream up some work for Nescafé. And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. And that is, that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question. They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me. This was an enormous revelation. This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. Howard immediately went on the road, and he would go to conferences around the country, and he would stand up and say, "You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi. You're wrong. You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis." And people would look at him blankly and say, "What are you talking about? Craziness." And they would say, "Move! Next!" Tried to get business, nobody would hire him — he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it. Howard loves the Yiddish expression "To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish." This was his horseradish. (Laughter) He was obsessed with it! And finally, he had a breakthrough. Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, "Doctor Moskowitz, we want to make the perfect pickle." And he said, "There is no perfect pickle; there are only perfect pickles." And he came back to them and he said, "You don't just need to improve your regular; you need to create zesty." And that's where we got zesty pickles. Then the next person came to him: Campbell's Soup. And this was even more important. In fact, Campbell's Soup is where Howard made his reputation. Campbell's made Prego, and Prego, in the early 80s, was struggling next to Ragù, which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the 70s and 80s. In the industry — I don't know whether you care about this, or how much time I have to go into this. But it was, technically speaking — this is an aside — Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragù. The quality of the tomato paste is much better; the spice mix is far superior; it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way. In fact, they would do the famous bowl test back in the 70s with Ragù and Prego. You'd have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right? And the Ragù would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top. That's called "adherence." And, anyway, despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence, and the quality of their tomato paste, Prego was struggling. So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us. And Howard looked at their product line, and he said, what you have is a dead tomato society. So he said, this is what I want to do. And he got together with the Campbell's soup kitchen, and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce: by sweetness, by level of garlic, by tomatoey-ness, by tartness, by sourness, by visible solids — my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business. (Laughter) Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce. And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, and he went on the road. He went to New York, to Chicago, he went to Jacksonville, to Los Angeles. And he brought in people by the truckload into big halls. And he sat them down for two hours, and over the course of that two hours, he gave them ten bowls. Ten small bowls of pasta, with a different spaghetti sauce on each one. And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to 100, how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was. At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. And then he analyzed the data. Did he look for the most popular variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard doesn't believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said, let's see if we can group all these different data points into clusters. Let's see if they congregate around certain ideas. And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain; there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy; and there are people who like it extra chunky. And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, "You're telling me that one third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?" And he said "Yes!" (Laughter) And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra-chunky sauces. Everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, "Oh my god! We've been thinking all wrong!" And that's when you started to get seven different kinds of vinegar, and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil. And then eventually even Ragù hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragù that he did for Prego. And today, if you go to a really good supermarket, do you know how many Ragùs there are? 36! In six varieties: Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional — Extra-Chunky Garden. (Laughter) That's Howard's doing. That is Howard's gift to the American people. Now why is that important? (Laughter) It is, in fact, enormously important. I'll explain to you why. What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy. Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat, what will make people happy, is to ask them. And for years and years and years, Ragù and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit you down, and they would say, "What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce." And for all those years — 20, 30 years — through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did. (Laughter) People don't know what they want! As Howard loves to say, "The mind knows not what the tongue wants." It's a mystery! (Laughter) And a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want, deep down. If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you'd say? Every one of you would say, "I want a dark, rich, hearty roast." It's what people always say when you ask them. "What do you like?" "Dark, rich, hearty roast!" What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee. (Laughter) But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want that "I want a milky, weak coffee." So that's number one thing that Howard did. Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize — it's another very critical point — he made us realize the importance of what he likes to call "horizontal segmentation." Why is this critical? Because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. What were they obsessed with in the early 80s? They were obsessed with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Used to be, there were two mustards: French's and Gulden's. What were they? Yellow mustard. What's in it? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit, much more delicate aromatics. And what do they do? They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though it's made in Oxnard, California. (Laughter) And instead of charging a dollar fifty for the eight-ounce bottle, the way that French's and Gulden's did, they decided to charge four dollars. And they had those ads. With the guy in the Rolls Royce, eating the Grey Poupon. Another pulls up, and says, "Do you have any Grey Poupon?" And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard business! And everyone's take-home lesson from that was that the way to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. It's to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. (Laughter) A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning. And Howard looked to that and said, "That's wrong!" Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks. Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. (Laughter) What do I mean by that? (Laughter) For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one way, a perfect way, to make a dish. You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction. They don't give you five options on the reduction. They don't say, "Do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or ...?" No! You just get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red-tail sashimi. "This is the way it ought to be." And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say, "You know what? You're wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant." Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. They had a Platonic notion of what tomato sauce was. And where did that come from? It came from Italy. Italian tomato sauce is what? It's blended; it's thin. The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about "authentic tomato sauce" in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce, we talked about the earliest Ragùs, which had no visible solids, right? Which were thin, you just put a little bit and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That's what it was. And why were we attached to that? Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, A. And B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that's what would please the maximum number of people. In other words, people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it's good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science, through the 19th century and much of the 20th, was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science, we don't want to know, necessarily, just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. I guess my cancer different from your cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability. What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying, "This same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce." And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks. I'll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is — oh, I'm sorry. Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food, we aren't just making an error; we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. And the example he used was coffee. And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafé. If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee — a type of coffee, a brew — that made all of you happy, and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe three or four coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters, your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78. The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy. That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness. Thank you. (Applause)

The freakonomics of crack dealing

Steven Levitt

{0: 'Steven Levitt'}

{0: ['economist']}

{0: "Steven Levitt's eye-opening <em>Freakonomics</em> took economic theory into the real world of suburban parenting and urban drug gangs, turning conventional wisdom upside-down."}

2004-02-27

2006-09-19

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'cities', 'culture', 'economics', 'race', 'narcotics']

{20: 'Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce', 2247: "How we're priming some kids for college — and others for prison", 1897: 'Does money make you mean?', 43333: 'The political power of being a good neighbor', 2261: 'How we cut youth violence in Boston by 79 percent', 2299: 'Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_the_freakonomics_of_crack_dealing/

"Freakonomics" author Steven Levitt presents new data on the finances of drug dealing. Contrary to popular myth, he says, being a street-corner crack dealer isn't lucrative: It pays below minimum wage. And your boss can kill you.

You'll be happy to know that I'll be talking not about my own tragedy, but other people's tragedy. It's a lot easier to be lighthearted about other people's tragedy than your own, and I want to keep it in the spirit of the conference. So, if you believe the media accounts, being a drug dealer in the height of the crack cocaine epidemic was a very glamorous life, in the words of Virginia Postrel. There was money, there was drugs, guns, women, you know, you name it — jewelry, bling-bling — it had it all. What I'm going to tell you today is that, in fact, based on 10 years of research, a unique opportunity to go inside a gang — to see the actual books, the financial records of the gang — that the answer turns out not to be that being in the gang was a glamorous life. But I think, more realistically, that being in a gang — selling drugs for a gang — is perhaps the worst job in all of America. And that's what I'd like to convince you of today. So there are three things I want to do. First, I want to explain how and why crack cocaine had such a profound influence on inner-city gangs. Secondly, I want to tell you how somebody like me came to be able to see the inner workings of a gang — an interesting story, I think. And then third, I want to tell you, in a very superficial way, about some of the things we found when we actually got to look at the financial records, the books, of the gang. So before I do that, just one warning, which is that this presentation has been rated 'R' by the Motion Picture Association of America. It contains adult themes, adult language. Given who is up on the stage, you'll be delighted to know that, in fact, there'll be no nudity — (Laughter) Unexpected wardrobe malfunctions aside. (Laughter) So let me start by talking about crack cocaine, and how it transformed the gang. To do that, you have to actually go back to a time before crack cocaine, in the early '80s, and look at it from the perspective of a gang leader. Being a gang leader in the inner city wasn't such a bad deal in the mid-'80s — the early '80s, let me say. Now, you had a lot of power, and you got to beat people up — you got a lot of prestige, a lot of respect. But the thing is, there was no money in it. The gang had no way to make money. You couldn't charge dues to the people in the gang, because the people in the gang didn't have any money. You couldn't really make any money selling marijuana — marijuana's too cheap, it turns out. You can't get rich selling marijuana. You couldn't sell cocaine; cocaine's a great product — powdered cocaine — but you've got to know rich white people. And most of the inner-city gang members didn't know any rich white people, so couldn't sell to that market. You couldn't really do petty crime, either. Turns out, petty crime's a terrible way to make a living. As a result, as a gang leader, you had, you know, power — it's a pretty good life — but the thing was, in the end, you were living at home with your mother. And so it wasn't really a career. There were limits to how powerful and important you could be if you had to live at home with your mother. Then along comes crack cocaine. And in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, crack cocaine was the extra-chunky version of tomato sauce for the inner city. (Laughter) Because crack cocaine was an unbelievable innovation. I don't have time to talk about it today, but if you think about it, I would say that in the last 25 years, of every invention or innovation that's occurred in this country, the biggest one in terms of impact on the well-being of people who live in the inner city, was crack cocaine. And for the worse — not for the better, but for the worse. It had a huge impact on life. So what was it about crack cocaine? It was a brilliant way of getting the brain high. Because you could smoke crack cocaine — you can't smoke powdered cocaine — and smoking is a much more efficient mechanism of delivering a high than snorting it. And it turned out there was this audience that didn't know it wanted crack cocaine, but when it came, it really did. And it was a perfect drug; you could buy the cocaine that went into it for a dollar, sell it for five dollars. Highly addictive — the high was very short. So for fifteen minutes, you get this great high, and then when you come down, all you want to do is get high again. It created a wonderful market. And for the people who were there running the gang, it was a great way, seemingly, to make a lot of money. At least for the people on the top. So this is where we enter the picture. Not really me — I'm really a bit player in all this. My co-author, Sudhir Venkatesh, is the main character. He was a math major in college who had a good heart, and decided he wanted to get a sociology PhD, came to the University of Chicago. Now, the three months before he came to Chicago, he had spent following the Grateful Dead. And in his own words, he "looked like a freak." He's a South Asian — very dark-skinned South Asian. Big man, and he had hair, in his words, "down to his ass." Defied all kinds of boundaries: Was he black or white? Was he man or woman? He was really a curious sight to be seen. So he showed up at the University of Chicago, and the famous sociologist William Julius Wilson was doing a book that involved surveying people all across Chicago. He took one look at Sudhir, who was going to go do some surveys for him, and decided he knew exactly the place to send him, which was to one of the toughest, most notorious housing projects not just in Chicago, but in the entire United States. So Sudhir, the suburban boy who had never really been in the inner city, dutifully took his clipboard and walked down to this housing project, gets to the first building. The first building? Well, there's nobody there. But he hears some voices up in the stairwell, so he climbs up the stairwell, comes around the corner, and finds a group of young African-American men playing dice. This is about 1990, peak of the crack epidemic. This is a very dangerous job, being in a gang. You don't like to be surprised. You don't like to be surprised by people who come around the corner. And the mantra was: shoot first; ask questions later. Now, Sudhir was lucky — he was such a freak, and that clipboard probably saved his life, because they figured no other rival gang member would be coming up to shoot at them with a clipboard. (Laughter) So his greeting was not particularly warm, but they did say, well, OK — let's hear your questions on your survey. So — I kid you not — the first question on the survey that he was sent to ask was: "How do you feel about being poor and Black in America?" (Laughter) Makes you wonder about academics. (Laughter) So the choice of answers were: [A) Very Good B) Good C) Bad D) Very Bad] (Laughter) What Sudhir found out is, in fact, that the real answer was the following: [A) Very Good B) Good C) Bad D) Very Bad E) Fuck you] (Laughter) The survey was not, in the end, going to be what got Sudhir off the hook. He was held hostage overnight in the stairwell. There was a lot of gunfire, there were a lot of philosophical discussions he had with the gang members. By morning, the gang leader arrived, checked out Sudhir, decided he was no threat, and they let him go home. So Sudhir went home, took a shower, took a nap. And you and I, probably, faced with the situation, would think, "I guess I'm going to write my dissertation on The Grateful Dead, I've been following them for the last three months." (Laughter) Sudhir, on the other hand, got right back, walked down to the housing project, went up to the second floor, and said: "Hey, guys, I had so much fun hanging out with you last night, I wonder if I could do it again tonight." And that was the beginning of what turned out to be a beautiful relationship that involved Sudhir living in the housing project on and off for 10 years, hanging out in crack houses, going to jail with the gang members, having the windows shot out of his car, having the police break into his apartment and steal his computer disks — you name it. But ultimately, the story has a happy ending for Sudhir, who became one of the most respected sociologists in the country. And especially for me, as I sat in my office with my Excel spreadsheet open, waiting for Sudhir to come and deliver to me the latest load of data that he would get from the gang. (Laughter) It was one of the most unequal co-authoring relationships ever — (Laughter) But I was glad to be the beneficiary of it. So what did we find? What did we find in the gang? Well, let me say one thing: We really got access to everybody in the gang. We got an inside look at the gang, from the very bottom up to the very top. They trusted Sudhir, in ways that really no academic has ever — or really anybody, any outsider — has ever earned the trust of these gangs, to the point where they actually opened up what was most interesting for me — their books, the financial records they kept. They made them available to us, and we not only could study them, but we could ask them questions about what was in them. So if I have to kind of summarize very quickly in the short time I have what the bottom line of what I take away from the gang is, it's that, if I had to draw a parallel between the gang and any other organization, it would be that the gang is just like McDonald's, in a lot of different respects — the restaurant McDonald's. So first, in one way, which isn't maybe the most interesting way, but it's a good way to start — is in the way it's organized, the hierarchy of the gang, the way it looks. So here's what the org chart of the gang looks like. I don't know if you know much about org charts, but if you were to assign a stripped-down and simplified McDonald's org chart, this is exactly what it would look like. It's amazing, but the top level of the gang, they actually call themselves the "Board of Directors." (Laughter) And Sudhir says it's not like these guys had a very sophisticated view of what happened in American corporate life, but they had seen movies like "Wall Street," and they had learned a little bit about what it was like to be in the real world. Now, below that board of directors, you've got essentially what are regional VPs — people who control, say, the South Side of Chicago, or the West Side of Chicago. Sudhir got to know very well the guy who had the unfortunate assignment of trying to take the Iowa franchise, which, it turned out, for this black gang, was not one of the more brilliant financial endeavors they undertook. (Laughter) But the thing that really makes the gang seem like McDonald's is its franchisees. The guys who are running the local gangs — the four-square-block by four-square-block areas — they're just like the guys, in some sense, who are running the McDonald's. They are the entrepreneurs. They get the exclusive property rights to control the drug-selling. They get the name of the gang behind them, for merchandising and marketing. And they're the ones who basically make the profit or lose a profit, depending on how good they are at running the business. Now, the group I really want you to think about, though, are the ones at the bottom — the foot soldiers. These are the teenagers, typically, who'd be standing out on the street corner, selling the drugs. Extremely dangerous work. And important to note is that almost all of the weight, all of the people in this organization are at the bottom — just like McDonald's. So in some sense, the foot soldiers are a lot like the people who are taking your order at McDonald's, and it's not just by chance that they're like them. In fact, in these neighborhoods, they'd be the same people. So the same kids who are working in the gang were actually, at the very same time, typically working part-time at a place like McDonald's. Which already foreshadows the main result that I've talked about, about what a crappy job it was, being in the gang. Because obviously, if being in the gang were such a wonderful, lucrative job, why in the world would these guys moonlight at McDonald's? So what do the wages look like? You might be surprised. But based on being able to talk to them and to see their records, this is what it looks like in terms of the wages. The hourly wage the foot soldiers were earning was $3.50 an hour. It was below the minimum wage. And this is well-documented. It's easy to see by the patterns of consumption they have. It really is not fiction — it's fact. There was very little money in the gang, especially at the bottom. Now if you managed to rise up, say, and be that local leader, the guy who's the equivalent of the McDonald's franchisee, you'd be making 100,000 dollars a year. And that, in some ways, was the best job you could hope to get if you were growing up in one of these neighborhoods as a young black male. If you managed to rise to the very top, 200,000 or 400,000 dollars a year is what you'd hope to make. Truly, you would be a great success story. And one of the sad parts of this is that, indeed, among the many other ramifications of crack cocaine is that the most talented individuals in these communities — this is what they were striving for. They weren't trying to make it in legitimate ways, because there were no legitimate channels out. This was the best way out. And it actually was the right choice, probably, to try to make it out this way. You look at this, the relationship to McDonald's breaks down here. The money looks about the same. Why is it such a bad job? Well, the reason it's such a bad job is that there's somebody shooting at you a lot of the time. So, with shooting at you, what are the death rates? We found, in our gang — and admittedly, this was not really a standard situation; this was a time of intense violence, of a lot of gang wars, as this gang actually became quite successful. But there were costs. And so the death rate — not to mention the rate of being arrested, sent to prison, being wounded — the death rate in our sample was seven percent per person per year. You're in the gang for four years, you expect to die with about a 25 percent likelihood. That is about as high as you can get. So for comparison's purposes, let's think about some other walk of life you may expect might be extremely risky. Let's say that you were a murderer and you were convicted of murder, and you're sent to death row. It turns out, the death rates on death row from all causes, including execution: two percent a year. (Laughter) So it's a lot safer being on death row than it is selling drugs out on the street. That gives you some pause, for those of you who believe that a death penalty's going to have an enormous deterrent effect on crime. To give you a sense of just how bad the inner city was during crack — and I'm not really focusing on the negatives, but really, there's another story to tell you there — if you look at the death rates just of random, young black males growing up in the inner city in the United States, the death rates during crack were about one percent. That's extremely high. And this is violent death — it's unbelievable, in some sense. To put it into perspective: if you compare this to the soldiers in Iraq, for instance, right now fighting the war: 0.5 percent. So in some very literal way, the young black men who were growing up in this country were living in a war zone, very much in the sense that the soldiers over in Iraq are fighting in a war. So why in the world, you might ask, would anybody be willing to stand out on a street corner selling drugs for $3.50 an hour, with a 25 percent chance of dying over the next four years? Why would they do that? And I think there are a couple answers. I think the first one is that they got fooled by history. It used to be the gang was a rite of passage; that the young people controlled the gang; that as you got older, you dropped out of the gang. So what happened was, the people who happened to be in the right place at the right time — the people who happened to be leading the gang in the mid-to-late-'80s — became very, very wealthy. And so the logical thing to think was that they are going to age out of the gang like everybody else has, and the next generation is going to take over and get the wealth. There are striking similarities, I think, to the Internet boom. The first set of people in Silicon Valley got very, very rich. And then all of my friends said, "Maybe I should go do that, too." And they were willing to work very cheap for stock options that never came. In some sense, that's what happened, exactly, to the set of people we were looking at. They were willing to start at the bottom, just like, say, a first-year lawyer at a law firm is willing to start at the bottom, work 80-hour weeks for not that much money, because they think they're going to make partner. But the rules changed, and they never got to make partner. Indeed, the same people who were running all of the major gangs in the late 1980s are still running the major gangs in Chicago today. They never passed on any of the wealth, So everybody got stuck at that $3.50-an-hour job, and it turned out to be a disaster. The other thing the gang was very good at was marketing and trickery. And so for instance, one thing the gang would do is — the gang leaders would have big entourages, and they'd drive fancy cars and have fancy jewelry. So what Sudhir eventually realized as he hung out with them more, is that, really, they didn't own those cars — they just leased them, because they couldn't afford to own the fancy cars. And they didn't really have gold jewelry, they had gold-plated jewelry. It goes back to, you know, the real-real versus the fake-real. And really, they did all sorts of things to trick the young people into thinking what a great deal the gang was going to be. So for instance, they would give a 14-year-old kid a whole roll of bills to hold. That 14-year-old kid would say to his friends, "Hey, look at all the money I got in the gang." It wasn't his money — until he spent it, and then he was in debt to the gang, and was sort of an indentured servant for a while. So I have a couple minutes. Let me do one last thing I hadn't thought I'd have time to do, which is to talk about what we learned more generally about economics, from the study of the gang. So, economists tend to talk in technical words. Often, our theories fail quite miserably when we over the data, but what's kind of interesting is that in this setting, it turned out that some of the economic theories that worked not so well in the real economy worked very well in the drug economy, in some sense, because it's unfettered capitalism. Here's an economic principle. This is one of the basic ideas in labor economics, called a "compensating differential." It's the idea that the increment to wages that a worker requires to leave him indifferent between performing two tasks, one which is more unpleasant than the other. Compensating differential — it's why we think garbagemen might be paid more than people who work in parks. The words of one of the members of the gang, I think, make this clear. So it turns out — I'm sort of getting ahead of myself — it turns out, in the gang, when there's a war going on, they actually pay the foot soldiers twice as much money. It's exactly this concept. Because they're not willing to be at risk. And the words of a gang member capture it quite nicely, he says: "Would you stand around here when all this shit ..." — the shooting — "... if all this shit's going on? No, right? So if I gonna be asked to put my life on the line, then front me the cash, man." I think the gang member says it much more articulately than the economist, about what's going on. (Laughter) Here's another one. Economists talk about game theory, that every two-person game has a Nash equilibrium. Here's the translation you get from the gang member. They're talking about the decision of why they don't go shoot — One thing that turns out to be a great business tactic in the gang: if you go and just shoot guns in the air in the other gang's territory — people are afraid to go buy drugs there, they're going to come into your neighborhood. Here's what he says about why they don't do that: "If we start shooting around there, the other gang's territory, nobody, I mean, you dig it, nobody gonna step on their turf. But we gotta be careful, 'cause they can shoot around here too and then we all fucked." (Laughter) So that's the same concept. Then again, sometimes economists get it wrong. One thing we observed in the data is that it looked like — the gang leader always got paid. No matter how bad it was economically, he always got himself paid. We had some theories related to cash flow, and lack of access to capital markets, and things like that. Then we asked the gang member, "Why is it you always get paid and your workers don't always get paid?" His response is, "You got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig? If you start taking losses, they see you as weak and shit." And I thought about it and said, "CEOs often pay themselves million-dollar bonuses, even when companies are losing a lot of money. And it never would really occur to an economist that this idea of 'weak and shit' could really be important." (Laughter) Maybe "weak and shit" is an important hypothesis that needs more analysis. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The surprising science of happiness

Dan Gilbert

{0: 'Dan Gilbert'}

{0: ['psychologist; happiness expert']}

{0: 'Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, <em>Stumbling on Happiness.</em>'}

2004-02-02

2006-09-26

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'gl', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'is', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'lv', 'mk', 'mn', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['brain', 'choice', 'culture', 'evolution', 'happiness', 'psychology', 'science']

{944: 'The Happy Planet Index', 1880: 'Want to be happy? Be grateful', 2162: 'Happy maps', 191: 'The habits of happiness', 312: 'The new era of positive psychology', 787: 'Plug into your hard-wired happiness'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_surprising_science_of_happiness/

Dan Gilbert, author of "Stumbling on Happiness," challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don't go as planned.

When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet, in two million years, the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter-pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf everybody here has between their ears. What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one? Well, it turns out when brains triple in size, they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the "frontal lobe," particularly, a part called the "prefrontal cortex." What does a prefrontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time? Well, it turns out the prefrontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is it's an experience simulator. Pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It's a marvelous adaptation. It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall. (Laughter) All of you have done this. Ben and Jerry's doesn't have "liver and onion" ice cream, and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, "Yuck!" It's because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say "yuck" before you make it. Let's see how your experience simulators are working. Let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate. You can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. (Laughter) Just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought. Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up! These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture. Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives. Don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, has revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the "impact bias," which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly, for the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than, in fact, they really are. From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. A recent study — this almost floors me — a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness. Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, "I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me." What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head? Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all of us have. Human beings have something that we might think of as a "psychological immune system," a system of cognitive processes, largely nonconscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine. Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it. We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found. Now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect, though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence. You don't have to look very far for evidence. I took a copy of the "New York Times" and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness. Here are three guys synthesizing happiness. "I'm better off physically, financially, mentally ..." "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." "I believe it turned out for the best." Who are these characters who are so damn happy? The first one is Jim Wright. Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives, and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal that he had done. He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country lost everything: he lost his money, he lost his power. What does he have to say all these years later about it? "I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way." What other way would there be to be better off? Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there. Moreese Bickham is somebody you've never heard of. Moreese Bickham uttered these words upon being released. He was 78 years old. He'd spent 37 years in Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit. He was ultimately [released for good behavior halfway through his sentence.] What did he have to say about his experience? "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." Glorious! This guy's not saying, "There were some nice guys. They had a gym." "Glorious" — a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience. Harry S. Langerman uttered these words. He's somebody you might have known but didn't, because in 1949, he read a little article in the paper about a hamburger stand owned by these two brothers named McDonald. And he thought, "That's a really neat idea!" So he went to find them. They said, "We can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks." Harry went back to New York, asked his brother, an investment banker, to loan him 3,000 dollars, and his brother's immortal words were, "You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers." He wouldn't lend him the money. Of course, six months later, Ray Kroc had exactly the same idea. It turns out, people do eat hamburgers, and Ray Kroc, for a while, became the richest man in America. And then, finally, some of you recognize this young photo of Pete Best, who was the original drummer for the Beatles, until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck away and picked up Ringo on a tour. Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed — yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician — he had this to say: "I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles." OK, there's something important to be learned from these people, and it is the secret of happiness. Here it is, finally to be revealed. First: accrue wealth, power and prestige, then lose it. (Laughter) Second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can. (Laughter) Third: make somebody else really, really rich. And finally: never, ever join the Beatles. (Laughter) Yeah, right. Because when people synthesize happiness, as these gentlemen seem to have done, we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say, "Yeah, right, you never really wanted the job." "Oh yeah, right — you really didn't have that much in common with her, and you figured that out just about the time she threw the engagement ring in your face." We smirk, because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what we might call "natural happiness." What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind. Why do we have that belief? Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it? With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable, because they don't want stuff enough. (Laughter) I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. Now, I'm a scientist, so I'm going to do this not with rhetoric, but by marinating you in a little bit of data. Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that's used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks. This isn't mine, it's a 50-year-old paradigm called the "free choice paradigm." It's very simple. You bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. In this case, because this experiment uses them, these are Monet prints. Everybody ranks these Monet prints from the one they like the most to the one they like the least. Now we give you a choice: "We happen to have some extra prints in the closet. We're going to give you one as your prize to take home. We happen to have number three and number four," we tell the subject. This is a bit of a difficult choice, because neither one is preferred strongly to the other, but naturally, people tend to pick number three, because they liked it a little better than number four. Sometime later — it could be 15 minutes, it could be 15 days — the same stimuli are put before the subject, and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli. "Tell us how much you like them now." What happens? Watch as happiness is synthesized. This is the result that's been replicated over and over again. You're watching happiness be synthesized. Would you like to see it again? Happiness! "The one I got is really better than I thought! That other one I didn't get sucks!" That's the synthesis of happiness. (Laughter) Now, what's the right response to that? "Yeah, right!" Now, here's the experiment we did, and I hope this is going to convince you that "Yeah, right!" was not the right response. We did this experiment with a group of patients who had anterograde amnesia. These are hospitalized patients. Most of them have Korsakoff syndrome, a polyneuritic psychosis. They drank way too much, and they can't make new memories. They remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself and then leave the room, when you come back, they don't know who you are. We took our Monet prints to the hospital. And we asked these patients to rank them from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least. We then gave them the choice between number three and number four. Like everybody else, they said, "Gee, thanks Doc! That's great! I could use a new print. I'll take number three." We explained we would have number three mailed to them. We gathered up our materials, and we went out of the room and counted to a half hour. (Laughter) Back into the room, we say, "Hi, we're back." The patients, bless them, say, "Ah, Doc, I'm sorry, I've got a memory problem; that's why I'm here. If I've met you before, I don't remember." "Really, Jim, you don't remember? I was just here with the Monet prints?" "Sorry, Doc, I just don't have a clue." "No problem, Jim. All I want you to do is rank these for me, from the one you like the most to the one you like the least." What do they do? Well, let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac. We ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own, which one they chose last time, which one is theirs. And what we find is, amnesiac patients just guess. These are normal controls, where if I did this with you, all of you would know which print you chose. But if I do this with amnesiac patients, they don't have a clue. They can't pick their print out of a lineup. Here's what normal controls do: they synthesize happiness. Right? This is the change in liking score, the change from the first time they ranked to the second time they ranked. Normal controls show — that was the magic I showed you; now I'm showing it to you in graphical form — "The one I own is better than I thought. The one I didn't own, the one I left behind, is not as good as I thought." Amnesiacs do exactly the same thing. Think about this result. These people like better the one they own, but they don't know they own it. "Yeah, right" is not the right response! What these people did when they synthesized happiness is they really, truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster. They're not just saying it because they own it, because they don't know they own it. When psychologists show you bars, you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people. And yet, all of us have this psychological immune system, this capacity to synthesize happiness, but some of us do this trick better than others. And some situations allow anybody to do it more effectively than other situations do. It turns out that freedom, the ability to make up your mind and change your mind, is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. But freedom to choose, to change and make up your mind, is the enemy of synthetic happiness, and I'm going to show you why. Dilbert already knows, of course. "Dogbert's tech support. How may I abuse you?" "My printer prints a blank page after every document." "Why complain about getting free paper?" "Free? Aren't you just giving me my own paper?" "Look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper! Only a fool or a liar would say that they look the same!" "Now that you mention it, it does seem a little silkier!" "What are you doing?" "I'm helping people accept the things they cannot change." Indeed. The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped. This is the difference between dating and marriage. You go out on a date with a guy, and he picks his nose; you don't go out on another date. You're married to a guy and he picks his nose? He has a heart of gold. Don't touch the fruitcake! You find a way to be happy with what's happened. (Laughter) Now, what I want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves, and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage. Here's an experiment we did at Harvard. We created a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras, they went around campus, they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog, and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of. They bring us the camera, we make up a contact sheet, they figure out which are the two best pictures. We now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms, and they blow two of them up. They have two gorgeous 8 x 10 glossies of meaningful things to them, and we say, "Which one would you like to give up?" "I have to give one up?" "Yes, we need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice. You get to keep one, and I get to keep one." Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, "But you know, if you want to change your mind, I'll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters" — yeah, "headquarters" — (Laughter) "I'll be glad to swap it out with you. In fact, I'll come to your dorm room, just give me an email. Better yet, I'll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable." The other half of the students are told exactly the opposite: "Make your choice, and by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again." Half of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next three to six days on their satisfaction with the pictures. Look at what we find. First of all, here's what students think is going to happen. They think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind. But these are not statistically significant differences. It's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition. Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here's what's really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot. And people who are deliberating — "Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one. Maybe I left the good one?" — have killed themselves. They don't like their picture. In fact, even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don't like their picture. Why? Because the [reversible] condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness. So here's the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, "You know, we're doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you'd have four days to change your mind, or we're doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?" Duh! Sixty-six percent of the students, two-thirds, prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? Sixty-six percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture — (Laughter) because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows. The Bard said everything best, of course, and he's making my point here but he's making it hyperbolically: "'Tis nothing good or bad But thinking makes it so." It's nice poetry, but that can't exactly be right. Is there really nothing good or bad? Is it really the case that gall bladder surgery and a trip to Paris are just the same thing? (Laughter) That seems like a one-question IQ test. They can't be exactly the same. In more turgid prose, but closer to the truth, was the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, and he said this. This is worth contemplating: "The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice." In other words: yes, some things are better than others. We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we're prudent, we're cautious, we're thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly. The lesson I want to leave you with, from these data, is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience. Thank you. (Applause)

The paradox of choice

Barry Schwartz

{0: 'Barry Schwartz'}

{0: ['psychologist']}

{0: "Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. Lately, working with Ken Sharpe, he's studying wisdom."}

2005-07-15

2006-09-26

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'lv', 'mk', 'mr', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sh', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'choice', 'culture', 'decision-making', 'economics', 'happiness', 'personal growth', 'potential', 'psychology']

{2023: 'How to make hard choices', 924: 'The art of choosing', 2044: 'Our unhealthy obsession with choice', 58010: 'How to make faster decisions', 10361: ' Do you really know why you do what you do?', 2799: 'Why you should define your fears instead of your goals'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choice/

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things you've already heard, and I'll try to make some connections myself, in case you miss them. But I want to start with what I call the "official dogma." The official dogma of what? The official dogma of all Western industrial societies. And the official dogma runs like this: if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. The reason for this is both that freedom is, in and of itself, good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human, and because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have. This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. And it's also deeply embedded in our lives. I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us. This is my supermarket. Not such a big one. I want to say just a word about salad dressing. A hundred seventy-five salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 extra-virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off-chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. So this is what the supermarket is like. And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system — speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier — and in this one single consumer electronics store, there are that many stereo systems. We can construct six and a half million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store. You've got to admit that's a lot of choice. In other domains — the world of communications. There was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone, you didn't buy it. One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. And those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. These are cell phones of the future. My favorite is the middle one — the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and crème brûlée torch. And if — (Laughter) if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon, you will. And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores, asking this question. And do you know what the answer to this question now is? The answer is "no." It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much. So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, the same explosion of choice is true. Health care. It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, "Well, we could do A, or we could do B. A has these benefits and these risks. B has these benefits and these risks. What do you want to do?" And you say, "Doc, what should I do?" And the doc says, "A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do?" And you say, "If you were me, Doc, what would you do?" And the doc says, "But I'm not you." And the result is — we call it "patient autonomy," which makes it sound like a good thing, but what it really is is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision-making from somebody who knows something — namely, the doctor — to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus, not in the best shape to be making decisions — namely, the patient. There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me, which, if you think about it, makes no sense at all, since we can't buy them. Why do they market to us if we can't buy them? The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed. Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice, as this slide is meant to indicate. We don't inherit an identity; we get to invent it. And we get to reinvent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day, when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be. With respect to marriage and family: there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could, and then you started having kids as soon as you could. The only real choice was who, not when, and not what you did after. Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs. I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20 percent less work than I used to. And it's not because they're less smart, and it's not because they're less diligent. It's because they are preoccupied, asking themselves, "Should I get married or not? Should I get married now? Should I get married later? Should I have kids first or a career first?" All of these are consuming questions. And they're going to answer these questions, whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign and not getting a good grade in my courses. And indeed they should. These are important questions to answer. Work. We are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet — except the Randolph Hotel. (Laughter) (Applause) There is one corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell anybody about, where the WiFi actually works. I'm not telling you about it, because I want to use it. So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is that we have to make a decision, again and again and again, about whether we should or shouldn't be working. We can go to watch our kid play soccer, and we have our cell phone on one hip and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. And even if they're all shut off, every minute that we're watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are also asking ourselves, "Should I answer this cell phone call? Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?" And even if the answer to the question is "no," it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would've been. So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in looked like this. [Well, actually, they are written in stone.] That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice. The world we now live in looks like this. [The Ten Commandments Do-It-Yourself Kit] And the question is: Is this good news or bad news? And the answer is "yes." (Laughter) We all know what's good about it, so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it. All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. I'll give you one very dramatic example of this, a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual fund company, of about a million employees and about 2,000 different workplaces. What she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percent. You offer 50 funds — 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose, that you'll just put it off till tomorrow, and then tomorrow and then tomorrow and tomorrow, and, of course, tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don't have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer. By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution. So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. And I think it makes the world look like this. [And lastly, for all eternity, French, bleu cheese or ranch?] (Laughter) You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right? You don't want to pick the wrong mutual fund or wrong salad dressing. So that's one effect. The second effect is that, even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. And there are several reasons for this. One of them is, with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one and it's not perfect — and what salad dressing is? — it's easy to imagine that you could've made a different choice that would've been better. And what happens is, this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose. Second, what economists call "opportunity costs." Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it's easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. Here's an example. [I can't stop thinking about those other available parking spaces on W 85th Street] If you're not a New Yorker, I apologize. Here's what you're supposed to be thinking. Here's this couple on the Hamptons. Very expensive real estate. Gorgeous beach. Beautiful day. They have it all to themselves. What could be better? "Damn it," this guy is thinking, "It's August. Everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away. I could be parking right in front of my building." And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space. (Laughter) Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction that we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs. Here's another example. (Laughter) Now, this cartoon makes a lot of points. It makes points about living in the moment as well, and probably about doing things slowly. But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing, you're choosing not to do other things, and those other things may have lots of attractive features, and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive. Third: escalation of expectations. This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans almost all the time. There was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap. They were incredibly uncomfortable, and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times, they started to feel OK. I went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones. I said, "I want a pair of jeans. Here's my size." And the shopkeeper said, "Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid-washed? Do you want them distressed? Do you want boot cut, tapered?" Blah, blah, blah on and on he went. My jaw dropped. And after I recovered, I said, "I want the kind that used to be the only kind." (Laughter) He had no idea what that was. (Laughter) So I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store — truth — with the best-fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But — I felt worse. Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself. The reason is — (Laughter) The reason I felt worse is that with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had very low, no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results. [It all looks so great. I can't wait to be disappointed.] Nobody in the world of marketing knows this. Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. The truth is more like this. [Everything was better back when everything was worse.] The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in — we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation — the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised, because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness — this is what you all came for — the secret to happiness is: low expectations. (Laughter) [You'll do] (Applause) (Laughter) I want to say — just a little autobiographical moment — that I actually am married to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. But settling isn't always such a bad thing. Finally, one consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear: the world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available and you buy one that is disappointing and you ask why, who's responsible, it is equally clear that the answer to the question is "you." You could have done better. With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them; they blame themselves. Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant — not the only, but a significant — contributor to this explosion of depression and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault. So the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. So let me remind you: this is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. There's no question that some choice is better than none. But it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare. Now, as a policy matter — I'm almost done — as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this: what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. Their problem is they have too little. So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this: Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult-to-install child seats don't help. It's a waste of money. What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices — it's not simply that they don't help. They actually hurt. They actually make us worse off. If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is what economists call a "Pareto-improving move." Income redistribution will make everyone better off, not just poor people, because of how all this excess choice plagues us. So to conclude. [You can be anything you want to be — no limits.] You're supposed to read this cartoon and, being a sophisticated person, say, "Ah! What does this fish know? Nothing is possible in this fishbowl." Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world — that's the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is, if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certainly too limited — perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery and, I suspect, disaster. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Meet the future of cancer research

Eva Vertes

{0: 'Eva Vertes'}

{0: ['neuroscience and cancer researcher']}

{0: "Eva Vertes is a microbiology prodigy. Her discovery, at age 17, of a compound that stops fruit-fly brain cells from dying was regarded as a step toward curing Alzheimer's. Now she aims to find better ways to treat -- and avoid -- cancer."}

2005-02-26

2006-10-02

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['cancer', 'disease', 'health', 'science', 'technology', 'wunderkind']

{2109: 'The future of early cancer detection?', 859: 'Can we eat to starve cancer?', 1498: "How I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's", 1229: 'Fighting a contagious cancer', 1343: 'Treating cancer with electric fields', 3231: 'We can hack our immune cells to fight cancer'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/eva_vertes_meet_the_future_of_cancer_research/

Eva Vertes -- only 19 when she gave this talk -- discusses her journey toward studying medicine and her drive to understand the roots of cancer and Alzheimer’s.

Thank you. It's really an honor and a privilege to be here spending my last day as a teenager. Today I want to talk to you about the future, but first I'm going to tell you a bit about the past. My story starts way before I was born. My grandmother was on a train to Auschwitz, the death camp. And she was going along the tracks, and the tracks split. And somehow — we don't really know exactly the whole story — but the train took the wrong track and went to a work camp rather than the death camp. My grandmother survived and married my grandfather. They were living in Hungary, and my mother was born. And when my mother was two years old, the Hungarian revolution was raging, and they decided to escape Hungary. They got on a boat, and yet another divergence — the boat was either going to Canada or to Australia. They got on and didn't know where they were going, and ended up in Canada. So, to make a long story short, they came to Canada. My grandmother was a chemist. She worked at the Banting Institute in Toronto, and at 44 she died of stomach cancer. I never met my grandmother, but I carry on her name — her exact name, Eva Vertes — and I like to think I carry on her scientific passion, too. I found this passion not far from here, actually, when I was nine years old. My family was on a road trip and we were in the Grand Canyon. And I had never been a reader when I was young — my dad had tried me with the Hardy Boys; I tried Nancy Drew; I tried all that — and I just didn't like reading books. And my mother bought this book when we were at the Grand Canyon called "The Hot Zone." It was all about the outbreak of the Ebola virus. And something about it just kind of drew me towards it. There was this big sort of bumpy-looking virus on the cover, and I just wanted to read it. I picked up that book, and as we drove from the edge of the Grand Canyon to Big Sur, and to, actually, here where we are today, in Monterey, I read that book, and from when I was reading that book, I knew that I wanted to have a life in medicine. I wanted to be like the explorers I'd read about in the book, who went into the jungles of Africa, went into the research labs and just tried to figure out what this deadly virus was. So from that moment on, I read every medical book I could get my hands on, and I just loved it so much. I was a passive observer of the medical world. It wasn't until I entered high school that I thought, "Maybe now, you know — being a big high school kid — I can maybe become an active part of this big medical world." I was 14, and I emailed professors at the local university to see if maybe I could go work in their lab. And hardly anyone responded. But I mean, why would they respond to a 14-year-old, anyway? And I got to go talk to one professor, Dr. Jacobs, who accepted me into the lab. At that time, I was really interested in neuroscience and wanted to do a research project in neurology — specifically looking at the effects of heavy metals on the developing nervous system. So I started that, and worked in his lab for a year, and found the results that I guess you'd expect to find when you feed fruit flies heavy metals — that it really, really impaired the nervous system. The spinal cord had breaks. The neurons were crossing in every which way. And from then I wanted to look not at impairment, but at prevention of impairment. So that's what led me to Alzheimer's. I started reading about Alzheimer's and tried to familiarize myself with the research, and at the same time when I was in the — I was reading in the medical library one day, and I read this article about something called "purine derivatives." And they seemed to have cell growth-promoting properties. And being naive about the whole field, I kind of thought, "Oh, you have cell death in Alzheimer's which is causing the memory deficit, and then you have this compound — purine derivatives — that are promoting cell growth." And so I thought, "Maybe if it can promote cell growth, it can inhibit cell death, too." And so that's the project that I pursued for that year, and it's continuing now as well, and found that a specific purine derivative called "guanidine" had inhibited the cell growth by approximately 60 percent. So I presented those results at the International Science Fair, which was just one of the most amazing experiences of my life. And there I was awarded "Best in the World in Medicine," which allowed me to get in, or at least get a foot in the door of the big medical world. And from then on, since I was now in this huge exciting world, I wanted to explore it all. I wanted it all at once, but knew I couldn't really get that. And I stumbled across something called "cancer stem cells." And this is really what I want to talk to you about today — about cancer. At first when I heard of cancer stem cells, I didn't really know how to put the two together. I'd heard of stem cells, and I'd heard of them as the panacea of the future — the therapy of many diseases to come in the future, perhaps. But I'd heard of cancer as the most feared disease of our time, so how did the good and bad go together? Last summer I worked at Stanford University, doing some research on cancer stem cells. And while I was doing this, I was reading the cancer literature, trying to — again — familiarize myself with this new medical field. And it seemed that tumors actually begin from a stem cell. This fascinated me. The more I read, the more I looked at cancer differently and almost became less fearful of it. It seems that cancer is a direct result to injury. If you smoke, you damage your lung tissue, and then lung cancer arises. If you drink, you damage your liver, and then liver cancer occurs. And it was really interesting — there were articles correlating if you have a bone fracture, and then bone cancer arises. Because what stem cells are — they're these phenomenal cells that really have the ability to differentiate into any type of tissue. So, if the body is sensing that you have damage to an organ and then it's initiating cancer, it's almost as if this is a repair response. And the cancer, the body is saying the lung tissue is damaged, we need to repair the lung. And cancer is originating in the lung trying to repair — because you have this excessive proliferation of these remarkable cells that really have the potential to become lung tissue. But it's almost as if the body has originated this ingenious response, but can't quite control it. It hasn't yet become fine-tuned enough to finish what has been initiated. So this really, really fascinated me. And I really think that we can't think about cancer — let alone any disease — in such black-and-white terms. If we eliminate cancer the way we're trying to do now, with chemotherapy and radiation, we're bombarding the body or the cancer with toxins, or with radiation, trying to kill it. It's almost as if we're getting back to this starting point. We're removing the cancer cells, but we're revealing the previous damage that the body has tried to fix. Shouldn't we think about manipulation, rather than elimination? If somehow we can cause these cells to differentiate — to become bone tissue, lung tissue, liver tissue, whatever that cancer has been put there to do — it would be a repair process. We'd end up better than we were before cancer. So, this really changed my view of looking at cancer. And while I was reading all these articles about cancer, it seemed that the articles — a lot of them — focused on, you know, the genetics of breast cancer, and the genesis and the progression of breast cancer — tracking the cancer through the body, tracing where it is, where it goes. But it struck me that I'd never heard of cancer of the heart, or cancer of any skeletal muscle for that matter. And skeletal muscle constitutes 50 percent of our body, or over 50 percent of our body. And so at first I kind of thought, "Well, maybe there's some obvious explanation why skeletal muscle doesn't get cancer — at least not that I know of." So, I looked further into it, found as many articles as I could, and it was amazing — because it turned out that it was very rare. Some articles even went as far as to say that skeletal muscle tissue is resistant to cancer, and furthermore, not only to cancer, but of metastases going to skeletal muscle. And what metastases are is when the tumor — when a piece — breaks off and travels through the blood stream and goes to a different organ. That's what a metastasis is. It's the part of cancer that is the most dangerous. If cancer was localized, we could likely remove it, or somehow — you know, it's contained. It's very contained. But once it starts moving throughout the body, that's when it becomes deadly. So the fact that not only did cancer not seem to originate in skeletal muscles, but cancer didn't seem to go to skeletal muscle — there seemed to be something here. So these articles were saying, you know, "Skeletal — metastasis to skeletal muscle — is very rare." But it was left at that. No one seemed to be asking why. So I decided to ask why. At first — the first thing I did was I emailed some professors who specialized in skeletal muscle physiology, and pretty much said, "Hey, it seems like cancer doesn't really go to skeletal muscle. Is there a reason for this?" And a lot of the replies I got were that muscle is terminally differentiated tissue. Meaning that you have muscle cells, but they're not dividing, so it doesn't seem like a good target for cancer to hijack. But then again, this fact that the metastases didn't go to skeletal muscle made that seem unlikely. And furthermore, that nervous tissue — brain — gets cancer, and brain cells are also terminally differentiated. So I decided to ask why. And here's some of, I guess, my hypotheses that I'll be starting to investigate this May at the Sylvester Cancer Institute in Miami. And I guess I'll keep investigating until I get the answers. But I know that in science, once you get the answers, inevitably you're going to have more questions. So I guess you could say that I'll probably be doing this for the rest of my life. Some of my hypotheses are that when you first think about skeletal muscle, there's a lot of blood vessels going to skeletal muscle. And the first thing that makes me think is that blood vessels are like highways for the tumor cells. Tumor cells can travel through the blood vessels. And you think, the more highways there are in a tissue, the more likely it is to get cancer or to get metastases. So first of all I thought, you know, "Wouldn't it be favorable to cancer getting to skeletal muscle?" And as well, cancer tumors require a process called angiogenesis, which is really, the tumor recruits the blood vessels to itself to supply itself with nutrients so it can grow. Without angiogenesis, the tumor remains the size of a pinpoint and it's not harmful. So angiogenesis is really a central process to the pathogenesis of cancer. And one article that really stood out to me when I was just reading about this, trying to figure out why cancer doesn't go to skeletal muscle, was that it had reported 16 percent of micro-metastases to skeletal muscle upon autopsy. 16 percent! Meaning that there were these pinpoint tumors in skeletal muscle, but only .16 percent of actual metastases — suggesting that maybe skeletal muscle is able to control the angiogenesis, is able to control the tumors recruiting these blood vessels. We use skeletal muscles so much. It's the one portion of our body — our heart's always beating. We're always moving our muscles. Is it possible that muscle somehow intuitively knows that it needs this blood supply? It needs to be constantly contracting, so therefore it's almost selfish. It's grabbing its blood vessels for itself. Therefore, when a tumor comes into skeletal muscle tissue, it can't get a blood supply, and can't grow. So this suggests that maybe if there is an anti-angiogenic factor in skeletal muscle — or perhaps even more, an angiogenic routing factor, so it can actually direct where the blood vessels grow — this could be a potential future therapy for cancer. And another thing that's really interesting is that there's this whole — the way tumors move throughout the body, it's a very complex system — and there's something called the chemokine network. And chemokines are essentially chemical attractants, and they're the stop and go signals for cancer. So a tumor expresses chemokine receptors, and another organ — a distant organ somewhere in the body — will have the corresponding chemokines, and the tumor will see these chemokines and migrate towards it. Is it possible that skeletal muscle doesn't express this type of molecules? And the other really interesting thing is that when skeletal muscle — there's been several reports that when skeletal muscle is injured, that's what correlates with metastases going to skeletal muscle. And, furthermore, when skeletal muscle is injured, that's what causes chemokines — these signals saying, "Cancer, you can come to me," the "go signs" for the tumors — it causes them to highly express these chemokines. So, there's so much interplay here. I mean, there are so many possibilities for why tumors don't go to skeletal muscle. But it seems like by investigating, by attacking cancer, by searching where cancer is not, there has got to be something — there's got to be something — that's making this tissue resistant to tumors. And can we utilize — can we take this property, this compound, this receptor, whatever it is that's controlling these anti-tumor properties and apply it to cancer therapy in general? Now, one thing that kind of ties the resistance of skeletal muscle to cancer — to the cancer as a repair response gone out of control in the body — is that skeletal muscle has a factor in it called "MyoD." And what MyoD essentially does is, it causes cells to differentiate into muscle cells. So this compound, MyoD, has been tested on a lot of different cell types and been shown to actually convert this variety of cell types into skeletal muscle cells. So, is it possible that the tumor cells are going to the skeletal muscle tissue, but once in contact inside the skeletal muscle tissue, MyoD acts upon these tumor cells and causes them to become skeletal muscle cells? Maybe tumor cells are being disguised as skeletal muscle cells, and this is why it seems as if it is so rare. It's not harmful; it has just repaired the muscle. Muscle is constantly being used — constantly being damaged. If every time we tore a muscle or every time we stretched a muscle or moved in a wrong way, cancer occurred — I mean, everybody would have cancer almost. And I hate to say that. But it seems as though muscle cell, possibly because of all its use, has adapted faster than other body tissues to respond to injury, to fine-tune this repair response and actually be able to finish the process which the body wants to finish. I really believe that the human body is very, very smart, and we can't counteract something the body is saying to do. It's different when a bacteria comes into the body — that's a foreign object — we want that out. But when the body is actually initiating a process and we're calling it a disease, it doesn't seem as though elimination is the right solution. So even to go from there, it's possible, although far-fetched, that in the future we could almost think of cancer being used as a therapy. If those diseases where tissues are deteriorating — for example Alzheimer's, where the brain, the brain cells, die and we need to restore new brain cells, new functional brain cells — what if we could, in the future, use cancer? A tumor — put it in the brain and cause it to differentiate into brain cells? That's a very far-fetched idea, but I really believe that it may be possible. These cells are so versatile, these cancer cells are so versatile — we just have to manipulate them in the right way. And again, some of these may be far-fetched, but I figured if there's anywhere to present far-fetched ideas, it's here at TED, so thank you very much. (Applause)

A roadmap to end aging

Aubrey de Grey

{0: 'Aubrey de Grey'}

{0: ['crusader against aging']}

{0: 'Aubrey de Grey, British researcher on aging, claims he has drawn a roadmap to defeat biological aging. He provocatively proposes that the first human beings who will live to 1,000 years old have already been born.'}

2005-07-14

2006-10-02

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'ms', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['aging', 'biotech', 'disease', 'engineering', 'future', 'health care', 'science', 'technology']

{252: 'Your genes are not your fate', 142: 'The potential of regenerative medicine', 12: 'Meet the future of cancer research', 515: 'To upgrade is human', 44: 'A philosophical quest for our biggest problems', 727: 'How to live to be 100+'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_a_roadmap_to_end_aging/

Cambridge researcher Aubrey de Grey argues that aging is merely a disease -- and a curable one at that. Humans age in seven basic ways, he says, all of which can be averted.

18 minutes is an absolutely brutal time limit, so I'm going to dive straight in, right at the point where I get this thing to work. Here we go. I'm going to talk about five different things. I'm going to talk about why defeating aging is desirable. I'm going to talk about why we have to get our shit together, and actually talk about this a bit more than we do. I'm going to talk about feasibility as well, of course. I'm going to talk about why we are so fatalistic about doing anything about aging. And then I'm going spend perhaps the second half of the talk talking about, you know, how we might actually be able to prove that fatalism is wrong, namely, by actually doing something about it. I'm going to do that in two steps. The first one I'm going to talk about is how to get from a relatively modest amount of life extension — which I'm going to define as 30 years, applied to people who are already in middle-age when you start — to a point which can genuinely be called defeating aging. Namely, essentially an elimination of the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year — or indeed, to get sick in the first place. And of course, the last thing I'm going to talk about is how to reach that intermediate step, that point of maybe 30 years life extension. So I'm going to start with why we should. Now, I want to ask a question. Hands up: anyone in the audience who is in favor of malaria? That was easy. OK. OK. Hands up: anyone in the audience who's not sure whether malaria is a good thing or a bad thing? OK. So we all think malaria is a bad thing. That's very good news, because I thought that was what the answer would be. Now the thing is, I would like to put it to you that the main reason why we think that malaria is a bad thing is because of a characteristic of malaria that it shares with aging. And here is that characteristic. The only real difference is that aging kills considerably more people than malaria does. Now, I like in an audience, in Britain especially, to talk about the comparison with foxhunting, which is something that was banned after a long struggle, by the government not very many months ago. I mean, I know I'm with a sympathetic audience here, but, as we know, a lot of people are not entirely persuaded by this logic. And this is actually a rather good comparison, it seems to me. You know, a lot of people said, "Well, you know, city boys have no business telling us rural types what to do with our time. It's a traditional part of the way of life, and we should be allowed to carry on doing it. It's ecologically sound; it stops the population explosion of foxes." But ultimately, the government prevailed in the end, because the majority of the British public, and certainly the majority of members of Parliament, came to the conclusion that it was really something that should not be tolerated in a civilized society. And I think that human aging shares all of these characteristics in spades. What part of this do people not understand? It's not just about life, of course — (Laughter) — it's about healthy life, you know — getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun, whether or not dying may be fun. So really, this is how I would like to describe it. It's a global trance. These are the sorts of unbelievable excuses that people give for aging. And, I mean, OK, I'm not actually saying that these excuses are completely valueless. There are some good points to be made here, things that we ought to be thinking about, forward planning so that nothing goes too — well, so that we minimize the turbulence when we actually figure out how to fix aging. But these are completely crazy, when you actually remember your sense of proportion. You know, these are arguments; these are things that would be legitimate to be concerned about. But the question is, are they so dangerous — these risks of doing something about aging — that they outweigh the downside of doing the opposite, namely, leaving aging as it is? Are these so bad that they outweigh condemning 100,000 people a day to an unnecessarily early death? You know, if you haven't got an argument that's that strong, then just don't waste my time, is what I say. (Laughter) Now, there is one argument that some people do think really is that strong, and here it is. People worry about overpopulation; they say, "Well, if we fix aging, no one's going to die to speak of, or at least the death toll is going to be much lower, only from crossing St. Giles carelessly. And therefore, we're not going to be able to have many kids, and kids are really important to most people." And that's true. And you know, a lot of people try to fudge this question, and give answers like this. I don't agree with those answers. I think they basically don't work. I think it's true, that we will face a dilemma in this respect. We will have to decide whether to have a low birth rate, or a high death rate. A high death rate will, of course, arise from simply rejecting these therapies, in favor of carrying on having a lot of kids. And, I say that that's fine — the future of humanity is entitled to make that choice. What's not fine is for us to make that choice on behalf of the future. If we vacillate, hesitate, and do not actually develop these therapies, then we are condemning a whole cohort of people — who would have been young enough and healthy enough to benefit from those therapies, but will not be, because we haven't developed them as quickly as we could — we'll be denying those people an indefinite life span, and I consider that that is immoral. That's my answer to the overpopulation question. Right. So the next thing is, now why should we get a little bit more active on this? And the fundamental answer is that the pro-aging trance is not as dumb as it looks. It's actually a sensible way of coping with the inevitability of aging. Aging is ghastly, but it's inevitable, so, you know, we've got to find some way to put it out of our minds, and it's rational to do anything that we might want to do, to do that. Like, for example, making up these ridiculous reasons why aging is actually a good thing after all. But of course, that only works when we have both of these components. And as soon as the inevitability bit becomes a little bit unclear — and we might be in range of doing something about aging — this becomes part of the problem. This pro-aging trance is what stops us from agitating about these things. And that's why we have to really talk about this a lot — evangelize, I will go so far as to say, quite a lot — in order to get people's attention, and make people realize that they are in a trance in this regard. So that's all I'm going to say about that. I'm now going to talk about feasibility. And the fundamental reason, I think, why we feel that aging is inevitable is summed up in a definition of aging that I'm giving here. A very simple definition. Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place, which is to say, metabolism. This is not a completely tautological statement; it's a reasonable statement. Aging is basically a process that happens to inanimate objects like cars, and it also happens to us, despite the fact that we have a lot of clever self-repair mechanisms, because those self-repair mechanisms are not perfect. So basically, metabolism, which is defined as basically everything that keeps us alive from one day to the next, has side effects. Those side effects accumulate and eventually cause pathology. That's a fine definition. So we can put it this way: we can say that, you know, we have this chain of events. And there are really two games in town, according to most people, with regard to postponing aging. They're what I'm calling here the "gerontology approach" and the "geriatrics approach." The geriatrician will intervene late in the day, when pathology is becoming evident, and the geriatrician will try and hold back the sands of time, and stop the accumulation of side effects from causing the pathology quite so soon. Of course, it's a very short-term-ist strategy; it's a losing battle, because the things that are causing the pathology are becoming more abundant as time goes on. The gerontology approach looks much more promising on the surface, because, you know, prevention is better than cure. But unfortunately the thing is that we don't understand metabolism very well. In fact, we have a pitifully poor understanding of how organisms work — even cells we're not really too good on yet. We've discovered things like, for example, RNA interference only a few years ago, and this is a really fundamental component of how cells work. Basically, gerontology is a fine approach in the end, but it is not an approach whose time has come when we're talking about intervention. So then, what do we do about that? I mean, that's a fine logic, that sounds pretty convincing, pretty ironclad, doesn't it? But it isn't. Before I tell you why it isn't, I'm going to go a little bit into what I'm calling step two. Just suppose, as I said, that we do acquire — let's say we do it today for the sake of argument — the ability to confer 30 extra years of healthy life on people who are already in middle age, let's say 55. I'm going to call that "robust human rejuvenation." OK. What would that actually mean for how long people of various ages today — or equivalently, of various ages at the time that these therapies arrive — would actually live? In order to answer that question — you might think it's simple, but it's not simple. We can't just say, "Well, if they're young enough to benefit from these therapies, then they'll live 30 years longer." That's the wrong answer. And the reason it's the wrong answer is because of progress. There are two sorts of technological progress really, for this purpose. There are fundamental, major breakthroughs, and there are incremental refinements of those breakthroughs. Now, they differ a great deal in terms of the predictability of time frames. Fundamental breakthroughs: very hard to predict how long it's going to take to make a fundamental breakthrough. It was a very long time ago that we decided that flying would be fun, and it took us until 1903 to actually work out how to do it. But after that, things were pretty steady and pretty uniform. I think this is a reasonable sequence of events that happened in the progression of the technology of powered flight. We can think, really, that each one is sort of beyond the imagination of the inventor of the previous one, if you like. The incremental advances have added up to something which is not incremental anymore. This is the sort of thing you see after a fundamental breakthrough. And you see it in all sorts of technologies. Computers: you can look at a more or less parallel time line, happening of course a bit later. You can look at medical care. I mean, hygiene, vaccines, antibiotics — you know, the same sort of time frame. So I think that actually step two, that I called a step a moment ago, isn't a step at all. That in fact, the people who are young enough to benefit from these first therapies that give this moderate amount of life extension, even though those people are already middle-aged when the therapies arrive, will be at some sort of cusp. They will mostly survive long enough to receive improved treatments that will give them a further 30 or maybe 50 years. In other words, they will be staying ahead of the game. The therapies will be improving faster than the remaining imperfections in the therapies are catching up with us. This is a very important point for me to get across. Because, you know, most people, when they hear that I predict that a lot of people alive today are going to live to 1,000 or more, they think that I'm saying that we're going to invent therapies in the next few decades that are so thoroughly eliminating aging that those therapies will let us live to 1,000 or more. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that the rate of improvement of those therapies will be enough. They'll never be perfect, but we'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of, before we have any 200-year-olds. And the same for 300 and 400 and so on. I decided to give this a little name, which is "longevity escape velocity." (Laughter) Well, it seems to get the point across. So, these trajectories here are basically how we would expect people to live, in terms of remaining life expectancy, as measured by their health, for given ages that they were at the time that these therapies arrive. If you're already 100, or even if you're 80 — and an average 80-year-old, we probably can't do a lot for you with these therapies, because you're too close to death's door for the really initial, experimental therapies to be good enough for you. You won't be able to withstand them. But if you're only 50, then there's a chance that you might be able to pull out of the dive and, you know — (Laughter) — eventually get through this and start becoming biologically younger in a meaningful sense, in terms of your youthfulness, both physical and mental, and in terms of your risk of death from age-related causes. And of course, if you're a bit younger than that, then you're never really even going to get near to being fragile enough to die of age-related causes. So this is a genuine conclusion that I come to, that the first 150-year-old — we don't know how old that person is today, because we don't know how long it's going to take to get these first-generation therapies. But irrespective of that age, I'm claiming that the first person to live to 1,000 — subject of course, to, you know, global catastrophes — is actually, probably, only about 10 years younger than the first 150-year-old. And that's quite a thought. Alright, so finally I'm going to spend the rest of the talk, my last seven-and-a-half minutes, on step one; namely, how do we actually get to this moderate amount of life extension that will allow us to get to escape velocity? And in order to do that, I need to talk about mice a little bit. I have a corresponding milestone to robust human rejuvenation. I'm calling it "robust mouse rejuvenation," not very imaginatively. And this is what it is. I say we're going to take a long-lived strain of mouse, which basically means mice that live about three years on average. We do exactly nothing to them until they're already two years old. And then we do a whole bunch of stuff to them, and with those therapies, we get them to live, on average, to their fifth birthday. So, in other words, we add two years — we treble their remaining lifespan, starting from the point that we started the therapies. The question then is, what would that actually mean for the time frame until we get to the milestone I talked about earlier for humans? Which we can now, as I've explained, equivalently call either robust human rejuvenation or longevity escape velocity. Secondly, what does it mean for the public's perception of how long it's going to take for us to get to those things, starting from the time we get the mice? And thirdly, the question is, what will it do to actually how much people want it? And it seems to me that the first question is entirely a biology question, and it's extremely hard to answer. One has to be very speculative, and many of my colleagues would say that we should not do this speculation, that we should simply keep our counsel until we know more. I say that's nonsense. I say we absolutely are irresponsible if we stay silent on this. We need to give our best guess as to the time frame, in order to give people a sense of proportion so that they can assess their priorities. So, I say that we have a 50/50 chance of reaching this RHR milestone, robust human rejuvenation, within 15 years from the point that we get to robust mouse rejuvenation. 15 years from the robust mouse. The public's perception will probably be somewhat better than that. The public tends to underestimate how difficult scientific things are. So they'll probably think it's five years away. They'll be wrong, but that actually won't matter too much. And finally, of course, I think it's fair to say that a large part of the reason why the public is so ambivalent about aging now is the global trance I spoke about earlier, the coping strategy. That will be history at this point, because it will no longer be possible to believe that aging is inevitable in humans, since it's been postponed so very effectively in mice. So we're likely to end up with a very strong change in people's attitudes, and of course that has enormous implications. So in order to tell you now how we're going to get these mice, I'm going to add a little bit to my description of aging. I'm going to use this word "damage" to denote these intermediate things that are caused by metabolism and that eventually cause pathology. Because the critical thing about this is that even though the damage only eventually causes pathology, the damage itself is caused ongoing-ly throughout life, starting before we're born. But it is not part of metabolism itself. And this turns out to be useful. Because we can re-draw our original diagram this way. We can say that, fundamentally, the difference between gerontology and geriatrics is that gerontology tries to inhibit the rate at which metabolism lays down this damage. And I'm going to explain exactly what damage is in concrete biological terms in a moment. And geriatricians try to hold back the sands of time by stopping the damage converting into pathology. And the reason it's a losing battle is because the damage is continuing to accumulate. So there's a third approach, if we look at it this way. We can call it the "engineering approach," and I claim that the engineering approach is within range. The engineering approach does not intervene in any processes. It does not intervene in this process or this one. And that's good because it means that it's not a losing battle, and it's something that we are within range of being able to do, because it doesn't involve improving on evolution. The engineering approach simply says, "Let's go and periodically repair all of these various types of damage — not necessarily repair them completely, but repair them quite a lot, so that we keep the level of damage down below the threshold that must exist, that causes it to be pathogenic." We know that this threshold exists, because we don't get age-related diseases until we're in middle age, even though the damage has been accumulating since before we were born. Why do I say that we're in range? Well, this is basically it. The point about this slide is actually the bottom. If we try to say which bits of metabolism are important for aging, we will be here all night, because basically all of metabolism is important for aging in one way or another. This list is just for illustration; it is incomplete. The list on the right is also incomplete. It's a list of types of pathology that are age-related, and it's just an incomplete list. But I would like to claim to you that this list in the middle is actually complete — this is the list of types of thing that qualify as damage, side effects of metabolism that cause pathology in the end, or that might cause pathology. And there are only seven of them. They're categories of things, of course, but there's only seven of them. Cell loss, mutations in chromosomes, mutations in the mitochondria and so on. First of all, I'd like to give you an argument for why that list is complete. Of course one can make a biological argument. One can say, "OK, what are we made of?" We're made of cells and stuff between cells. What can damage accumulate in? The answer is: long-lived molecules, because if a short-lived molecule undergoes damage, but then the molecule is destroyed — like by a protein being destroyed by proteolysis — then the damage is gone, too. It's got to be long-lived molecules. So, these seven things were all under discussion in gerontology a long time ago and that is pretty good news, because it means that, you know, we've come a long way in biology in these 20 years, so the fact that we haven't extended this list is a pretty good indication that there's no extension to be done. However, it's better than that; we actually know how to fix them all, in mice, in principle — and what I mean by in principle is, we probably can actually implement these fixes within a decade. Some of them are partially implemented already, the ones at the top. I haven't got time to go through them at all, but my conclusion is that, if we can actually get suitable funding for this, then we can probably develop robust mouse rejuvenation in only 10 years, but we do need to get serious about it. We do need to really start trying. So of course, there are some biologists in the audience, and I want to give some answers to some of the questions that you may have. You may have been dissatisfied with this talk, but fundamentally you have to go and read this stuff. I've published a great deal on this; I cite the experimental work on which my optimism is based, and there's quite a lot of detail there. The detail is what makes me confident of my rather aggressive time frames that I'm predicting here. So if you think that I'm wrong, you'd better damn well go and find out why you think I'm wrong. And of course the main thing is that you shouldn't trust people who call themselves gerontologists because, as with any radical departure from previous thinking within a particular field, you know, you expect people in the mainstream to be a bit resistant and not really to take it seriously. So, you know, you've got to actually do your homework, in order to understand whether this is true. And we'll just end with a few things. One thing is, you know, you'll be hearing from a guy in the next session who said some time ago that he could sequence the human genome in half no time, and everyone said, "Well, it's obviously impossible." And you know what happened. So, you know, this does happen. We have various strategies — there's the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which is basically an incentive to innovate, and to do what you think is going to work, and you get money for it if you win. There's a proposal to actually put together an institute. This is what's going to take a bit of money. But, I mean, look — how long does it take to spend that on the war in Iraq? Not very long. OK. (Laughter) It's got to be philanthropic, because profits distract biotech, but it's basically got a 90 percent chance, I think, of succeeding in this. And I think we know how to do it. And I'll stop there. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: OK. I don't know if there's going to be any questions but I thought I would give people the chance. Audience: Since you've been talking about aging and trying to defeat it, why is it that you make yourself appear like an old man? (Laughter) AG: Because I am an old man. I am actually 158. (Laughter) (Applause) Audience: Species on this planet have evolved with immune systems to fight off all the diseases so that individuals live long enough to procreate. However, as far as I know, all the species have evolved to actually die, so when cells divide, the telomerase get shorter, and eventually species die. So, why does — evolution has — seems to have selected against immortality, when it is so advantageous, or is evolution just incomplete? AG: Brilliant. Thank you for asking a question that I can answer with an uncontroversial answer. I'm going to tell you the genuine mainstream answer to your question, which I happen to agree with, which is that, no, aging is not a product of selection, evolution; [aging] is simply a product of evolutionary neglect. In other words, we have aging because it's hard work not to have aging; you need more genetic pathways, more sophistication in your genes in order to age more slowly, and that carries on being true the longer you push it out. So, to the extent that evolution doesn't matter, doesn't care whether genes are passed on by individuals, living a long time or by procreation, there's a certain amount of modulation of that, which is why different species have different lifespans, but that's why there are no immortal species. CA: The genes don't care but we do? AG: That's right. Audience: Hello. I read somewhere that in the last 20 years, the average lifespan of basically anyone on the planet has grown by 10 years. If I project that, that would make me think that I would live until 120 if I don't crash on my motorbike. That means that I'm one of your subjects to become a 1,000-year-old? AG: If you lose a bit of weight. (Laughter) Your numbers are a bit out. The standard numbers are that lifespans have been growing at between one and two years per decade. So, it's not quite as good as you might think, you might hope. But I intend to move it up to one year per year as soon as possible. Audience: I was told that many of the brain cells we have as adults are actually in the human embryo, and that the brain cells last 80 years or so. If that is indeed true, biologically are there implications in the world of rejuvenation? If there are cells in my body that live all 80 years, as opposed to a typical, you know, couple of months? AG: There are technical implications certainly. Basically what we need to do is replace cells in those few areas of the brain that lose cells at a respectable rate, especially neurons, but we don't want to replace them any faster than that — or not much faster anyway, because replacing them too fast would degrade cognitive function. What I said about there being no non-aging species earlier on was a little bit of an oversimplification. There are species that have no aging — Hydra for example — but they do it by not having a nervous system — and not having any tissues in fact that rely for their function on very long-lived cells.

Invest in Africa's own solutions

Jacqueline Novogratz

{0: 'Jacqueline Novogratz'}

{0: ['investor and advocate for moral leadership']}

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

2005-07-01

2006-10-10

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sq', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'culture', 'entrepreneur', 'investment', 'microfinance', 'philanthropy', 'poverty', 'global development']

{2213: 'In praise of macro -- yes, macro -- finance in Africa', 154: 'Why invest in Africa', 127: 'Want to help Africa? Do business here', 157: 'Patient capitalism', 644: 'A third way to think about aid', 847: 'Social experiments to fight poverty'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jacqueline_novogratz_invest_in_africa_s_own_solutions/

Jacqueline Novogratz applauds the world's heightened interest in Africa and poverty, but argues persuasively for a new approach.

I want to start with a story, a la Seth Godin, from when I was 12 years old. My uncle Ed gave me a beautiful blue sweater — at least I thought it was beautiful. And it had fuzzy zebras walking across the stomach, and Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru were kind of right across the chest, that were also fuzzy. And I wore it whenever I could, thinking it was the most fabulous thing I owned. Until one day in ninth grade, when I was standing with a number of the football players. And my body had clearly changed, and Matt, who was undeniably my nemesis in high school, said in a booming voice that we no longer had to go far away to go on ski trips, but we could all ski on Mount Novogratz. (Laughter) And I was so humiliated and mortified that I immediately ran home to my mother and chastised her for ever letting me wear the hideous sweater. We drove to the Goodwill and we threw the sweater away somewhat ceremoniously, my idea being that I would never have to think about the sweater nor see it ever again. Fast forward — 11 years later, I'm a 25-year-old kid. I'm working in Kigali, Rwanda, jogging through the steep slopes, when I see, 10 feet in front of me, a little boy — 11 years old — running toward me, wearing my sweater. And I'm thinking, no, this is not possible. But so, curious, I run up to the child — of course scaring the living bejesus out of him — grab him by the collar, turn it over, and there is my name written on the collar of this sweater. I tell that story, because it has served and continues to serve as a metaphor to me about the level of connectedness that we all have on this Earth. We so often don't realize what our action and our inaction does to people we think we will never see and never know. I also tell it because it tells a larger contextual story of what aid is and can be. That this traveled into the Goodwill in Virginia, and moved its way into the larger industry, which at that point was giving millions of tons of secondhand clothing to Africa and Asia. Which was a very good thing, providing low cost clothing. And at the same time, certainly in Rwanda, it destroyed the local retailing industry. Not to say that it shouldn't have, but that we have to get better at answering the questions that need to be considered when we think about consequences and responses. So, I'm going to stick in Rwanda, circa 1985, 1986, where I was doing two things. I had started a bakery with 20 unwed mothers. We were called the "Bad News Bears," and our notion was we were going to corner the snack food business in Kigali, which was not hard because there were no snacks before us. And because we had a good business model, we actually did it, and I watched these women transform on a micro-level. But at the same time, I started a micro-finance bank, and tomorrow Iqbal Quadir is going to talk about Grameen, which is the grandfather of all micro-finance banks, which now is a worldwide movement — you talk about a meme — but then it was quite new, especially in an economy that was moving from barter into trade. We got a lot of things right. We focused on a business model; we insisted on skin in the game. The women made their own decisions at the end of the day as to how they would use this access to credit to build their little businesses, earn more income so they could take care of their families better. What we didn't understand, what was happening all around us, with the confluence of fear, ethnic strife and certainly an aid game, if you will, that was playing into this invisible but certainly palpable movement inside Rwanda, that at that time, 30 percent of the budget was all foreign aid. The genocide happened in 1994, seven years after these women all worked together to build this dream. And the good news was that the institution, the banking institution, lasted. In fact, it became the largest rehabilitation lender in the country. The bakery was completely wiped out, but the lessons for me were that accountability counts — got to build things with people on the ground, using business models where, as Steven Levitt would say, the incentives matter. Understand, however complex we may be, incentives matter. So when Chris raised to me how wonderful everything that was happening in the world, that we were seeing a shift in zeitgeist, on the one hand I absolutely agree with him, and I was so thrilled to see what happened with the G8 — that the world, because of people like Tony Blair and Bono and Bob Geldof — the world is talking about global poverty; the world is talking about Africa in ways I have never seen in my life. It's thrilling. And at the same time, what keeps me up at night is a fear that we'll look at the victories of the G8 — 50 billion dollars in increased aid to Africa, 40 billion in reduced debt — as the victory, as more than chapter one, as our moral absolution. And in fact, what we need to do is see that as chapter one, celebrate it, close it, and recognize that we need a chapter two that is all about execution, all about the how-to. And if you remember one thing from what I want to talk about today, it's that the only way to end poverty, to make it history, is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor, in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable. If we do that, we really can make poverty history. And it was that — that whole philosophy — that encouraged me to start my current endeavor called "Acumen Fund," which is trying to build some mini-blueprints for how we might do that in water, health and housing in Pakistan, India, Kenya, Tanzania and Egypt. And I want to talk a little bit about that, and some of the examples, so you can see what it is that we're doing. But before I do this — and this is another one of my pet peeves — I want to talk a little bit about who the poor are. Because we too often talk about them as these strong, huge masses of people yearning to be free, when in fact, it's quite an amazing story. On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day. That's who we talk about when we think about "the poor." If you aggregate it, it's the third largest economy on Earth, and yet most of these people go invisible. Where we typically work, there's people making between one and three dollars a day. Who are these people? They are farmers and factory workers. They work in government offices. They're drivers. They are domestics. They typically pay for critical goods and services like water, like healthcare, like housing, and they pay 30 to 40 times what their middleclass counterparts pay — certainly where we work in Karachi and Nairobi. The poor also are willing to make, and do make, smart decisions, if you give them that opportunity. So, two examples. One is in India, where there are 240 million farmers, most of whom make less than two dollars a day. Where we work in Aurangabad, the land is extraordinarily parched. You see people on average making 60 cents to a dollar. This guy in pink is a social entrepreneur named Ami Tabar. What he did was see what was happening in Israel, larger approaches, and figure out how to do a drip irrigation, which is a way of bringing water directly to the plant stock. But previously it's only been created for large-scale farms, so Ami Tabar took this and modularized it down to an eighth of an acre. A couple of principles: build small. Make it infinitely expandable and affordable to the poor. This family, Sarita and her husband, bought a 15-dollar unit when they were living in a — literally a three-walled lean-to with a corrugated iron roof. After one harvest, they had increased their income enough to buy a second system to do their full quarter-acre. A couple of years later, I meet them. They now make four dollars a day, which is pretty much middle class for India, and they showed me the concrete foundation they had just laid to build their house. And I swear, you could see the future in that woman's eyes. Something I truly believe. You can't talk about poverty today without talking about malaria bed nets, and I again give Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard huge kudos for bringing to the world this notion of his rage — for five dollars you can save a life. Malaria is a disease that kills one to three million people a year. 300 to 500 million cases are reported. It's estimated that Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year to the disease. Five dollars can save a life. We can send people to the moon; we can see if there's life on Mars — why can't we get five-dollar nets to 500 million people? The question, though, is not "Why can't we?" The question is how can we help Africans do this for themselves? A lot of hurdles. One: production is too low. Two: price is too high. Three: this is a good road in — right near where our factory is located. Distribution is a nightmare, but not impossible. We started by making a 350,000-dollar loan to the largest traditional bed net manufacturer in Africa so that they could transfer technology from Japan and build these long-lasting, five-year nets. Here are just some pictures of the factory. Today, three years later, the company has employed another thousand women. It contributes about 600,000 dollars in wages to the economy of Tanzania. It's the largest company in Tanzania. The throughput rate right now is 1.5 million nets, three million by the end of the year. We hope to have seven million at the end of next year. So the production side is working. On the distribution side, though, as a world, we have a lot of work to do. Right now, 95 percent of these nets are being bought by the U.N., and then given primarily to people around Africa. We're looking at building on some of the most precious resources of Africa: people. Their women. And so I want you to meet Jacqueline, my namesake, 21 years old. If she were born anywhere else but Tanzania, I'm telling you, she could run Wall Street. She runs two of the lines, and has already saved enough money to put a down payment on her house. She makes about two dollars a day, is creating an education fund, and told me she is not marrying nor having children until these things are completed. And so, when I told her about our idea — that maybe we could take a Tupperware model from the United States, and find a way for the women themselves to go out and sell these nets to others — she quickly started calculating what she herself could make and signed up. We took a lesson from IDEO, one of our favorite companies, and quickly did a prototyping on this, and took Jacqueline into the area where she lives. She brought 10 of the women with whom she interacts together to see if she could sell these nets, five dollars apiece, despite the fact that people say nobody will buy one, and we learned a lot about how you sell things. Not coming in with our own notions, because she didn't even talk about malaria until the very end. First, she talked about comfort, status, beauty. These nets, she said, you put them on the floor, bugs leave your house. Children can sleep through the night; the house looks beautiful; you hang them in the window. And we've started making curtains, and not only is it beautiful, but people can see status — that you care about your children. Only then did she talk about saving your children's lives. A lot of lessons to be learned in terms of how we sell goods and services to the poor. I want to end just by saying that there's enormous opportunity to make poverty history. To do it right, we have to build business models that matter, that are scaleable and that work with Africans, Indians, people all over the developing world who fit in this category, to do it themselves. Because at the end of the day, it's about engagement. It's about understanding that people really don't want handouts, that they want to make their own decisions; they want to solve their own problems; and that by engaging with them, not only do we create much more dignity for them, but for us as well. And so I urge all of you to think next time as to how to engage with this notion and this opportunity that we all have — to make poverty history — by really becoming part of the process and moving away from an us-and-them world, and realizing that it's about all of us, and the kind of world that we, together, want to live in and share. Thank you. (Applause)

How mobile phones can fight poverty

Iqbal Quadir

{0: 'Iqbal Quadir'}

{0: ['founder', 'grameenphone']}

{0: 'Iqbal Quadir is an advocate of business as a humanitarian tool. With GrameenPhone, he brought the first commercial telecom services to poor areas of Bangladesh. His latest project will help rural entrepreneurs build power plants.'}

2005-07-13

2006-10-10

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['alternative energy', 'business', 'communication', 'culture', 'global issues', 'invention', 'investment', 'microfinance', 'poverty', 'technology', 'telecom', 'transportation', 'global development']

{270: 'The "bottom billion"', 157: 'Patient capitalism', 288: 'One Laptop per Child, two years on', 2114: 'Should you donate differently?', 2105: 'The hidden force in global economics: sending money home', 1599: 'How open data is changing international aid'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/iqbal_quadir_how_mobile_phones_can_fight_poverty/

Iqbal Quadir tells how his experiences as a kid in poor Bangladesh, and later as a banker in New York, led him to start a mobile phone operator connecting 80 million rural Bangladeshi -- and to become a champion of bottom-up development.

I'll just take you to Bangladesh for a minute. Before I tell that story, we should ask ourselves the question: Why does poverty exist? I mean, there is plenty of knowledge and scientific breakthroughs. We all live in the same planet, but there's still a great deal of poverty in the world. And I think — so I want to throw a perspective that I have, so that we can assess this project, or any other project, for that matter, to see whether it's contributing or — contributing to poverty or trying to alleviate it. Rich countries have been sending aid to poor countries for the last 60 years. And by and large, this has failed. And you can see this book, written by someone who worked in the World Bank for 20 years, and he finds economic growth in this country to be elusive. By and large, it did not work. So the question is, why is that? In my mind, there is something to learn from the history of Europe. I mean, even here, yesterday I was walking across the street, and they showed three bishops were executed 500 years ago, right across the street from here. So my point is, there's a lot of struggle has gone in Europe, where citizens were empowered by technologies. And they demanded authorities from — to come down from their high horses. And in the end, there's better bargaining between the authorities and citizens, and democracies, capitalism — everything else flourished. And so you can see, the real process of — and this is backed up by this 500-page book — that the authorities came down and citizens got up. But if you look, if you have that perspective, then you can see what happened in the last 60 years. Aid actually did the opposite. It empowered authorities, and, as a result, marginalized citizens. The authorities did not have the reason to make economic growth happen so that they could tax people and make more money for to run their business. Because they were getting it from abroad. And in fact, if you see oil-rich countries, where citizens are not yet empowered, the same thing goes — Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, all sorts of countries. Because the aid and oil or mineral money acts the same way. It empowers authorities, without activating the citizens — their hands, legs, brains, what have you. And if you agree with that, then I think the best way to improve these countries is to recognize that economic development is of the people, by the people, for the people. And that is the real network effect. If citizens can network and make themselves more organized and productive, so that their voices are heard, so then things would improve. And to contrast that, you can see the most important institution in the world, the World Bank, is an organization of the government, by the government, for the governments. Just see the contrast. And that is the perspective I have, and then I can start my story. Of course, how would you empower citizens? There could be all sorts of technologies. And one is cell phones. Recently "The Economist" recognized this, but I stumbled upon the idea 12 years ago, and that's what I've been working on. So 12 years ago, I was trying to be an investment banker in New York. We had — quite a few our colleagues were connected by a computer network. And we got more productive because we didn't have to exchange floppy disks; we could update each other more often. But one time it broke down. And it reminded me of a day in 1971. There was a war going on in my country. And my family moved out of an urban place, where we used to live, to a remote rural area where it was safer. And one time my mother asked me to get some medicine for a younger sibling. And I walked 10 miles or so, all morning, to get there, to the medicine man. And he wasn't there, so I walked all afternoon back. So I had another unproductive day. So while I was sitting in a tall building in New York, I put those two experiences together side by side, and basically concluded that connectivity is productivity — whether it's in a modern office or an underdeveloped village. So naturally, I — the implication of that is that the telephone is a weapon against poverty. And if that's the case, then the question is how many telephones did we have at that time? And it turns out, that there was one telephone in Bangladesh for every 500 people. And all those phones were in the few urban places. The vast rural areas, where 100 million people lived, there were no telephones. So just imagine how many man-months or man-years are wasted, just like I wasted a day. If you just multiply by 100 million people, let's say losing one day a month, whatever, and you see a vast amount of resource wasted. And after all, poor countries, like rich countries, one thing we've got equal, is their days are the same length: 24 hours. So if you lose that precious resource, where you are somewhat equal to the richer countries, that's a huge waste. So I started looking for any evidence that — does connectivity really increase productivity? And I couldn't find much, really, but I found this graph produced by the ITU, which is the International Telecommunication Union, based in Geneva. They show an interesting thing. That you see, the horizontal axis is where you place your country. So the United States or the UK would be here, outside. And so the impact of one new telephone, which is on the vertical axis, is very little. But if you come back to a poorer country, where the GNP per capita is, let's say, 500 dollars, or 300 dollars, then the impact is huge: 6,000 dollars. Or 5,000 dollars. The question was, how much did it cost to install a new telephone in Bangladesh? It turns out: 2,000 dollars. So if you spend 2,000 dollars, and let's say the telephone lasts 10 years, and if 5,000 dollars every year — so that's 50,000 dollars. So obviously this was a gadget to have. And of course, if the cost of installing a telephone is going down, because there's a digital revolution going on, then it would be even more dramatic. And I knew a little economics by then — it says Adam Smith taught us that specialization leads to productivity. But how would you specialize? Let's say I'm a fisherman and a farmer. And Chris is a fisherman farmer. Both are generalists. So the point is that we could only — the only way we could depend on each other, is if we can connect with each other. And if we are neighbors, I could just walk over to his house. But then we are limiting our economic sphere to something very small area. But in order to expand that, you need a river, or you need a highway, or you need telephone lines. But in any event, it's connectivity that leads to dependability. And that leads to specialization. That leads to productivity. So the question was, I started looking at this issue, and going back and forth between Bangladesh and New York. There were a lot of reasons people told me why we don't have enough telephones. And one of them is the lacking buying power. Poor people apparently don't have the power to buy. But the point is, if it's a production tool, why do we have to worry about that? I mean, in America, people buy cars, and they put very little money down. They get a car, and they go to work. The work pays them a salary; the salary allows them to pay for the car over time. The car pays for itself. So if the telephone is a production tool, then we don't quite have to worry about the purchasing power. And of course, even if that's true, then what about initial buying power? So then the question is, why can't we have some kind of shared access? In the United States, we have — everybody needs a banking service, but very few of us are trying to buy a bank. So it's — a bank tends to serve a whole community. So we could do that for telephones. And also people told me that we have a lot of important primary needs to meet: food, clothing, shelter, whatever. But again, it's very paternalistic. You should be raising income and let people decide what they want to do with their money. But the real problem is the lack of other infrastructures. See, you need some kind of infrastructure to bring a new thing. For instance, the Internet was booming in the U.S. because there were — there were people who had computers. They had modems. They had telephone lines, so it's very easy to bring in a new idea, like the Internet. But that's what's lacking in a poor country. So for example, we didn't have ways to have credit checks, few banks to collect bills, etc. But that's why I noticed Grameen Bank, which is a bank for poor people, and had 1,100 branches, 12,000 employees, 2.3 million borrowers. And they had these branches. I thought I could put cell towers and create a network. And anyway, to cut the time short — so I started — I first went to them and said, "You know, perhaps I could connect all your branches and make you more efficient." But you know, they have, after all, evolved in a country without telephones, so they are decentralized. I mean, of course there might be other good reasons, but this was one of the reasons — they had to be. And so they were not that interested to connect all their branches, and then to be — and rock the boat. So I started focusing. What is it that they really do? So what happens is that somebody borrows money from the bank. She typically buys a cow. The cow gives milk. And she sells the milk to the villagers, and pays off the loan. And this is a business for her, but it's milk for everybody else. And suddenly I realized that a cell phone could be a cow. Because some way she could borrow 200 dollars from the bank, get a phone and have the phone for everybody. And it's a business for her. So I wrote to the bank, and they thought for a while, and they said, "It's a little crazy, but logical. If you think it can be done, come and make it happen." So I quit my job; I went back to Bangladesh. I created a company in America called Gonofone, which in Bengali means "people's phone." And angel investors in America put in money into that. I flew around the world. After about a million — I mean, I got rejected from lots of places, because I was not only trying to go to a poor country, I was trying to go to the poor of the poor country. After about a million miles, and a meaningful — a substantial loss of hair, I eventually put together a consortium, and — which involved the Norwegian telephone company, which provided the know-how, and the Grameen Bank provided the infrastructure to spread the service. To make the story short, here is the coverage of the country. You can see it's pretty much covered. Even in Bangladesh, there are some empty places. But we are also investing around another 300 million dollars this year to extend that coverage. Now, about that cow model I talked about. There are about 115,000 people who are retailing telephone services in their neighborhoods. And it's serving 52,000 villages, which represent about 80 million people. And these phones are generating about 100 million dollars for the company. And two dollars profit per entrepreneur per day, which is like 700 dollars per year. And of course, it's very beneficial in a lot of ways. It increases income, improves welfare, etc. And the result is, right now, this company is the largest telephone company, with 3.5 million subscribers, 115,000 of these phones I talked about — that produces about a third of the traffic in the network. And 2004, the net profit, after taxes — very serious taxes — was 120 million dollars. And the company contributed about 190 million dollars to the government coffers. And again, here are some of the lessons. "The government needs to provide economically viable services." Actually, this is an instance where private companies can provide that. "Governments need to subsidize private companies." This is what some people think. And actually, private companies help governments with taxes. "Poor people are recipients." Poor people are a resource. "Services cost too much for the poor." Their involvement reduces the cost. "The poor are uneducated and cannot do much." They are very eager learners and very capable survivors. I've been very surprised. Most of them learn how to operate a telephone within a day. "Poor countries need aid." Businesses — this one company has raised the — if the ideal figures are even five percent true, this one company is raising the GNP of the country much more than the aid the country receives. And as I was trying to show you, as far as I'm concerned, aid does damages because it removes the government from its citizens. And this is a new project I have with Dean Kamen, the famous inventor in America. He has produced some power generators, which we are now doing an experiment in Bangladesh, in two villages where cow manure is producing biogas, which is running these generators. And each of these generators is selling electricity to 20 houses each. It's just an experiment. We don't know how far it will go, but it's going on. Thank you.

How to rebuild a broken state

Ashraf Ghani

{0: 'Ashraf Ghani'}

{0: ['president-elect of afghanistan']}

{0: 'Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s new president-elect, and his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, will share power in a national unity government. He previously served as Finance Minister and as a chancellor of Kabul University.'}

2005-07-12

2006-10-18

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'ps', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'corruption', 'culture', 'economics', 'entrepreneur', 'global issues', 'investment', 'military', 'global development', 'poverty', 'politics', 'policy']

{127: 'Want to help Africa? Do business here', 1929: 'We need money for aid. So let’s print it.', 584: 'New rules for rebuilding a broken nation', 270: 'The "bottom billion"', 152: 'Aid versus trade', 1321: 'In defense of dialogue'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/ashraf_ghani_how_to_rebuild_a_broken_state/

Ashraf Ghani's passionate and powerful 10-minute talk, emphasizing the necessity of both economic investment and design ingenuity to rebuild broken states, is followed by a conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson on the future of Afghanistan.

A public, Dewey long ago observed, is constituted through discussion and debate. If we are to call the tyranny of assumptions into question, and avoid doxa, the realm of the unquestioned, then we must be willing to subject our own assumptions to debate and discussion. It is in this spirit that I join into a discussion of one of the critical issues of our time, namely, how to mobilize different forms of capital for the project of state building. To put the assumptions very clearly: capitalism, after 150 years, has become acceptable, and so has democracy. If we looked in the world of 1945 and looked at the map of capitalist economies and democratic polities, they were the rare exception, not the norm. The question now, however, is both about which form of capitalism and which type of democratic participation. But we must acknowledge that this moment has brought about a rare consensus of assumptions. And that provides the ground for a type of action, because consensus of each moment allows us to act. And it is necessary, no matter how fragile or how provisional our consensus, to be able to move forward. But the majority of the world neither benefits from capitalism nor from democratic systems. Most of the globe experiences the state as repressive, as an organization that is concerned about denial of rights, about denial of justice, rather than provision of it. And in terms of experience of capitalism, there are two aspects that the rest of the globe experiences. First, extractive industry. Blood diamonds, smuggled emeralds, timber, that is cut right from under the poorest. Second is technical assistance. And technical assistance might shock you, but it's the worst form of — today — of the ugly face of the developed world to the developing countries. Tens of billions of dollars are supposedly spent on building capacity with people who are paid up to 1,500 dollars a day, who are incapable of thinking creatively, or organically. Next assumption — and of course the events of July 7, I express my deep sympathy, and before that, September 11 — have reminded us we do not live in three different worlds. We live in one world. But that's easily said. But we are not dealing with the implications of the one world that we are living in. And that is that if we want to have one world, this one world cannot be based on huge pockets of exclusion, and then inclusion for some. We must now finally come to think about the premises of a truly global world, in relationship to the regime of rights and responsibilities and accountabilities that are truly global in scope. Otherwise we will be missing this open moment in history, where we have a consensus on both the form of politics and the form of economics. What is one of these organizations to pick? We have three critical terms: economy, civil society and the state. I will not deal with those first two, except to say that uncritical transfer of assumptions, from one context to another, can only make for disaster. Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy. The poverty of our knowledge must become the first basis of moving forward, and not imposition of the framework that works on the basis of mathematical modeling, for which I have enormous respect. My colleagues at Johns Hopkins were among the best. Second, instead of debating endlessly about what is the structure of the state, why don't we simplify and say, what are a series of functions that the state in the 21st century must perform? Clare Lockhart and I are writing a book on this; we hope to share that much widely with — and third is that we could actually construct an index to measure comparatively how well these functions that we would agree on are being performed in different places. So what are these functions? We propose 10. And it's legitimate monopoly of means of violence, administrative control, management of public finances, investment in human capital, provision of citizenship rights, provision of infrastructure, management of the tangible and intangible assets of the state through regulation, creation of the market, international agreements, including public borrowing, and then, most importantly, rule of law. I won't elaborate. I hope the questions will give me an opportunity. This is a feasible goal, basically because, contrary to widespread assumption, I would argue that we know how to do this. Who would have imagined that Germany would be either united or democratic today, if you looked at it from the perspective of Oxford of 1943? But people at Oxford prepared for a democratic Germany and engaged in planning. And there are lots of other examples. Now in order to do this — and this brings this group — we have to rethink the notion of capital. The least important form of capital, in this project, is financial capital — money. Money is not capital in most of the developing countries. It's just cash. Because it lacks the institutional, organizational, managerial forms to turn it into capital. And what is required is a combination of physical capital, institutional capital, human capital — and security, of course, is critical, but so is information. Now, the issue that should concern us here — and that's the challenge that I would like to pose to this group — is again, it takes 16 years in your countries to produce somebody with a B.S. degree. It takes 20 years to produce somebody with a Ph.D. The first challenge is to rethink, fundamentally, the issue of the time. Do we need to repeat the modalities that we have inherited? Our educational systems are inherited from the 19th century. What is it that we need to do fundamentally to re-engage in a project, that capital formation is rapid? The absolute majority of the world's population are below 20, and they are growing larger and faster. They need different ways of being approached, different ways of being enfranchised, different ways of being skilled. And that's the first thing. Second is, you're problem solvers, but you're not engaging your global responsibility. You've stayed away from the problems of corruption. You only want clean environments in which to function. But if you don't think through the problems of corruption, who will? You stay away from design for development. You're great designers, but your designs are selfish. It's for your own immediate use. The world in which I operate operates with designs regarding roads, or dams, or provision of electricity that have not been revisited in 60 years. This is not right. It requires thinking. But, particularly, what we need more than anything else from this group is your imagination to be brought to bear on problems the way a meme is supposed to work. As the work on paradigms, long time ago showed — Thomas Kuhn's work — it's in the intersection of ideas that new developments — true breakthroughs — occur. And I hope that this group would be able to deal with the issue of state and development and the empowerment of the majority of the world's poor, through this means. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So, Ashraf, until recently, you were the finance minister of Afghanistan, a country right at the middle of much of the world's agenda. Is the country gonna make it? Will democracy flourish? What scares you most? Ashraf Ghani: What scares me most is — is you, lack of your engagement. (Laughter) You asked me. You know I always give the unconventional answer. No. But seriously, the issue of Afghanistan first has to be seen as, at least, a 10- to 20-year perspective. Today the world of globalization is on speed. Time has been compressed. And space does not exist for most people. But in my world — you know, when I went back to Afghanistan after 23 years, space had expanded. Every conceivable form of infrastructure had broken down. I rode — traveled — travel between two cities that used to take three hours now took 12. So the first is when the scale is that, we need to recognize that just the simple things that are infrastructure — it takes six years to deliver infrastructure. In our world. Any meaningful sort of thing. But the modality of attention, or what is happening today, what's happening tomorrow. Second is, when a country has been subjected to one of the most immense, brutal forms of exercise of power — we had the Red Army for 10 continuous years, 110,000 strong, literally terrorizing. The sky: every Afghan sees the sky as a source of fear. We were bombed practically out of existence. Then, tens of thousands of people were trained in terrorism — from all sides. The United States, Great Britain, joined for instance, Egyptian intelligence service to train thousands of people in resistance and urban terrorism. How to turn a bicycle into an instrument of terror. How to turn a donkey, a carthorse, anything. And the Russians, equally. So, when violence erupts in a country like Afghanistan, it's because of that legacy. But we have to understand that we've been incredibly lucky. I mean, I really can't believe how lucky I am here, standing in front of you, speaking. When I joined as finance minister, I thought that the chances of my living more than three years would not be more than five percent. Those were the risks. They were worth it. I think we can make it, and the reason we can make it is because of the people. You see, because, I mean — I give you one statistic. 91 percent of the men in Afghanistan, 86 percent of the women, listen to at least three radio stations a day. In terms of their discourse, in terms of their sophistication of knowledge of the world, I think that I would dare say, they're much more sophisticated than rural Americans with college degrees and the bulk of Europeans — because the world matters to them. And what is their predominant concern? Abandonment. Afghans have become deeply internationalist. You know, when I went back in December of 2001, I had absolutely no desire to work with the Afghan government because I'd lived as a nationalist. And I told them — my people, with the Americans here — separate. Yes, I have an advisory position with the U.N. I went through 10 Afghan provinces very rapidly. And everybody was telling me it was a different world. You know, they engage. They see engagement, global engagement, as absolutely necessary to the future of the ordinary people. And the thing that the ordinary Afghan is most concerned with is — Clare Lockhart is here, so I'll recite a discussion she had with an illiterate woman in Northern Afghanistan. And that woman said she didn't care whether she had food on her table. What she worried about was whether there was a plan for the future, where her children could really have a different life. That gives me hope. CA: How is Afghanistan going to provide alternative income to the many people who are making their living off the drugs trade? AG: Certainly. Well, the first is, instead of sending a billion dollars on drug eradication and paying it to a couple of security companies, they should give this hundred billion dollars to 50 of the most critically innovative companies in the world to ask them to create one million jobs. The key to the drug eradication is jobs. Look, there's a very little known fact: countries that have a legal average income per capita of 1,000 dollars don't produce drugs. Second, textile. Trade is the key, not aid. The U.S. and Europe should give us a zero percent tariff. The textile industry is incredibly mobile. If you want us to be able to compete with China and to attract investment, we could probably attract four to six billion dollars quite easily in the textile sector, if there was zero tariffs — would create the type of job. Cotton does not compete with opium; a t-shirt does. And we need to understand, it's the value chain. Look, the ordinary Afghan is sick and tired of hearing about microcredit. It is important, but what the ordinary women and men who engage in micro-production want is global access. They don't want to sell to the charity bazaars that are only for foreigners — and the same bloody shirt embroidered time and again. What we want is a partnership with the Italian design firms. Yeah, we have the best embroiderers in the world! Why can't we do what was done with northern Italy? With the Put Out system? So I think economically, the critical issue really is to now think through. And what I will say here is that aid doesn't work. You know, the aid system is broken. The aid system does not have the knowledge, the vision, the ability. I'm all for it; after all, I raised a lot of it. Yeah, to be exact, you know, I managed to persuade the world that they had to give my country 27.5 billion. They didn't want to give us the money. CA: And it still didn't work? AG: No. It's not that it didn't work. It's that a dollar of private investment, in my judgment, is equal at least to 20 dollars of aid, in terms of the dynamic that it generates. Second is that one dollar of aid could be 10 cents; it could be 20 cents; or it could be four dollars. It depends on what form it comes, what degrees of conditionalities are attached to it. You know, the aid system, at first, was designed to benefit entrepreneurs of the developed countries, not to generate growth in the poor countries. And this is, again, one of those assumptions — the way car seats are an assumption that we've inherited in governments, and doors. You would think that the US government would not think that American firms needed subsidizing to function in developing countries, provide advice, but they do. There's an entire weight of history vis-a-vis aid that now needs to be reexamined. If the goal is to build states that can credibly take care of themselves — and I'm putting that proposition equally; you know I'm very harsh on my counterparts — aid must end in each country in a definable period. And every year there must be progress on mobilization of domestic revenue and generation of the economy. Unless that kind of compact is entered into, you will not be able to sustain the consensus.

Why we should invest in a free press

Sasa Vucinic

{0: 'Sasa Vucinic'}

{0: ['nonprofit venture capitalist']}

{0: "Sasa Vucinic's Media Development Loan Fund applies venture-capital principles to create a sustainable free press in developing nations and countries emerging from repressive regimes."}

2005-07-14

2006-10-18

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'culture', 'global issues', 'investment', 'media', 'philanthropy']

{91: "Invest in Africa's own solutions", 170: 'My journey into movies that matter', 23: 'Fight injustice with raw video', 983: 'Poverty, money -- and love', 803: "Let's simplify legal jargon!", 1949: 'My wish: To launch a new era of openness in business'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/sasa_vucinic_why_we_should_invest_in_a_free_press/

A free press -- papers, magazines, radio, TV, blogs -- is the backbone of any true democracy (and a vital watchdog on business). Sasa Vucinic, a journalist from Belgrade, talks about his new fund, which supports media by selling "free press bonds."

Video: Narrator: An event seen from one point of view gives one impression. Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression. But it's only when you get the whole picture you can fully understand what's going on. Sasha Vucinic: It's a great clip, isn't it? And I found that in 29 seconds, it tells more about the power of, and importance of, independent media than I could say in an hour. So I thought that it will be good to start with it. And also start with a little bit of statistics. According to relevant researchers, 83 percent of the population of this planet lives in the societies without independent press. Think about that number: 83 percent of the population on the whole planet does not really know what is going on in their countries. The information they get gets filtered through somebody who either twists that information, or colors that information, does something with it. So they're deprived of understanding their reality. That is just to understand how big and important this problem is. Now those of you who are lucky enough to live in those societies that represent 17 percent, I think should enjoy it until it lasts. You know, Sunday morning, you flick the paper, get your cappuccino. Enjoy it while it lasts. Because as we heard yesterday, countries can lose stars from their flags, but they can also lose press freedom, as I guess Americans among us can tell us more about. But that's totally another and separate topic. So I can go back to my story. My story starts — the story I want to share — starts in 1991. At that time I was running B92, the only independent, for that matter the only electronic media, in the country. And I guess we were sharing — we had that regular life of the only independent media in the country, operating in hostile environment, where government really wants to make your life miserable. And there are different ways. Yeah, it was the usual cocktail: a little bit of threats, a little bit of friendly advice, a little bit of financial police, a little bit of text control, so you always have somebody who never leaves your office. But what they really do, which is very powerful, and that is what governments in the late '90s started doing if they don't like independent media companies — you know, they threaten your advertisers. Once they threaten your advertisers, market forces are actually, you know, destroyed, and the advertisers do not want to come — no matter how much does it make sense for them — do not want to come and advertise. And you have a problem making ends meet. At that time at the beginning of the '90s, we had that problem, which was, you know, survival below one side, but what was really painful for me was, remember, the beginning of the '90s, Yugoslavia is falling apart. We were sitting over there with a country in a downfall, in a slow-motion downfall. And we all had all of that on tapes. We had the ability to understand what was going on. We were actually recording history. The problem was that we had to re-tape that history a week later; because if we did not, we could not afford enough tapes to keep archives of that history. So if I gave you that picture, I don't want to go too long on that. In that context a gentleman came to my office at that time. It was still 1991. He was running a media systems organization which is still in business, the gentleman is still in business. And what did I know at that time about media systems? I would think media systems were organizations, which means they should help you. So I prepared two plans for that meeting, two strategic plans: the small one and the big one. The small one was, I just wanted him to help us get those damn tapes, so we can keep that archive for the next 50 years. The big plan was to ask him for a 1,000,000-dollar loan. Because I thought, I still maintain, that serious and independent media companies are great business. And I thought that B92 will survive and be a great company once Milosevic is gone, which turned out to be true. It's now probably either the biggest or the second biggest media company in the country. And I thought that the only thing that we needed at that time was 1,000,000-dollar loan to take us through those hard times. To make a long story short, the gentleman comes into the office, great suit and tie. I gave him what I thought was a brilliant explanation of the political situation and explained how hard and difficult the war will be. Actually, I underestimated the atrocities, I have to admit. Anyway, after that whole, big, long explanation, the only question he had for me — and this is not a joke — is, are we paying royalties after we broadcast music of Michael Jackson? That was really the only question he had. He left, and I remember being actually very angry at myself because I thought there must be an institution in the world that is providing loans to media companies. It's so obvious, straight in your face, and somebody must have thought of it. Somebody must have started something like that. And I thought, I'm just dumb and I cannot find it. You know, in my defense, there was no Google at that time; you could not just Google in '91. So I thought that that's actually my problem. Now we go from here, fast forward to 1995. I have — I left the country, I have a meeting with George Soros, trying for the third time to convince him that his foundation should invest in something that should operate like a media bank. And basically what I was saying is very simple. You know, forget about charity; it doesn't work. Forget about handouts; 20,000 dollars do not help anybody. What you should do is you should treat media companies as a business. It's business anywhere. Media business, or any other business, it needs to be capitalized. And what these guys need, actually, is access to capital. So third meeting, arguments are pretty well exercised. At the end of the meeting he says, look, it is not going to work; you will never see your money back; but my foundations will put 500,000 dollars so you can test the idea. See that it will not work. He said, I'll give you a rope to hang yourself. (Laughter) I knew two things after that meeting. First, under no circumstances I want to hang myself. And second, that I have no idea how to make it work. You see, at the level of a concept, it was a great concept. But it's one thing to have a concept; it's a totally separate thing to actually make it work. So I had absolutely no idea how that could actually work. Had the wrong idea; I thought that we can be a bank. You see banks — I don't know if there are any bankers over here; I apologize in advance — but it's the best job in the world. You know, you find somebody who is respectable and has a lot of money. You give them more money; they repay you that over a time. You collect interest and do nothing in between. So I thought, why don't we get into that business? (Laughter) So here we are having our first client, brilliant. First independent newspaper in Slovakia. The government cutting them off from all the printing facilities in Bratislava. So here's the daily newspaper that has to be printed 400 kilometers away from the capital. It's a daily newspaper with a deadline of 4 p.m. That means that they have no sports; they have no latest news; circulation goes down. It's a kind of very nice, sophisticated way how to economically strangle a daily newspaper. They come to us with a request for a loan. They want to — the only way for them to survive is to get a printing press. And we said, that's fine; let's meet; you'll bring us your business plan, which eventually they did. We start the meeting. I get these two pieces of paper, not like this, A4 format, so it's much bigger. A lot of numbers there. A lot of numbers. But however you put it, you know, the numbers do not make any sense. And that's the best they could do. We were the best that they could do. So that is how we understood what our method is. It's not a bank. We had to actually go into these companies and earn our return by fixing them — by establishing management systems, by providing all that knowledge, how do you run a business on one side — while they all know how to run, how to create content. Just quickly on the results. Over these 10 years, 40 million dollars in affordable financing, average interest rate five percent to six percent. Lately we are going wild, charging seven percent from time to time. We do it in 17 countries of the developing world. And here is the most stunning number. Return rate — the one that Soros was so worried about — 97 percent. 97 percent of all the scheduled repayments came back to us on time. What do we typically finance? We finance anything that a media company would need, from printing presses to transmitters. What is most important is we do it either in form of loans, equities, lease — whatever is appropriate for, you know, supporting anybody. But what is most important here is, who do we finance? We believe that in the last 10 years companies that we've financed are actually the best media companies in the developing world. That is a "Who is Who" list. And I could spend hours talking about them, because they're all kind of heroes. And I can, but I'll give you just, maybe one, and depending on time I may give you two examples who we work with. You see we started working in Eastern and Central Europe, and moved to Russia. Our first loan in Russia was in Chelyabinsk. I'll bet half of you have never heard of that place. In the south of Russia there's a guy called Boris Nikolayevich Kirshin, who is running an independent newspaper there. The city was closed until early '90s because, of all things, they were producing glass for Tupolev planes. Anyway, he's running independent newspaper there. After two years working with us, he becomes the most respected newspaper in that small place. Governor comes to him one day, actually invites him to come to his office. He goes and sees the governor. The governor says, Boris Nikolayevich, I understand you are doing a great job, and you are the most respected newspaper in our district. And I want to offer you a deal. Can you please give me your newspaper for the next nine months, because I have elections — there are elections coming up in nine months. I will not run, but it's very important for me who is going to succeed me. So give me the paper for nine months. I'll give it back to you. I have no interest in being in media business. How much would that cost? Boris Nikolayevich says, "It's not for sale." The governor says, "We will close you." Boris Nikolayevich says, "No, you cannot do it." Six months later the newspaper was closed. Luckily, we had enough time to help Boris Nikolayevich take all the assets out of that company and bring him into a new one, to get all the subscription lists, rehire staff. So what the governor got was an empty shell. But that is what happens if you're in business of independent media, and if you are a banker for independent media. So it sounds like a great story. Somewhere down the road we opened a media management center. We started our media lab, sounds like a real great story. But there is a second angle to that. The second angle, like in this clip. If you take the camera above, you start thinking about these numbers again. 40 million dollars over 10 years spread over 17 countries. That is not too much, is it? It's actually just a drop in the sea. Because when you think about the importance, some of the issues that we were talking about last night — this last session we had about Africa and his hypothetical 50 billion dollars destined for Africa. All of those, not all, half of those problems mentioned last night — government accountability, corruption, how do you fight corruption, giving voice to unheard, to poor — it's why independent media is in business. And it's why it was invented. So from that perspective, what we did is just really one drop in the sea of that need that we can identify. Now ours is just one story. I'm sure that in this room there are, like, 15 other wonderful stories of nonprofits doing spectacular work. Here is where the problem is, and I'll explain to you as well as I can what the problem is. And it's called fundraising. Imagine that this third of this room is filled with people who represent different foundations. Imagine two thirds over here running excellent organizations, doing very important work. Now imagine that every second person over here is deaf, does not hear, and switch the lights off. Now that is how difficult it is to match people from this side of the room with people of that side of the room. So we thought that some kind of a big idea is needed to reform, to totally rethink fundraising. You know, instead of people running in this dark, trying to find their own match, who will be willing, who has the same goals. Instead of all of that we thought there is — something new needs to be invented. And we came up with this idea of issuing bonds, press freedom bonds. If there are investors willing to finance U.S. government budget deficit, why wouldn't we find investors willing to finance press freedom deficit? We've decided to do it this fall; we will issue them, probably in denominations of 1,000 dollars. I don't want to advertise them too much; that's not the point. But the point is, if we ever survive to actually issue them, find enough investors that this can be considered a success, there's nothing stopping the next organization to start to issue bonds next spring. And those can be environmental bonds. And then two weeks later, Iqbal Quadir can issue his electricity in Bangladesh bonds. And before you know it, any social cause can be actually financed in this way. Now we do daydreaming in 11:30 with 55 seconds left. But let's take the idea further. You do it, you start it in the States, because it's, you know, concepts are very, very close to American minds. But you can actually bring it to Europe, too. You can bring it to Asia. You can, once you have all of those different points, you can make it easy for investors. Put all of those bonds at one place and they sit down and click. Once you have more than 10 of them you have to develop some kind of a matrix. What do investors get? On one side financial, on the other side social. So that brings the idea of some kind of rating agency, Morningstar type. It says, you know, social impact over here is spectacular, five stars. Financial, they give you one percent, only one star. Now take it to the last step. Once you have all of that put together, there's not one reason why you couldn't actually have a marketplace for all of that, where you cannot dispose of all of those bonds in a pretty quick way. And in that way you organize the financing so there are no dark rooms, no blind people running around to find each other. Thank you.

The real future of space exploration

Burt Rutan

{0: 'Burt Rutan'}

{0: ['aircraft engineer']}

{0: "In 2004, legendary spacecraft designer Burt Rutan won the $10M Ansari X-Prize for <em>SpaceShipOne,</em> the first privately funded craft to enter space twice in a two-week period. He's now collaborating with Virgin Galactic to build the first rocketship for space tourism."}

2006-02-24

2006-10-25

TED2006

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'mk', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['NASA', 'aircraft', 'business', 'design', 'engineering', 'entrepreneur', 'flight', 'industrial design', 'invention', 'rocket science']

{141: "Inside the world's deepest caves", 264: 'The astonishing hidden world of the deep ocean', 335: 'Our next giant leap', 1402: 'From mach-20 glider to hummingbird drone', 429: 'My dream of a flying car', 292: "Stephen Hawking's zero g flight"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/burt_rutan_the_real_future_of_space_exploration/

In this passionate talk, legendary spacecraft designer Burt Rutan lambasts the US government-funded space program for stagnating and asks entrepreneurs to pick up where NASA has left off.

I want to start off by saying, Houston, we have a problem. We're entering a second generation of no progress in terms of human flight in space. In fact, we've regressed. We stand a very big chance of losing our ability to inspire our youth to go out and continue this very important thing that we as a species have always done. And that is, instinctively we've gone out and climbed over difficult places, went to more hostile places, and found out later, maybe to our surprise, that that's the reason we survived. And I feel very strongly that it's not good enough for us to have generations of kids that think that it's OK to look forward to a better version of a cell phone with a video in it. They need to look forward to exploration; they need to look forward to colonization; they need to look forward to breakthroughs. We need to inspire them, because they need to lead us and help us survive in the future. I'm particularly troubled that what NASA's doing right now with this new Bush doctrine to — for this next decade and a half — oh shoot, I screwed up. We have real specific instructions here not to talk about politics. (Laughter) What we're looking forward to is — (Applause) what we're looking forward to is not only the inspiration of our children, but the current plan right now is not really even allowing the most creative people in this country — the Boeing's and Lockheed's space engineers — to go out and take risks and try new stuff. We're going to go back to the moon ... 50 years later? And we're going to do it very specifically planned to not learn anything new. I'm really troubled by that. But anyway that's — the basis of the thing that I want to share with you today, though, is that right back to where we inspire people who will be our great leaders later. That's the theme of my next 15 minutes here. And I think that the inspiration begins when you're very young: three-year-olds, up to 12-, 14-year-olds. What they look at is the most important thing. Let's take a snapshot at aviation. And there was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, "Ooh, hey, I can do that." There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousand of pilots. Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again. The ones that flew and landed OK because there were no trained pilots who had good flying qualities by definition. So we, by making a whole bunch of attempts, thousands of attempts, in that four-year time period, we invented the concepts of the airplanes that we fly today. And that's why they're so safe, as we gave it a lot of chance to find what's good. That has not happened at all in space flying. There's only been two concepts tried — two by the U.S. and one by the Russians. Well, who was inspired during that time period? Aviation Week asked me to make a list of who I thought were the movers and shakers of the first 100 years of aviation. And I wrote them down and I found out later that every one of them was a little kid in that wonderful renaissance of aviation. Well, what happened when I was a little kid was — some pretty heavy stuff too. The jet age started: the missile age started. Von Braun was on there showing how to go to Mars — and this was before Sputnik. And this was at a time when Mars was a hell of a lot more interesting than it is now. We thought there'd be animals there; we knew there were plants there; the colors change, right? But, you know, NASA screwed that up because they've sent these robots and they've landed it only in the deserts. (Laughter) If you look at what happened — this little black line is as fast as man ever flew, and the red line is top-of-the-line military fighters and the blue line is commercial air transport. You notice here's a big jump when I was a little kid — and I think that had something to do with giving me the courage to go out and try something that other people weren't having the courage to try. Well, what did I do when I was a kid? I didn't do the hotrods and the girls and the dancing and, well, we didn't have drugs in those days. But I did competition model airplanes. I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around the world Voyager. I founded another company in '82, which is my company now. And we have developed more than one new type of airplane every year since 1982. And there's a lot of them that I actually can't show you on this chart. The most impressive airplane ever, I believe, was designed only a dozen years after the first operational jet. Stayed in service till it was too rusty to fly, taken out of service. We retreated in '98 back to something that was developed in '56. What? The most impressive spaceship ever, I believe, was a Grumman Lunar Lander. It was a — you know, it landed on the moon, take off of the moon, didn't need any maintenance guys — that's kind of cool. We've lost that capability. We abandoned it in '72. This thing was designed three years after Gagarin first flew in space in 1961. Three years, and we can't do that now. Crazy. Talk very briefly about innovation cycles, things that grow, have a lot of activity; they die out when they're replaced by something else. These things tend to happen every 25 years. 40 years long, with an overlap. You can put that statement on all kinds of different technologies. The interesting thing — by the way, the speed here, excuse me, higher-speed travel is the title of these innovation cycles. There is none here. These two new airplanes are the same speed as the DC8 that was done in 1958. Here's the biggie, and that is, you don't have innovation cycles if the government develops and the government uses it. You know, a good example, of course, is the DARPA net. Computers were used for artillery first, then IRS. But when we got it, now you have all the level of activity, all the benefit from it. Private sector has to do it. Keep that in mind. I put down innovation — I've looked for innovation cycles in space; I found none. The very first year, starting when Gagarin went in space, and a few weeks later Alan Shepherd, there were five manned space flights in the world — the very first year. In 2003, everyone that the United States sent to space was killed. There were only three or four flights in 2003. In 2004, there were only two flights: two Russian Soyuz flights to the international manned station. And I had to fly three in Mojave with my little group of a couple dozen people in order to get to a total of five, which was the number the same year back in 1961. There is no growth. There's no activity. There's no nothing. This is a picture here taken from SpaceShipOne. This is a picture here taken from orbit. Our goal is to make it so that you can see this picture and really enjoy that. We know how to do it for sub-orbital flying now, do it safe enough — at least as safe as the early airlines — so that can be done. And I think I want to talk a little bit about why we had the courage to go out and try that as a small company. Well, first of all, what's going to happen next? The first industry will be a high volume, a lot of players. There's another one announced just last week. And it will be sub-orbital. And the reason it has to be sub-orbital is, there is not solutions for adequate safety to fly the public to orbit. The governments have been doing this — three governments have been doing this for 45 years, and still four percent of the people that have left the atmosphere have died. That's — You don't want to run a business with that kind of a safety record. It'll be very high volume; we think 100,000 people will fly by 2020. I can't tell you when this will start, because I don't want my competition to know my schedule. But I think once it does, we will find solutions, and very quickly, you'll see those resort hotels in orbit. And that real easy thing to do, which is a swing around the moon so you have this cool view. And that will be really cool. Because the moon doesn't have an atmosphere — you can do an elliptical orbit and miss it by 10 feet if you want. Oh, it's going to be so much fun. (Laughter) OK. My critics say, "Hey, Rutan's just spending a lot of these billionaires' money for joyrides for billionaires. What's this? This is not a transportation system; it's just for fun." And I used to be bothered by that, and then I got to thinking, well, wait a minute. I bought my first Apple computer in 1978 and I bought it because I could say, "I got a computer at my house and you don't. 'What do you use it for?' Come over. It does Frogger." OK. (Laughter) Not the bank's computer or Lockheed's computer, but the home computer was for games. For a whole decade it was for fun — we didn't even know what it was for. But what happened, the fact that we had this big industry, big development, big improvement and capability and so on, and they get out there in enough homes — we were ripe for a new invention. And the inventor is in this audience. Al Gore invented the Internet and because of that, something that we used for a whole year — excuse me — a whole decade for fun, became everything — our commerce, our research, our communication and, if we let the Google guys think for another couple weekends, we can add a dozen more things to the list. (Laughter) And it won't be very long before you won't be able to convince kids that we didn't always have computers in our homes. So fun is defendable. OK, I want to show you kind of a busy chart, but in it is my prediction with what's going to happen. And in it also brings up another point, right here. There's a group of people that have come forward — and you don't know all of them — but the ones that have come forward were inspired as young children, this little three- to 15-year-old age, by us going to orbit and going to the moon here, right in this time period. Paul Allen, Elan Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, the Ansari family, which is now funding the Russians' sub-orbital thing, Bob Bigelow, a private space station, and Carmack. These people are taking money and putting it in an interesting area, and I think it's a lot better than they put it in an area of a better cell phone or something — but they're putting it in very — areas and this will lead us into this kind of capability, and it will lead us into the next really big thing and it will allow us to explore. And I think eventually it will allow us to colonize and to keep us from going extinct. They were inspired by big progress. But look at the progress that's going on after that. There were a couple of examples here. The military fighters had a — highest-performance military airplane was the SR71. It went a whole life cycle, got too rusty to fly, and was taken out of service. The Concorde doubled the speed for airline travel. It went a whole life cycle without competition, took out of service. And we're stuck back here with the same kind of capability for military fighters and commercial airline travel that we had back in the late '50s. But something is out there to inspire our kids now. And I'm talking about if you've got a baby now, or if you've got a 10-year-old now. What's out there is there's something really interesting going to happen here. Relatively soon, you'll be able to buy a ticket and fly higher and faster than the highest-performance military operational airplane. It's never happened before. The fact that they have stuck here with this kind of performance has been, well, you know, you win the war in 12 minutes; why do you need something better? But I think when you guys start buying tickets and flying sub-orbital flights to space, very soon — wait a minute, what's happening here, we'll have military fighters with sub-orbital capability, and I think very soon this. But the interesting thing about it is the commercial guys are going to go first. OK, I look forward to a new "capitalist's space race," let's call it. You remember the space race in the '60s was for national prestige, because we lost the first two milestones. We didn't lose them technically. The fact that we had the hardware to put something in orbit when we let Von Braun fly it — you can argue that's not a technical loss. Sputnik wasn't a technical loss, but it was a prestige loss. America — the world saw America as not being the leader in technology, and that was a very strong thing. And then we flew Alan Shepherd weeks after Gagarin, not months or decades, or whatever. So we had the capability. But America lost. We lost. And because of that, we made a big jump to recover it. Well, again, what's interesting here is we've lost to the Russians on the first couple of milestones already. You cannot buy a ticket commercially to fly into space in America — can't do it. You can buy it in Russia. You can fly with Russian hardware. This is available because a Russian space program is starving, and it's nice for them to get 20 million here and there to take one of the seats. It's commercial. It can be defined as space tourism. They are also offering a trip to go on this whip around the moon, like Apollo 8 was done. 100 million bucks — hey, I can go to the moon. But, you know, would you have thought back in the '60s, when the space race was going on, that the first commercial capitalist-like thing to do to buy a ticket to go to the moon would be in Russian hardware? And would you have thought, would the Russians have thought, that when they first go to the moon in their developed hardware, the guys inside won't be Russians? Maybe it'll probably be a Japanese or an American billionaire? Well, that's weird: you know, it really is. But anyway, I think we need to beat them again. I think what we'll do is we'll see a successful, very successful, private space flight industry. Whether we're first or not really doesn't matter. The Russians actually flew a supersonic transport before the Concorde. And then they flew a few cargo flights, and took it out of service. I think you kind of see the same kind of parallel when the commercial stuff is offered. OK, we'll talk just a little bit about commercial development for human space flight. This little thing says here: five times what NASA's doing by 2020. I want to tell you, already there's about 1.5 billion to 1.7 billion investment in private space flight that is not government at all — already, worldwide. If you read — if you Google it, you'll find about half of that money, but there's twice of that being committed out there — not spent yet, but being committed and planned for the next few years. Hey, that's pretty big. I'm predicting, though, as profitable as this industry is going to be — and it certainly is profitable when you fly people at 200,000 dollars on something that you can actually operate at a tenth of that cost, or less — this is going to be very profitable. I predict, also, that the investment that will flow into this will be somewhere around half of what the U.S. taxpayer spends for NASA's manned spacecraft work. And every dollar that flows into that will be spent more efficiently by a factor of 10 to 15. And what that means is before we know it, the progress in human space flight, with no taxpayer dollars, will be at a level of about five times as much as the current NASA budgets for human space flight. And that is because it's us. It's private industry. You should never depend on the government to do this sort of stuff — and we've done it for a long time. The NACA, before NASA, never developed an airliner and never ran an airline. But NASA is developing the space liner, always has, and runs the only space line, OK. And we've shied away from it because we're afraid of it. But starting back in June of 2004, when I showed that a little group out there actually can do it, can get a start with it, everything changed after that time. OK, thank you very much. (Applause)

Why did I ski to the North Pole?

Ben Saunders

{0: 'Ben Saunders'}

{0: ['polar explorer']}

{0: 'In 2004, Ben Saunders became the youngest person ever to ski solo to the North Pole. In 2013, he set out on another record-breaking expedition, this time to retrace Captain Scott’s ill-fated journey to the South Pole on foot.'}

2005-02-24

2006-10-25

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['climate change', 'culture', 'exploration', 'global issues', 'personal growth', 'potential', 'sports', 'technology', 'travel']

{2292: 'The surprising thing I learned sailing solo around the world', 627: 'A leap from the edge of space', 2255: 'The joy of surfing in ice-cold water', 1631: 'Why bother leaving the house?', 586: 'My trek to the South Pole', 29160: 'The dangerous race for the South Pole'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_saunders_why_did_i_ski_to_the_north_pole/

Arctic explorer Ben Saunders recounts his harrowing solo ski trek to the North Pole, complete with engaging anecdotes, gorgeous photos and never-before-seen video.

This is me. My name is Ben Saunders. I specialize in dragging heavy things around cold places. On May 11th last year, I stood alone at the North geographic Pole. I was the only human being in an area one-and-a-half times the size of America, five-and-a-half thousand square miles. More than 2,000 people have climbed Everest. 12 people have stood on the moon. Including me, only four people have skied solo to the North Pole. And I think the reason for that — (Applause) — thank you — I think the reason for that is that it's — it's — well, it's as Chris said, bonkers. It's a journey that is right at the limit of human capability. I skied the equivalent of 31 marathons back to back. 800 miles in 10 weeks. And I was dragging all the food I needed, the supplies, the equipment, sleeping bag, one change of underwear — everything I needed for nearly three months. (Laughter) What we're going to try and do today, in the 16 and a bit minutes I've got left, is to try and answer three questions. The first one is, why? The second one is, how do you go to the loo at minus 40? "Ben, I've read somewhere that at minus 40, exposed skin becomes frostbitten in less than a minute, so how do you answer the call of nature?" I don't want to answer these now. I'll come on to them at the end. Third one: how do you top that? What's next? It all started back in 2001. My first expedition was with a guy called Pen Hadow — enormously experienced chap. This was like my polar apprenticeship. We were trying to ski from this group of islands up here, Severnaya Zemlya, to the North Pole. And the thing that fascinates me about the North Pole, geographic North Pole, is that it's slap bang in the middle of the sea. This is about as good as maps get, and to reach it you've got to ski literally over the frozen crust, the floating skin of ice on the Artic Ocean. I'd spoken to all the experts. I'd read lots of books. I studied maps and charts. But I realized on the morning of day one that I had no idea exactly what I'd let myself in for. I was 23 years old. No one my age had attempted anything like this, and pretty quickly, almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. We were attacked by a polar bear on day two. I had frostbite in my left big toe. We started running very low on food. We were both pretty hungry, losing lots of weight. Some very unusual weather conditions, very difficult ice conditions. We had decidedly low-tech communications. We couldn't afford a satellite phone, so we had HF radio. You can see two ski poles sticking out of the roof of the tent. There's a wire dangling down either side. That was our HF radio antenna. We had less than two hours two-way communication with the outside world in two months. Ultimately, we ran out of time. We'd skied 400 miles. We were just over 200 miles left to go to the Pole, and we'd run out of time. We were too late into the summer; the ice was starting to melt; we spoke to the Russian helicopter pilots on the radio, and they said, "Look boys, you've run out of time. We've got to pick you up." And I felt that I had failed, wholeheartedly. I was a failure. The one goal, the one dream I'd had for as long as I could remember — I hadn't even come close. And skiing along that first trip, I had two imaginary video clips that I'd replay over and over again in my mind when the going got tough, just to keep my motivation going. The first one was reaching the Pole itself. I could see vividly, I suppose, being filmed out of the door of a helicopter, there was, kind of, rock music playing in the background, and I had a ski pole with a Union Jack, you know, flying in the wind. I could see myself sticking the flag in a pole, you know — ah, glorious moment — the music kind of reaching a crescendo. The second video clip that I imagined was getting back to Heathrow airport, and I could see again, vividly, the camera flashbulbs going off, the paparazzi, the autograph hunters, the book agents coming to sign me up for a deal. And of course, neither of these things happened. We didn't get to the Pole, and we didn't have any money to pay anyone to do the PR, so no one had heard of this expedition. And I got back to Heathrow. My mum was there; my brother was there; my granddad was there — had a little Union Jack — (Laughter) — and that was about it. I went back to live with my mum. I was physically exhausted, mentally an absolute wreck, considered myself a failure. In a huge amount of debt personally to this expedition, and lying on my mum's sofa, day in day out, watching daytime TV. My brother sent me a text message, an SMS — it was a quote from the "Simpsons." It said, "You tried your hardest and failed miserably. The lesson is: don't even try." (Laughter) Fast forward three years. I did eventually get off the sofa, and start planning another expedition. This time, I wanted to go right across, on my own this time, from Russia, at the top of the map, to the North Pole, where the sort of kink in the middle is, and then on to Canada. No one has made a complete crossing of the Arctic Ocean on their own. Two Norwegians did it as a team in 2000. No one's done it solo. Very famous, very accomplished Italian mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, tried it in 1995, and he was rescued after a week. He described this expedition as 10 times as dangerous as Everest. So for some reason, this was what I wanted to have a crack at, but I knew that even to stand a chance of getting home in one piece, let alone make it across to Canada, I had to take a radical approach. This meant everything from perfecting the sawn-off, sub-two-gram toothbrush, to working with one of the world's leading nutritionists in developing a completely new, revolutionary nutritional strategy from scratch: 6,000 calories a day. And the expedition started in February last year. Big support team. We had a film crew, a couple of logistics people with us, my girlfriend, a photographer. At first it was pretty sensible. We flew British Airways to Moscow. The next bit in Siberia to Krasnoyarsk, on a Russian internal airline called KrasAir, spelled K-R-A-S. The next bit, we'd chartered a pretty elderly Russian plane to fly us up to a town called Khatanga, which was the sort of last bit of civilization. Our cameraman, who it turned out was a pretty nervous flier at the best of times, actually asked the pilot, before we got on the plane, how long this flight would take, and the pilot — Russian pilot — completely deadpan, replied, "Six hours — if we live." (Laughter) We got to Khatanga. I think the joke is that Khatanga isn't the end of the world, but you can see it from there. (Laughter) It was supposed to be an overnight stay. We were stuck there for 10 days. There was a kind of vodka-fueled pay dispute between the helicopter pilots and the people that owned the helicopter, so we were stuck. We couldn't move. Finally, morning of day 11, we got the all-clear, loaded up the helicopters — two helicopters flying in tandem — dropped me off at the edge of the pack ice. We had a frantic sort of 45 minutes of filming, photography; while the helicopter was still there, I did an interview on the satellite phone; and then everyone else climbed back into the helicopter, wham, the door closed, and I was alone. And I don't know if words will ever quite do that moment justice. All I could think about was running back up to the door, banging on the door, and saying, "Look guys, I haven't quite thought this through." (Laughter) To make things worse, you can just see the white dot up at the top right hand side of the screen; that's a full moon. Because we'd been held up in Russia, of course, the full moon brings the highest and lowest tides; when you're standing on the frozen surface of the sea, high and low tides generally mean that interesting things are going to happen — the ice is going to start moving around a bit. I was, you can see there, pulling two sledges. Grand total in all, 95 days of food and fuel, 180 kilos — that's almost exactly 400 pounds. When the ice was flat or flattish, I could just about pull both. When the ice wasn't flat, I didn't have a hope in hell. I had to pull one, leave it, and go back and get the other one. Literally scrambling through what's called pressure ice — the ice had been smashed up under the pressure of the currents of the ocean, the wind and the tides. NASA described the ice conditions last year as the worst since records began. And it's always drifting. The pack ice is always drifting. I was skiing into headwinds for nine out of the 10 weeks I was alone last year, and I was drifting backwards most of the time. My record was minus 2.5 miles. I got up in the morning, took the tent down, skied north for seven-and-a-half hours, put the tent up, and I was two and a half miles further back than when I'd started. I literally couldn't keep up with the drift of the ice. (Video): So it's day 22. I'm lying in the tent, getting ready to go. The weather is just appalling — oh, drifted back about five miles in the last — last night. Later in the expedition, the problem was no longer the ice. It was a lack of ice — open water. I knew this was happening. I knew the Artic was warming. I knew there was more open water. And I had a secret weapon up my sleeve. This was my little bit of bio-mimicry. Polar bears on the Artic Ocean move in dead straight lines. If they come to water, they'll climb in, swim across it. So we had a dry suit developed — I worked with a team in Norway — based on a sort of survival suit — I suppose, that helicopter pilots would wear — that I could climb into. It would go on over my boots, over my mittens, it would pull up around my face, and seal pretty tightly around my face. And this meant I could ski over very thin ice, and if I fell through, it wasn't the end of the world. It also meant, if the worst came to the worst, I could actually jump in and swim across and drag the sledge over after me. Some pretty radical technology, a radical approach —but it worked perfectly. Another exciting thing we did last year was with communications technology. In 1912, Shackleton's Endurance expedition — there was — one of his crew, a guy called Thomas Orde-Lees. He said, "The explorers of 2012, if there is anything left to explore, will no doubt carry pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes." Well, Orde-Lees guessed wrong by about eight years. This is my pocket wireless telephone, Iridium satellite phone. The wireless telescope was a digital camera I had tucked in my pocket. And every single day of the 72 days I was alone on the ice, I was blogging live from my tent, sending back a little diary piece, sending back information on the distance I'd covered — the ice conditions, the temperature — and a daily photo. Remember, 2001, we had less than two hours radio contact with the outside world. Last year, blogging live from an expedition that's been described as 10 times as dangerous as Everest. It wasn't all high-tech. This is navigating in what's called a whiteout. When you get lots of mist, low cloud, the wind starts blowing the snow up. You can't see an awful lot. You can just see, there's a yellow ribbon tied to one of my ski poles. I'd navigate using the direction of the wind. So, kind of a weird combination of high-tech and low-tech. I got to the Pole on the 11th of May. It took me 68 days to get there from Russia, and there is nothing there. (Laughter). There isn't even a pole at the Pole. There's nothing there, purely because it's sea ice. It's drifting. Stick a flag there, leave it there, pretty soon it will drift off, usually towards Canada or Greenland. I knew this, but I was expecting something. Strange mixture of feelings: it was extremely warm by this stage, a lot of open water around, and of course, elated that I'd got there under my own steam, but starting to really realize that my chances of making it all the way across to Canada, which was still 400 miles away, were slim at best. The only proof I've got that I was there is a blurry photo of my GPS, the little satellite navigation gadget. You can just see — there's a nine and a string of zeros here. Ninety degrees north — that is slap bang in the North Pole. I took a photo of that. Sat down on my sledge. Did a sort of video diary piece. Took a few photos. I got my satellite phone out. I warmed the battery up in my armpit. I dialed three numbers. I dialed my mum. I dialed my girlfriend. I dialed the CEO of my sponsor. And I got three voicemails. (Laughter) (Video): Ninety. It's a special feeling. The entire planet is rotating beneath my feet. The — the whole world underneath me. I finally got through to my mum. She was at the queue of the supermarket. She started crying. She asked me to call her back. (Laughter) I skied on for a week past the Pole. I wanted to get as close to Canada as I could before conditions just got too dangerous to continue. This was the last day I had on the ice. When I spoke to the — my project management team, they said, "Look, Ben, conditions are getting too dangerous. There are huge areas of open water just south of your position. We'd like to pick you up. Ben, could you please look for an airstrip?" This was the view outside my tent when I had this fateful phone call. I'd never tried to build an airstrip before. Tony, the expedition manager, he said, "Look Ben, you've got to find 500 meters of flat, thick safe ice." The only bit of ice I could find — it took me 36 hours of skiing around trying to find an airstrip — was exactly 473 meters. I could measure it with my skis. I didn't tell Tony that. I didn't tell the pilots that. I thought, it'll have to do. (Video): Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. It just about worked. A pretty dramatic landing — the plane actually passed over four times, and I was a bit worried it wasn't going to land at all. The pilot, I knew, was called Troy. I was expecting someone called Troy that did this for a living to be a pretty tough kind of guy. I was bawling my eyes out by the time the plane landed — a pretty emotional moment. So I thought, I've got to compose myself for Troy. I'm supposed to be the roughty toughty explorer type. The plane taxied up to where I was standing. The door opened. This guy jumped out. He's about that tall. He said, "Hi, my name is Troy." (Laughter). The co-pilot was a lady called Monica. She sat there in a sort of hand-knitted jumper. They were the least macho people I've ever met, but they made my day. Troy was smoking a cigarette on the ice; we took a few photos. He climbed up the ladder. He said, "Just — just get in the back." He threw his cigarette out as he got on the front, and I climbed in the back. (Laughter) Taxied up and down the runway a few times, just to flatten it out a bit, and he said, "Right, I'm going to — I'm going to give it a go." And he — I've now learned that this is standard practice, but it had me worried at the time. He put his hand on the throttle. You can see the control for the engines is actually on the roof of the cockpit. It's that little bar there. He put his hand on the throttle. Monica very gently put her hand sort of on top of his. I thought, "God, here we go. We're, we're — this is all or nothing." Rammed it forwards. Bounced down the runway. Just took off. One of the skis just clipped a pressure ridge at the end of the runway, banking. I could see into the cockpit, Troy battling the controls, and he just took one hand off, reached back, flipped a switch on the roof of the cockpit, and it was the "fasten seat belt" sign you can see on the wall. (Laughter) And only from the air did I see the big picture. Of course, when you're on the ice, you only ever see one obstacle at a time, whether it's a pressure ridge or there's a bit of water. This is probably why I didn't get into trouble about the length of my airstrip. I mean, it really was starting to break up. Why? I'm not an explorer in the traditional sense. I'm not skiing along drawing maps; everyone knows where the North Pole is. At the South Pole there's a big scientific base. There's an airstrip. There's a cafe and there's a tourist shop. For me, this is about exploring human limits, about exploring the limits of physiology, of psychology and of technology. They're the things that excite me. And it's also about potential, on a personal level. This, for me, is a chance to explore the limits — really push the limits of my own potential, see how far they stretch. And on a wider scale, it amazes me how people go through life just scratching the surface of their potential, just doing three or four or five percent of what they're truly capable of. So, on a wider scale, I hope that this journey was a chance to inspire other people to think about what they want to do with their potential, and what they want to do with the tiny amount of time we each have on this planet. That's as close as I can come to summing that up. The next question is, how do you answer the call of nature at minus 40? The answer, of course, to which is a trade secret — and the last question, what's next? As quickly as possible, if I have a minute left at the end, I'll go into more detail. What's next: Antarctica. It's the coldest, highest, windiest and driest continent on Earth. Late 1911, early 1912, there was a race to be the first to the South Pole: the heart of the Antarctic continent. If you include the coastal ice shelves, you can see that the Ross Ice Shelf — it's the big one down here — the Ross Ice Shelf is the size of France. Antarctica, if you include the ice shelves, is twice the size of Australia — it's a big place. And there's a race to get to the Pole between Amundsen, the Norwegian — Amundsen had dog sleds and huskies — and Scott, the British guy, Captain Scott. Scott had sort of ponies and some tractors and a few dogs, all of which went wrong, and Scott and his team of four people ended up on foot. They got to the Pole late January 1912 to find a Norwegian flag already there. There was a tent, a letter to the Norwegian king. And they turned around, headed back to the coast, and all five of them died on the return journey. Since then, no one has ever skied — this was 93 years ago — since then, no one has ever skied from the coast of Antarctica to the Pole and back. Every South Pole expedition you may have heard about is either flown out from the Pole or has used vehicles or dogs or kites to do some kind of crossing — no one has ever made a return journey. So that's the plan. Two of us are doing it. That's pretty much it. One final thought before I get to the toilet bit, is — is, I have a — and I meant to scan this and I've forgotten — but I have a — I have a school report. I was 13 years old, and it's framed above my desk at home. It says, "Ben lacks sufficient impetus to achieve anything worthwhile." (Laughter) (Applause) I think if I've learned anything, it's this: that no one else is the authority on your potential. You're the only person that decides how far you go and what you're capable of. Ladies and gentlemen, that's my story. Thank you very much.

My wish: Manufactured landscapes and green education

Edward Burtynsky

{0: 'Edward Burtynsky'}

{0: ['photographer']}

{0: "2005 TED Prize winner Edward Burtynsky has made it his life's work to document humanity's impact on the planet. His riveting photographs, as beautiful as they are horrifying, capture views of the Earth altered by mankind."}

2005-02-17

2006-10-31

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['TED Prize', 'art', 'cities', 'culture', 'design', 'environment', 'photography', 'pollution', 'social change']

{279: 'Turning powerful stats into art', 84: 'My wish: Let my photographs bear witness', 40: 'The story of life in photographs', 634: '3 warp-speed architecture tales', 1236: "The generation that's remaking China", 1554: "The voices of China's workers"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/edward_burtynsky_my_wish_manufactured_landscapes_and_green_education/

Accepting his 2005 TED Prize, photographer Edward Burtynsky makes a wish: that his images -- stunning landscapes that document humanity's impact on the world -- help persuade millions to join a global conversation on sustainability.

Walk around for four months with three wishes, and all the ideas will start to percolate up. I think everybody should do it — think that you've got three wishes. And what would you do? It's actually a great exercise to really drill down to the things that you feel are important, and really reflect on the world around us. And thinking that, can an individual actually do something, or come up with something, that may actually get some traction out there and make a difference? Inspired by nature — that's the theme here. And I think, quite frankly, that's where I started. I became very interested in the landscape as a Canadian. We have this Great North. And there was a pretty small population, and my father was an avid outdoorsman. So I really had a chance to experience that. And I could never really understand exactly what it was, or how it was informing me. But what I think it was telling me is that we are this transient thing that's happening, and that the nature that you see out there — the untouched shorelines, the untouched forest that I was able to see — really bring in a sense of that geological time, that this has gone on for a long time, and we're experiencing it in a different way. And that, to me, was a reference point that I think I needed to have to be able to make the work that I did. And I did go out, and I did this picture of grasses coming through in the spring, along a roadside. This rebirth of grass. And then I went out for years trying to photograph the pristine landscape. But as a fine-art photographer I somehow felt that it wouldn't catch on out there, that there would be a problem with trying to make this as a fine-art career. And I kept being sucked into this genre of the calendar picture, or something of that nature, and I couldn't get away from it. So I started to think of, how can I rethink the landscape? I decided to rethink the landscape as the landscape that we've transformed. I had a bit of an epiphany being lost in Pennsylvania, and I took a left turn trying to get back to the highway. And I ended up in a town called Frackville. I got out of the car, and I stood up, and it was a coal-mining town. I did a 360 turnaround, and that became one of the most surreal landscapes I've ever seen. Totally transformed by man. And that got me to go out and look at mines like this, and go out and look at the largest industrial incursions in the landscape that I could find. And that became the baseline of what I was doing. And it also became the theme that I felt that I could hold onto, and not have to re-invent myself — that this theme was large enough to become a life's work, to become something that I could sink my teeth into and just research and find out where these industries are. And I think one of the things I also wanted to say in my thanks, which I kind of missed, was to thank all the corporations who helped me get in. Because it took negotiation for almost every one of these photographs — to get into that place to make those photographs, and if it wasn't for those people letting me in at the heads of those corporations, I would have never made this body of work. So in that respect, to me, I'm not against the corporation. I own a corporation. I work with them, and I feel that we all need them and they're important. But I am also for sustainability. So there's this thing that is pulling me in both directions. And I'm not making an indictment towards what's happening here, but it is a slow progression. So I started thinking, well, we live in all these ages of man: the Stone Age, and the Iron Age, and the Copper Age. And these ages of man are still at work today. But we've become totally disconnected from them. There's something that we're not seeing there. And it's a scary thing as well. Because when we start looking at the collective appetite for our lifestyles, and what we're doing to that landscape — that, to me, is something that is a very sobering moment for me to contemplate. And through my photographs, I'm hoping to be able to engage the audiences of my work, and to come up to it and not immediately be rejected by the image. Not to say, "Oh my God, what is it?" but to be challenged by it — to say, "Wow, this is beautiful," on one level, but on the other level, "This is scary. I shouldn't be enjoying it." Like a forbidden pleasure. And it's that forbidden pleasure that I think is what resonates out there, and it gets people to look at these things, and it gets people to enter it. And it also, in a way, defines kind of what I feel, too — that I'm drawn to have a good life. I want a house, and I want a car. But there's this consequence out there. And how do I begin to have that attraction, repulsion? It's even in my own conscience I'm having it, and here in my work, I'm trying to build that same toggle. These things that I photographed — this tire pile here had 45 million tires in it. It was the largest one. It was only about an hour-and-a-half away from me, and it caught fire about four years ago. It's around Westley, California, around Modesto. And I decided to start looking at something that, to me, had — if the earlier work of looking at the landscape had a sense of lament to what we were doing to nature, in the recycling work that you're seeing here was starting to point to a direction. To me, it was our redemption. That in the recycling work that I was doing, I'm looking for a practice, a human activity that is sustainable. That if we keep putting things, through industrial and urban existence, back into the system — if we keep doing that — we can continue on. Of course, listening at the conference, there's many, many things that are coming. Bio-mimicry, and there's many other things that are coming on stream — nanotechnology that may also prevent us from having to go into that landscape and tear it apart. And we all look forward to those things. But in the meantime, these things are scaling up. These things are continuing to happen. What you're looking at here — I went to Bangladesh, so I started to move away from North America; I started to look at our world globally. These images of Bangladesh came out of a radio program I was listening to. They were talking about Exxon Valdez, and that there was going to be a glut of oil tankers because of the insurance industries. And that those oil tankers needed to be decommissioned, and 2004 was going to be the pinnacle. And I thought, "My God, wouldn't that be something?" To see the largest vessels of man being deconstructed by hand, literally, in third-world countries. So originally I was going to go to India. And I was shut out of India because of a Greenpeace situation there, and then I was able to get into Bangladesh, and saw for the first time a third world, a view of it, that I had never actually thought was possible. 130 million people living in an area the size of Wisconsin — people everywhere — the pollution was intense, and the working conditions were horrible. Here you're looking at some oil fields in California, some of the biggest oil fields. And again, I started to think that — there was another epiphany — that the whole world I was living in was a result of having plentiful oil. And that, to me, was again something that I started building on, and I continued to build on. So this is a series I'm hoping to have ready in about two or three years, under the heading of "The Oil Party." Because I think everything that we're involved in — our clothing, our cars, our roads, and everything — are directly a result. I'm going to move to some pictures of China. And for me China — I started photographing it four years ago, and China truly is a question of sustainability in my mind, not to mention that China, as well, has a great effect on the industries that I grew up around. I came out of a blue-collar town, a GM town, and my father worked at GM, so I was very familiar with that kind of industry and that also informed my work. But you know, to see China and the scale at which it's evolving, is quite something. So what you see here is the Three Gorges Dam, and this is the largest dam by 50 percent ever attempted by man. Most of the engineers around the world left the project because they said, "It's just too big." In fact, when it did actually fill with water a year and a half ago, they were able to measure a wobble within the earth as it was spinning. It took fifteen days to fill it. So this created a reservoir 600 kilometers long, one of the largest reservoirs ever created. And what was also one of the bigger projects around that was moving 13 full-size cities up out of the reservoir, and flattening all the buildings so they could make way for the ships. This is a "before and after." So that was before. And this is like 10 weeks later, demolished by hand. I think 11 of the buildings they used dynamite, everything else was by hand. That was 10 weeks later. And this gives you an idea. And it was all the people who lived in those homes, were the ones that were actually taking it apart and working, and getting paid per brick to take their cities apart. And these are some of the images from that. So I spent about three trips to the Three Gorges Dam, looking at that massive transformation of a landscape. And it looks like a bombed-out landscape, but it isn't. What it is, it's a landscape that is an intentional one. This is a need for power, and they're willing to go through this massive transformation, on this scale, to get that power. And again, it's actually a relief for what's going on in China because I think on the table right now, there's 27 nuclear power stations to be built. There hasn't been one built in North America for 20 years because of the "NIMBY" problem — "Not In My BackYard." But in China they're saying, "No, we're putting in 27 in the next 10 years." And coal-burning furnaces are going in there for hydroelectric power literally weekly. So coal itself is probably one of the largest problems. And one of the other things that happened in the Three Gorges — a lot of the agricultural land that you see there on the left was also lost; some of the most fertile agricultural land was lost in that. And 1.2 to 2 million people were relocated, depending on whose statistics you're looking at. And this is what they were building. This is Wushan, one of the largest cities that was relocated. This is the town hall for the city. And again, the rebuilding of the city — to me, it was sad to see that they didn't really grab a lot of, I guess, what we know here, in terms of urban planning. There were no parks; there were no green spaces. Very high-density living on the side of a hill. And here they had a chance to rebuild cities from the bottom up, but somehow were not connecting with them. Here is a sign that, translated, says, "Obey the birth control law. Build our science, civilized and advanced idea of marriage and giving birth." So here, if you look at this poster, it has all the trappings of Western culture. You're seeing the tuxedos, the bouquets. But what's really, to me, frightening about the picture and about this billboard is the refinery in the background. So it's like marrying up all the things that we have and it's an adaptation of our way of life, full stop. And again, when you start seeing that kind of embrace, and you start looking at them leading their rural lifestyle with a very, very small footprint and moving into an urban lifestyle with a much higher footprint, it starts to become very sobering. This is a shot in one of the biggest squares in Guangdong — and this is where a lot of migrant workers are coming in from the country. And there's about 130 million people in migration trying to get into urban centers at all times, and in the next 10 to 15 years, are expecting another 400 to 500 million people to migrate into the urban centers like Shanghai and the manufacturing centers. The manufacturers are — the domestics are usually — you can tell a domestic factory by the fact that they all use the same color uniforms. So this is a pink uniform at this factory. It's a shoe factory. And they have dorms for the workers. So they bring them in from the country and put them up in the dorms. This is one of the biggest shoe factories, the Yuyuan shoe factory near Shenzhen. It has 90,000 employees making shoes. This is a shift change, one of three. There's two factories of this scale in the same town. This is one with 45,000, so every lunch, there's about 12,000 coming through for lunch. They sit down; they have about 20 minutes. The next round comes in. It's an incredible workforce that's building there. Shanghai — I'm looking at the urban renewal in Shanghai, and this is a whole area that will be flattened and turned into skyscrapers in the next five years. What's also happening in Shanghai is — China is changing because this wouldn't have happened five years ago, for instance. This is a holdout. They're called dengzahoos — they're like pin tacks to the ground. They won't move. They're not negotiating. They're not getting enough, so they're not going to move. And so they're holding off until they get a deal with them. And they've been actually quite successful in getting better deals because most of them are getting a raw deal. They're being put out about two hours — the communities that have been around for literally hundreds of years, or maybe even thousands of years, are being broken up and spread across in the suburban areas outside of Shanghai. But these are a whole series of guys holding out in this reconstruction of Shanghai. Probably the largest urban-renewal project, I think, ever attempted on the planet. And then the embrace of the things that they're replacing it with — again, one of my wishes, and I never ended up going there, was to somehow tell them that there were better ways to build a house. The kinds of collisions of styles and things were quite something, and these are called the villas. And also, like right now, they're just moving. The scaffolding is still on, and this is an e-waste area, and if you looked in the foreground on the big print, you'd see that the industry — their industry — they're all recycling. So the industry's already growing around these new developments. This is a five-level bridge in Shanghai. Shanghai was a very intriguing city — it's exploding on a level that I don't think any city has experienced. In fact, even Shenzhen, the economic zone — one of the first ones — 15 years ago was about 100,000 people, and today it boasts about 10 to 11 million. So that gives you an idea of the kinds of migrations and the speed with which — this is just the taxis being built by Volkswagen. There's 9,000 of them here, and they're being built for most of the big cities, Beijing and Shanghai, Shenzhen. And this isn't even the domestic car market; this is the taxi market. And what we would see here as a suburban development — a similar thing, but they're all high-rises. So they'll put 20 or 40 up at a time, and they just go up in the same way as a single-family dwelling would go up here in an area. And the density is quite incredible. And one of the things in this picture that I wanted to point out is that when I saw these kinds of buildings, I was shocked to see that they're not using a central air-conditioning system; every window has an air conditioner in it. And I'm sure there are people here who probably know better than I do about efficiencies, but I can't imagine that every apartment having its own air conditioner is a very efficient way to cool a building on this scale. And when you start looking at that, and then you start factoring up into a city the size of Shanghai, it's literally a forest of skyscrapers. It's breathtaking, in terms of the speed at which this city is transforming. And you can see in the foreground of this picture, it's still one of the last areas that was being held up. Right now that's all cleared out — this was done about eight months ago — and high-rises are now going up into that central spot. So a skyscraper is built, literally, overnight in Shanghai. Most recently I went in, and I started looking at some of the biggest industries in China. And this is Baosteel, right outside of Shanghai. This is the coal supply for the steel factory — 18 square kilometers. It's an incredibly massive operation, I think 15,000 workers, five cupolas, and the sixth one's coming in here. So they're building very large blast furnaces to try to deal with the demand for steel in China. So this is three of the visible blast furnaces within that shot. And again, looking at these images, there's this constant, like, haze that you're seeing. This is going to show you, real time, an assembler. It's a circuit breaker. 10 hours a day at this speed. I think one of the issues that we here are facing with China, is that they're using a lot of the latest production technology. In that one, there were 400 people that worked on the floor. And I asked the manager to point out five of your fastest producers, and then I went and looked at each one of them for about 15 or 20 minutes, and picked this one woman. And it was just lightning fast; the way she was working was almost unbelievable. But that is the trick that they've got right now, that they're winning with, is that they're using all the latest technologies and extrusion machines, and bringing all the components into play, but the assembly is where they're actually bringing in — the country workers are very willing to work. They want to work. There's a massive backlog of people wanting their jobs. That condition's going to be there for the next 10 to 15 years if they realize what they want, which is, you know, 400 to 500 million more people coming into the cities. In this particular case — this is the assembly line that you saw; this is a shot of it. I had to use a very small aperture to get the depth of field. I had to have them freeze for 10 seconds to get this shot. It took me five fake tries because they were just going. To slow them down was literally impossible. They were just wound up doing these things all day long, until the manager had to, with a stern voice, say, "Okay, everybody freeze." It wasn't too bad, but they're driven to produce these things at an incredible rate. This is a textile mill doing synthetic silk, an oil byproduct. And what you're seeing here is, again, one of the most state-of-the-art textile mills. There are 500 of these machines; they're worth about 200,000 dollars each. So you have about 12 people running this, and they're just inspecting it — and they're just walking the lines. The machines are all running, absolutely incredible to see what the scale of industries are. And I started getting in further and further into the factories. And that's a diptych. I do a lot of pairings to try and get the sense of scale in these places. This is a line where they get the threads and they wind the threads together, pre-going into the textile mills. Here's something that's far more labor-intensive, which is the making of shoes. This floor has about 1,500 workers on this floor. The company itself had about 10,000 employees, and they're doing domestic shoes. It was very hard to get into the international companies because I had to get permission from companies like Nike and Adidas, and that's very hard to get. And they don't want to let me in. But the domestic was much easier to do. It just gives you a sense of, again — and that's where, really, the whole migration of jobs started going over to China and making the shoes. Nike was one of the early ones. It was such a high labor component to it that it made a lot of sense to go after that labor market. This is a high-tech mobile phone: Bird mobile phone, one of the largest mobile makers in China. I think mobile phone companies are popping up, literally, on a weekly basis, and they have an explosive growth in mobile phones. This is a textile where they're doing shirts — Youngor, the biggest shirt factory and clothing factory in China. And this next shot here is one of the lunchrooms. Everything is very efficient. While setting up this shot, people on average would spend eight to 10 minutes having a lunch. This was one of the biggest factories I've ever seen. They make coffeemakers here, the biggest coffeemaker and the biggest iron makers — they make 20 million of them in the world. There's 21,000 employees. This one factory — and they had several of them — is half a kilometer long. These are just recently shot — I just came back about a month ago, so you're the first ones to be seeing these, these new factory pictures I've taken. So it's taken me almost a year to gain access into these places. The other aspect of what's happening in China is that there's a real need for materials there. So a lot of the recycled materials that are collected here are being recycled and taken to China by ships. That's cubed metal. This is armatures, electrical armatures, where they're getting the copper and the high-end steel from electrical motors out, and recycling them. This is certainly connected to California and Silicon Valley. But this is what happens to most of the computers. Fifty percent of the world's computers end up in China to be recycled. It's referred to as "e-waste" there. And it is a bit of a problem. The way they recycle the boards is that they actually use the coal briquettes, which are used all through China, but they heat up the boards, and with pairs of pliers they pull off all the components. They're trying to get all the valued metals out of those components. But the toxic smells — when you come into a town that's actually doing this kind of burning of the boards, you can smell it a good five or 10 kilometers before you get there. Here's another operation. It's all cottage industries, so it's not big places — it's all in people's front porches, in their backyards, even in their homes they're burning boards, if there's a concern for somebody coming by — because it is considered in China to be illegal, doing it, but they can't stop the product from coming in. This portrait — I'm not usually known for portraits, but I couldn't resist this one, where she's been through Mao, and she's been through the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, and now she's sitting on her porch with this e-waste beside her. It's quite something. This is a road where it's been shored up by computer boards in one of the biggest towns where they're recycling. So that's the photographs that I wanted to show you. (Applause) I want to dedicate my wishes to my two girls. They've been sitting on my shoulder the whole time while I've been thinking. One's Megan, the one of the right, and Katja there. And to me the whole notion — the things I'm photographing are out of a great concern about the scale of our progress and what we call progress. And as much as there are great things around the corner — and it's palpable in this room — of all of the things that are just about to break that can solve so many problems, I'm really hoping that those things will spread around the world and will start to have a positive effect. And it isn't something that isn't just affecting our world, but it starts to go up — because I think we can start correcting our footprint and bring it down — but there's a growing footprint that's happening in Asia, and is growing at a rapid, rapid rate, and so I don't think we can equalize it. So ultimately the strategy, I think, here is that we have to be very concerned about their evolution, because it is going to be connected to our evolution as well. So part of my thinking, and part of my wishes, is sitting with these thoughts in mind, and thinking about, "How is their life going to be when they want to have children, or when they're ready to get married 20 years from now — or whatever, 15 years from now?" And to me that has been the core behind most of my thinking — in my work, and also for this incredible chance to have some wishes. Wish one: world-changing. I want to use my images to persuade millions of people to join in the global conversation on sustainability. And it is through communications today that I believe that that is not an unreal idea. Oh, and I went in search — I wanted to put what I had in mind, hitch it onto something. I didn't want a wish just to start from nowhere. One of them I'm starting from almost nothing, but the other one, I wanted to find out what's going on that's working right now. And Worldchanging.com is a fantastic blog, and that blog is now being visited by close to half-a-million people a month. And it just started about 14 months ago. And the beauty of what's going on there is that the tone of the conversation is the tone that I like. What they're doing there is that they're not — I think the environmental movement has failed in that it's used the stick too much; it's used the apocalyptic tone too much; it hasn't sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out. Whereas this conversation that is going on in this blog is about positive movements, about how to change our world in a better way, quickly. And it's looking at technology, and it's looking at new energy-saving devices, and it's looking at how to rethink and how to re-strategize the movement towards sustainability. And so for me, one of the things that I thought would be to put some of my work in the service of promoting the Worldchanging.com website. Some of you might know, he's a TEDster — Stephen Sagmeister and I are working on some layouts. And this is still in preliminary stages; these aren't the finals. But these images, with Worldchanging.com, can be placed into any kind of media. They could be posted through the Web; they could be used as a billboard or a bus shelter, or anything of that nature. So we're looking at this as trying to build out. And what we ended up discussing was that in most media you get mostly an image with a lot of text, and the text is blasted all over. What was unusual, according to Stephen, is less than five percent of ads are actually leading with image. And so in this case, because it's about a lot of these images and what they represent, and the kinds of questions they bring up, that we thought letting the images play out and bring someone to say, "Well, what's Worldchanging.com, with these images, have to do?" And hopefully inspire people to go to that website. So Worldchanging.com, and building that blog, and it is a blog, and I'm hoping that it isn't — I don't see it as the kind of blog where we're all going to follow each other to death. This one is one that will spoke out, and will go out, and to start reaching. Because right now there's conversations in India, in China, in South America — there's entries coming from all around the world. I think there's a chance to have a dialogue, a conversation about sustainability at Worldchanging.com. And anything that you can do to promote that would be fantastic. Wish two is more of the bottom-up, ground-up one that I'm trying to work with. And this one is: I wish to launch a groundbreaking competition that motivates kids to invest ideas on, and invent ideas on, sustainability. And one of the things that came out — Allison, who actually nominated me, said something earlier on in a brainstorming. She said that recycling in Canada had a fantastic entry into our psyche through kids between grade four and six. And you think about it, you know, grade four — my wife and I, we say age seven is the age of reason, so they're into the age of reason. And they're pre-puberty. So it's this great window where they actually are — you can influence them. You know what happens at puberty? You know, we know that from earlier presentations. So my thinking here is that we try to motivate those kids to start driving home ideas. Let them understand what sustainability is, and that they have a vested interest in it to happen. And one of the ways I thought of doing it is to use my prize, so I would take 30,000 or 40,000 dollars of the winnings, and the rest is going to be to manage this project, but to use that as prizes for kids to get into their hands. But the other thing that I thought would be fantastic was to create these — call them "prize targets." And so one could be for the best sustainable idea for an in-school project, the best one for a household project, or it could be the best community project for sustainability. And I also thought there should be a nice prize for the best artwork for "In My World." And what would happen — it's a scalable thing. And if we can get people to put in things — whether it's equipment, like a media lab, or money to make the prize significant enough — and to open it up to all the schools that are public schools, or schools that are with kids that age, and make it a wide-open competition for them to go after those prizes and to submit them. And the prize has to be a verifiable thing, so it's not about just ideas. The art pieces are about the ideas and how they present them and do them, but the actual things have to be verifiable. In that way, what's happening is that we're motivating a certain age group to start thinking. And they're going to push that up, from the bottom — up into, I believe, into the households. And parents will be reacting to it, and trying to help them with the projects. And I think it starts to motivate the whole idea towards sustainability in a very positive way, and starts to teach them. They know about recycling now, but they don't really, I think, get sustainability in all the things, and the energy footprint, and how that matters. And to teach them, to me, would be a fantastic wish, and it would be something that I would certainly put my shoulder into. And again, in "In My World," the competition — we would use the artwork that comes in from that competition to promote it. And I like the words, "in my world," because it gives possession of the world to the person who's doing it. It is my world; it's not someone else's. I want to help it; I want to do something with it. So I think it has a great opportunity to engage the imaginations — and great ideas, I think, come from kids — and engage their imagination into a project, and do something for schools. I think all schools could use extra equipment, extra cash — it's going to be an incentive for them to do that. And these are some of the ideas in terms of where we could possibly put in some promotion for "In My World." And wish three is: Imax film. So I was told I should do one for myself, and I've always wanted to actually get involved with doing something. And the scale of my work, and the kinds of ideas I'm playing with — when I first saw an Imax film, I almost immediately thought, "There's a real resonance between what I'm trying to do and the scale of what I try to do as a photographer." And I think there's a real possibility to reach new audiences if I had a chance. So I'm looking, really, for a mentor, because I just had my birthday. I'm 50, and I don't have time to go back to school right now — I'm too busy. So I need somebody who can put me on a quick catch-up course on how to do something like that, and lead me through the maze of how one does something like this. That would be fantastic. So those are my three wishes. (Applause)

My wish: Three unusual medical inventions

Robert Fischell

{0: 'Robert Fischell'}

{0: ['biomedical inventor']}

{0: "Robert Fischell invented the rechargeable pacemaker, the implantable insulin pump, and devices that warn of epileptic seizures and heart attacks. Yet it's not just his inventive genius that makes him fascinating, but his determination to make the world a better place. "}

2005-02-24

2006-10-31

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['TED Prize', 'business', 'disease', 'health care', 'invention', 'medicine', 'science', 'technology']

{82: 'Luke, a new prosthetic arm for soldiers', 142: 'The potential of regenerative medicine', 280: 'Robots inspired by cockroach ingenuity', 31377: 'A life-saving device that detects silent heart attacks', 24443: 'What happens during a heart attack?', 2555: 'A new way to heal hearts without surgery'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_fischell_my_wish_three_unusual_medical_inventions/

Accepting his 2005 TED Prize, inventor Robert Fischell makes three wishes: redesigning a portable device that treats migraines, finding new cures for clinical depression and reforming the medical malpractice system.

I'm going to discuss with you three of my inventions that can have an effect on 10 to a 100 million people, which we will hope to see happen. We discussed, in the prior film, some of the old things that we did, like stents and insulin pumps for the diabetic. And I'd like to talk very briefly about three new inventions that will change the lives of many people. At the present time, it takes an average of three hours after the first symptoms of a heart attack are recognized by the patient, before that patient arrives at an emergency room. And people with silent ischemia — which, translated into English, means they don't have any symptoms — it takes even longer for them to get to the hospital. The AMI, Acute Myocardial Infarction, which is a doctor's big word so they can charge you more money — (Laughter) — means a heart attack. Annual incidence: 1.2 million Americans. Mortality: 300,000 people dying each year. About half of them, 600,000, have permanent damage to their heart that will cause them to have very bad problems later on. Thus 900,000 people either have died or have significant damage to their heart muscle. Symptoms are often denied by the patient, particularly us men, because we are very brave. We are very brave, and we don't want to admit that I'm having a hell of a chest pain. Then, approximately 25 percent of all patients never have any symptoms. What are we going to do about them? How can we save their lives? It's particularly true of diabetics and elderly women. Well, what is needed for the earliest possible warning of a heart attack? A means to determine if there's a complete blockage of a coronary artery. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a heart attack. The means consist of noting something a little technical, ST segment elevation of the electrogram — translated into English, that means that if there's an electrical signal in the heart, and one part of the ECG — which we call the ST segment — elevates, that is a sure sign of a heart attack. And if we had a computer put into the body of a person who's at risk, we could know, before they even have symptoms, that they're having a heart attack, to save their life. Well, the doctor can program a level of this ST elevation voltage that will trigger an emergency alarm, vibration like your cell phone, but right by your clavicle bone. And when it goes beep, beep, beep, you better do something about it, because if you want to live you have to get to some medical treatment. So we have to try these devices out because the FDA won't just let us use them on people unless we try it out first, and the best model for this happens to be pigs. And what we tried with the pig was external electrodes on the skin, like you see in an emergency room, and I'm going to show you why they don't work very well. And then we put a lead, which is a wire, in the right ventricle inside the heart, which does the electrogram, which is the signal voltage from inside the heart. Well, with the pig, at the baseline, before we blocked the pig's artery to simulate a heart attack, that was the signal. After 43 seconds, even an expert couldn't tell the difference, and after three minutes — well, if you really studied it, you'd see a difference. But what happened when we looked inside the pig's heart, to the electrogram? There was the baseline — first of all, a much bigger and more reliable signal. Second of all, I'll bet even you people who are untrained can see the difference, and we see here an ST segment elevation right after this sharp line. Look at the difference there. It doesn't take much — every layperson could see that difference, and computers can be programmed to easily detect it. Then, look at that after three minutes. We see that the signal that's actually in the heart, we can use it to tell people that they're having a heart attack even before they have symptoms so we can save their life. Then we tried it with my son, Dr. Tim Fischell, we tried it on some human patients who had to have a stent put in. Well, he kept the balloon filled to block the artery, to simulate a blockage, which is what a heart attack is. And it's not hard to see that — the baseline is the first picture on the upper left. Next to it, at 30 seconds, you see this rise here, then this rise — that's the ST elevation. And if we had a computer that could detect it, we could tell you you're having a heart attack so early it could save your life and prevent congestive heart failure. And then he did it again. We filled the balloon again a few minutes later and here you see, even after 10 seconds, a great rise in this piece, which we can have computers inside, under your chest like a pacemaker, with a wire into your heart like a pacemaker. And computers don't go to sleep. We have a little battery and on this little battery that computer will run for five years without needing replacement. What does the system look like? Well, on the left is the IMD, which is Implantable Medical Device, and tonight in the tent you can see it — they've exhibited it. It's about this big, the size of a pacemaker. It's implanted with very conventional techniques. And the EXD is an External Device that you can have on your night table. It'll wake you up and tell you to get your tail to the emergency room when the thing goes off because, if you don't, you're in deep doo-doo. And then, finally, a programmer that will set the level of the stimulation, which is the level which says you are having a heart attack. The FDA says, OK, test this final device after it's built in some animal, which we said is a pig, so we had to get this pig to have a heart attack. And when you go to the farmyard, you can't easily get pigs to have heart attacks, so we said, well, we're experts in stents. Tonight you'll see some of our invented stents. We said, so we'll put in a stent, but we're not going to put in a stent that we'd put in people. We're putting in a copper stent, and this copper stent erodes the artery and causes heart attacks. That's not very nice, but, after all, we had to find out what the answer is. So we took two copper stents and we put it in the artery of this pig, and let me show you the result that's very gratifying as far as people who have heart disease are concerned. So there it was, Thursday morning we stopped the pig's medication and there is his electrogram, the signal from inside the pig's heart coming out by radio telemetry. Then, on Friday at 6:43, he began to get certain signs, which later we had the pig run around — I'm not going to go into this early stage. But look what happened at 10:06 after we removed this pig's medication that kept him from having a heart attack. Any one of you now is an expert on ST elevation. Can you see it there? Can you see it in the picture after the big rise of the QRS — you see ST elevation? This pig at 10:06 was having a heart attack. What happens after you have the heart attack, this blockage? Your rhythm becomes irregular, and that's what happened 45 minutes later. Then, ventricular fibrillation, the heart quivers instead of beats — this is just before death of the pig — and then the pig died; it went flat-line. But we had a little bit over an hour where we could've saved this pig's life. Well, because of the FDA, we didn't save the pig's life, because we need to do this type of animal research for humans. But when it comes to the sake of a human, we can save their life. We can save the lives of people who are at high risk for a heart attack. What is the response to acute myocardial infarction, a heart attack, today? Well, you feel some chest pain or indigestion. It's not all that bad; you decide not to do anything. Several hours pass and it gets worse, and even the man won't ignore it. Finally, you go to the emergency room. You wait as burns and other critical patients are treated, because 75 percent of the patients who go to an emergency room with chest pains don't have AMI, so you're not taken very seriously. They finally see you. It takes more time to get your electrocardiogram on your skin and diagnose it, and it's hard to do because they don't have the baseline data, which the computer we put in you gets. Finally, if you're lucky, you are treated in three or four hours after the incident, but the heart muscle has died. And that is the typical treatment in the advanced world — not Africa — that's the typical treatment in the advanced world today. So we developed the AngelMed Guardian System and we have a device inside this patient, called the Implanted AngelMed Guardian. And when you have a blockage, the alarm goes off and it sends the alarm and the electrogram to an external device, which gets your baseline electrogram from 24 hours ago and the one that caused the alarm, so you can take it to the emergency room and show them, and say, take care of me right away. Then it goes to a network operations center, where they get your data from your patient database that's been put in at some central location, say, in the United States. Then it goes to a diagnostic center, and within one minute of your heart attack, your signal appears on the screen of a computer and the computer analyzes what your problem is. And the person who's there, the medical practitioner, calls you — this is also a cell phone — and says, "Mr. Smith, you're in deep doo-doo; you have a problem. We've called the ambulance. The ambulance is on the way. It'll pick you up, and then we're going to call your doctor, tell him about it. We're going to send him the signal that we have, that says you have a heart attack, and we're going to send the signal to the hospital and we're going to have it analyzed there, and there you're going to be with your doctor and you'll be taken care of so you won't die of a heart attack." That's the first invention that I wanted to describe. (Applause) And now I want to talk about something entirely different. At first I didn't think migraine headaches were a big problem because I'd never had a migraine headache, but then I spoke to some people who have three or four every week of their life, and their lives are being totally ruined by it. We have a mission statement for our company doing migraine, which is, "Prevent or ameliorate migraine headaches by the application of a safe, controlled magnetic pulse applied, as needed, by the patient." Now, you're probably very few physicists here. If you're a physicist you'd know there's a certain Faraday's Law, which says if I apply a magnetic pulse on salt water — that's your brains by the way — it'll generate electric currents, and the electric current in the brain can erase a migraine headache. That's what we have discovered. So here's a picture of what we're doing. The patients who have a migraine preceded by an aura have a band of excited neurons — that's shown in red — that moves at three to five millimeters a minute towards the mid-brain. And when it hits the mid-brain, that's when the headache begins. There's this migraine that is preceded by a visual aura, and this visual aura, by the way — and I'll show you a picture — but it sort of begins with little dancing lights, gets bigger and bigger until it fills your whole visual field. And what we tried was this; here is a device called the Cadwell Model MES10. Weighs about 70 pounds, has a wire about an inch in diameter. And here's one of the patients who has an aura and always has a headache, bad one, after the aura. What do we do? This is what an aura looks like. It's sort of funny dancing lights, shown there on the left and right side. And that's a fully developed visual aura, as we see on top. In the middle, our experimentalist, the neurologist, who said, "I'm going to move this down a little and I'm going to erase half your aura." And, by God, the neurologist did erase it, and that's the middle picture: half of the aura erased by a short magnetic pulse. What does that mean? That means that the magnetic pulse is generating an electric current that's interfering with the erroneous electrical activity in the brain. And finally he says, "OK, now I'm going to — " all of the aura get erased with an appropriately placed magnetic pulse. What is the result? We designed a magnetic depolarizer that looks like this, that you could have — a lady, in her pocket book — and when you get an aura you can try it and see how it works. Well, the next thing they have to show is what was on ABC News, Channel 7, last week in New York City, in the 11 o'clock news. Anchor: For anyone who suffers from migraine headaches — and there are 30 million Americans who do — tonight: a possible answer. Eyewitness news reporter Stacy Sager tonight, with a small and portable machine that literally zaps your migraines away. Christina Sidebottom: Well, my first reaction was that it was — looked awfully gun-like, and it was very strange. Stacy Sager: But for Christina Sidebottom, almost anything was worth trying if it could stop a migraine. It may look silly or even frightening as you walk around with it in your purse, but researchers here in Ohio organizing clinical trials for this migraine zapper, say it is scientifically sound — that, in fact, when the average person gets a migraine, it's caused by something similar to an electrical impulse. The zapper creates a magnetic field to counteract that. Yousef Mohammed: In other words, we're treating electricity with electricity, rather than treating electricity with the chemicals that we're using nowadays. SS: But is it safe to use everyday? Experts say the research has actually been around for more than a decade, and more long-term studies need to be done. Christina now swears by it. CS: It's been the most wonderful thing for my migraine. SS: Researchers are hoping to present their studies to the FDA this summer. Robert Fischell: And that is the invention to treat migraines. (Applause) You see, the problem is, 30 million Americans have migraine headaches, and we need a means to treat it, and I think that we now have it. And this is the first device that we did, and I'm going to talk about my second wish, which has something to do with this. Our conclusions from our studies so far, at three research centers, is there is a marked improvement in pain levels after using it just once. The most severe headaches responded better after we did it several times, and the unexpected finding indicates that even established headaches, not only those with aura, get treated and get diminished. And auras can be erased and the migraine, then, does not occur. And that is the migraine invention that we are talking about and that we are working on. (Applause) The third and last invention began with an idea. Epilepsy can best be treated by responsive electrical stimulation. Now, why do we use — add on, nearly, an epileptic focus? Now, unfortunately, us technical people, unlike Mr. Bono, have to get into all these technical words. Well, "responsive electrical stimulation" means that we sense, at a place in your brain which is called an "epileptic focus," which is where the epileptic seizure begins — we sense there, that it's going to happen, and then we respond by applying an electrical energy at that spot, which erases the errant signal so that you don't get the clinical manifestations of the migraine headache. We use current pacemaker defibrillator technology that's used for the heart. We thought we could adapt it for the brain. The device could be implanted under the scalp to be totally hidden and avoid wire breakage, which occurs if you put it in the chest and you try to move your neck around. Form a company to develop a neuro-pacemaker for epilepsy, as well as other diseases of the brain, because all diseases of the brain are a result of some electrical malfunction in it, that causes many, if not all, of brain disorders. We formed a company called NeuroPace and we started work on responsive neurostimulation, and this is a picture of what the device looked like, that's placed into the cranial bone. This is probably a better picture. Here we have our device in which we put in a frame. There's a cut made in the scalp; it's opened; the neurosurgeon has a template; he marks it around, and uses a dental burr to remove a piece of the cranial bone exactly the size of our device. And tonight, you'll be able to see the device in the tent. And then with four screws, we put in a frame, then we snap in the device and we run with wires — the one shown in green will go to the surface of the brain with electrodes, to the epileptic focus, the origin of the epilepsy, where we can sense the electrical signal and have computer analysis that tells us when to hit it with some electrical current to prevent the clinical manifestation of the seizure. In the blue wire, we see what's called a deep brain electrode. If that's the source of the epilepsy, we can attack that as well. The comprehensive solution: this is the device; it's about one inches by two inches and, oddly enough, just the thickness of most cranial bones. The advantages of responsive neurostimulation: It can detect and terminate seizures before the clinical symptoms occur, provide stimulation only when needed, can be turned off if seizures disappear; it has minimal side effects — as a matter of fact, in all our clinical trials to date, we've seen no side effects in the 40 or so patients in whom it's been implanted — and it's invisible, cosmetically hidden, so, if you have epilepsy and you have the device, no one will know it because you can't tell that it's there. And this shows what an electroencephalogram is, and on the left is the signal of a spontaneous seizure of one of the patients. Then we stimulated, and you see how that heavy black line and then you see the electroencephalogram signal going to normal, which means they did not get the epileptic seizure. That concludes my discussion of epilepsy, which is the third invention that I want to discuss here this afternoon. (Applause) I have three wishes. Well, I can't do much about Africa. I'm a tech; I'm into medical gadgetry, which is mostly high-tech stuff like Mr. Bono talked about. The first wish is to use the epilepsy responsive neurostimulator, called RNS, for Responsive NeuroStimulator — that's a brilliant acronym — for the treatment of other brain disorders. Well, if we're going to do it for epilepsy, why the hell not try it for something else? Then you saw what that device looked like, that the woman was using to fix her migraines? I tell you this: that's something which some research engineer like me would concoct, not a real designer of good equipment. (Laughter) We want to have some people, who really know how to do this, perform human engineering studies to develop the optimum design for the portable device for treating migraine headaches. And some of the sponsors of this TED meeting are such organizations. Then we're going to challenge the TED attendees to come up with a way to improve health care in the USA, where we have problems that Africa doesn't have. And by reducing malpractice litigation — malpractice litigation is not an African problem; it's an American problem. (Applause) So, to get quickly to my first wish — the brain operates by electrical signals. If the electrical signals create a brain disorder, electro-stimulation can overcome that disorder by acting on the brain's neurons. In other words, if you've screwed up electrical signals, maybe, by putting other electrical signals from a computer in the brain, we can counteract that. A signal in the brain that triggers brain dysfunction might be sensed as a trigger for electro-stimulation like we're doing with epilepsy. But even if there is no signal, electro-stimulation of an appropriate part of the brain can turn off a brain disorder. And consider treating psychotic disorders — and I want this involved with the TED group — such as obsessive-compulsive disorder that, presently, is not well treated with drugs, and includes five million Americans. And Mr. Fischer, and his group at NeuroPace, and myself believe that we can have a dramatic effect in improving OCD in America and in the world. That is the first wish. (Applause) The second wish is, at the present time, the clinical trials of transcranial magnetic stimulators — that's what TMS means, device to treat migraine headaches — appears to be quite successful. Well, that's the good news. The present portable device is far from optimally designed, both as to human factors as appearance. I think she said it looks like a gun. A lot of people don't like guns. (Laughter) Engage a company having prior successes for human factors engineering and industrial design to optimize the design of the first portable TMS device that will be sold to the patients who have migraine headaches. And that is the second wish. (Applause) And, of the 100,000-dollar prize money, that TED was so generous to give me, I am donating 50,000 dollars to the NeuroPace people to get on with the treatment of OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I'm making another 50,000 available for a company to optimize the design of the device for migraines. And that's how I'll use my 100,000-dollar prize money. (Applause) Well, the third and final wish is somewhat — unfortunately, it's much more complicated because it involves lawyers. (Laughter) Well, medical malpractice litigation in the US has escalated the cost of malpractice insurance, so that competent physicians are leaving their practice. Lawyers take cases on contingency with the hope of a big share of a big settlement by a sympathetic jury, because this patient really ended up badly. The high cost of health care in the US is partly due to litigation and insurance costs. I've seen pictures, graphs in today's USA Today showing it skyrocketing out of control, and this is one factor. Well, how can the TED community help with this situation? I have a couple of ideas to begin with. As a starting point for discussion with the TED group, a major part of the problem is the nature of the written extent of informed consent that the patient or spouse must read and sign. For example, I asked the epilepsy people what are they using for informed consent. Would you believe, 12 pages, single space, the patient has to read before they're in our trial to cure their epilepsy? What do you think someone has at the end of reading 12 single-spaced pages? They don't understand what the hell it's about. (Laughter) That's the present system. How about making a video? We have entertainment people here; we have people who know how to do videos, with visual presentation of the anatomy and procedure done with animation. Everybody knows that we can do better with a visual thing that can be interactive with the patient, where they see the video and they're being videoed and they press, do you understand this? No, I don't. Well, then let's go to a simpler explanation. Then there's a simpler one and, oh yes, I understand that. Well, press the button and you're on record, you understand. And that is one of the ideas. Now, also a video is done of the patient or spouse and medical presenter, with the patient agreeing that he understands the procedure to be done, including all the possible failure modes. The patient or spouse agrees not to file a lawsuit if one of the known procedure failures occurs. Now, in America, in fact, you cannot give up your right to trial by jury. However, if a video is there that everything was explained to you, and you have it all in the video file, it'll be much less likely that some hotshot lawyer will take this case on contingency, because it won't be nearly as good a case. If a medical error occurs, the patient or spouse agrees to a settlement for fair compensation by arbitration instead of going to court. That would save hundreds of millions of dollars in legal costs in the United States and would decrease the cost of medicine for everyone. These are just some starting points. And, so there, that's the end of all my wishes. I wish I had more wishes but three is what I've got and there they are. (Applause)

My wish: Three actions for Africa

Bono

{0: ' Bono'}

{0: ['musician', 'activist']}

{0: 'Bono, the lead singer of U2, uses his celebrity to fight for social justice worldwide: to end hunger, poverty and disease, especially in Africa. His nonprofit ONE raises awareness via media, policy and calls to action.'}

2005-02-24

2006-10-31

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'eo', 'es', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['AIDS', 'Africa', 'activism', 'entertainment', 'global issues', 'philanthropy', 'poverty', 'social change']

{156: 'How to educate leaders? Liberal arts', 157: 'Patient capitalism', 127: 'Want to help Africa? Do business here', 330: 'How I became an activist', 154: 'Why invest in Africa', 232: 'My wish: Find the next Einstein in Africa'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/bono_my_wish_three_actions_for_africa/

Musician and activist Bono accepts the 2005 TED Prize with a riveting talk, arguing that aid to Africa isn't just another celebrity cause; it's a global emergency.

Well, as Alexander Graham Bell famously said on his first successful telephone call, "Hello, is that Domino's Pizza?" (Laughter) I just really want to thank you very much. As another famous man, Jerry Garcia, said, "What a strange, long trip." And he should have said, "What a strange, long trip it's about to become." At this very moment, you are viewing my upper half. My lower half is appearing at a different conference (Laughter) in a different country. You can, it turns out, be in two places at once. But still, I'm sorry I can't be with you in person. I'll explain at another time. And though I'm a rock star, I just want to assure you that none of my wishes will include a hot tub. But what really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. The revolution — this revolution — is much bigger than that. I hope, I believe. What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop. If you wanted to make a film, you needed a mass of equipment and a Hollywood budget. Now, you need a camera that fits in your palm, and a couple of bucks for a blank DVD. Imagination has been decoupled from the old constraints. And that really, really excites me. I'm excited when I glimpse that kind of thinking writ large. What I would like to see is idealism decoupled from all constraints. Political, economic, psychological, whatever. The geopolitical world has got a lot to learn from the digital world. From the ease with which you swept away obstacles that no one knew could even be budged. And that's actually what I'd like to talk about today. First, though, I should probably explain why, and how, I got to this place. It's a journey that started 20 years ago. You may remember that song, "We Are the World," or, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" Band Aid, Live Aid. Another very tall, grizzled rock star, my friend Sir Bob Geldof, issued a challenge to "feed the world." It was a great moment, and it utterly changed my life. That summer, my wife, Ali, and myself went to Ethiopia. We went on the quiet to see for ourselves what was going on. We lived in Ethiopia for a month, working at an orphanage. The children had a name for me. They called me, "The girl with the beard." (Laughter) Don't ask. Anyway, we found Africa to be a magical place. Big skies, big hearts, big, shining continent. Beautiful, royal people. Anybody who ever gave anything to Africa got a lot more back. Ethiopia didn't just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, "Would you take my son with you?" He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die. It was the middle of that awful famine. Well, I turned him down. And it was a funny kind of sick feeling, but I turned him down. And it's a feeling I can't ever quite forget. And in that moment, I started this journey. In that moment, I became the worst thing of all: I became a rock star with a cause. (Laughter) Except this isn't the cause, is it? Six-and-a-half thousand Africans dying every single day from AIDS — a preventable, treatable disease — for lack of drugs we can get in any pharmacy. That's not a cause. That's an emergency. 11 million AIDS orphans in Africa, 20 million by the end of the decade. That's not a cause. That's an emergency. Today, every day, 9,000 more Africans will catch HIV because of stigmatization and lack of education. That's not a cause. That's an emergency. So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality. The next thing I'd like to be clear about is what this problem is, and what this problem isn't. Because this is not all about charity. This is about justice. Really. This is not about charity. This is about justice. That's right. And that's too bad, because we're very good at charity. Americans, like Irish people, are good at it. Even the poorest neighborhoods give more than they can afford. We like to give, and we give a lot. Look at the response to the tsunami — it's inspiring. But justice is a tougher standard than charity. You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else. As you heard in the film, anywhere else, not here. Not here, not in America, not in Europe. In fact, a head of state that you're all familiar with admitted this to me. And it's really true. There is no chance this kind of hemorrhaging of human life would be accepted anywhere else other than Africa. Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We're standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade. You see, it's not as dramatic as the tsunami. It's crazy, really, when you think about it. Does stuff have to look like an action movie these days to exist in the front of our brain? The slow extinguishing of countless lives is just not dramatic enough, it would appear. Catastrophes that we can avert are not as interesting as ones we could avert. Funny, that. Anyway, I believe that that kind of thinking offends the intellectual rigor in this room. Six-and-a-half thousand people dying a day in Africa may be Africa's crisis, but the fact that it's not on the nightly news, that we in Europe, or you in America, are not treating it like an emergency — I want to argue with you tonight that that's our crisis. I want to argue that though Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, it could be soon. Every week, religious extremists take another African village. They're attempting to bring order to chaos. Well, why aren't we? Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn't it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later? "The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty." And I didn't say that. Colin Powell said that. Now when the military are telling us that this is a war that cannot be won by military might alone, maybe we should listen. There's an opportunity here, and it's real. It's not spin. It's not wishful thinking. The problems facing the developing world afford us in the developed world a chance to re-describe ourselves to the world. We will not only transform other people's lives, but we will also transform the way those other lives see us. And that might be smart in these nervous, dangerous times. Don't you think that on a purely commercial level, that anti-retroviral drugs are great advertisements for Western ingenuity and technology? Doesn't compassion look well on us? And let's cut the crap for a second. In certain quarters of the world, brand EU, brand USA, is not at its shiniest. The neon sign is fizzing and cracking. Someone's put a brick through the window. The regional branch managers are getting nervous. Never before have we in the west been so scrutinized. Our values: do we have any? Our credibility? These things are under attack around the world. Brand USA could use some polishing. And I say that as a fan, you know? As a person who buys the products. But think about it. More anti-retrovirals make sense. But that's just the easy part, or ought to be. But equality for Africa — that's a big, expensive idea. You see, the scale of the suffering numbs us into a kind of indifference. What on earth can we all do about this? Well, much more than we think. We can't fix every problem, but the ones we can, I want to argue, we must. And because we can, we must. This is the straight truth, the righteous truth. It is not a theory. The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it: we do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off — we do not have to stand for this. (Applause) And let me say this without a trace of irony — before I back it up to a bunch of ex-hippies. Forget the '60s. We can change the world. I can't; you can't, as individuals; but we can change the world. I really believe that, the people in this room. Look at the Gates Foundation. They've done incredible stuff, unbelievable stuff. But working together, we can actually change the world. We can turn the inevitable outcomes, and transform the quality of life for millions of lives who look and feel rather like us, when you're up close. I'm sorry to laugh here, but you do look so different than you did in Haight-Ashbury in the '60s. (Laughter) But I want to argue that this is the moment that you are designed for. It is the flowering of the seeds you planted in earlier, headier days. Ideas that you gestated in your youth. This is what excites me. This room was born for this moment, is really what I want to say to you tonight. Most of you started out wanting to change the world, didn't you? Most of you did, the digital world. Well, now, actually because of you, it is possible to change the physical world. It's a fact. Economists confirm it, and they know much more than I do. So why, then, are we not pumping our fists into the air? Probably because when we admit we can do something about it, we've got to do something about it. It is a pain in the arse. This equality business is actually a pain in the arse. But for the first time in history, we have the technology; we have the know-how; we have the cash; we have the life-saving drugs. Do we have the will? I hope this is obvious, but I'm not a hippie. And I'm not really one for the warm, fuzzy feeling. I do not have flowers in my hair. Actually, I come from punk rock. The Clash wore big army boots, not sandals. But I know toughness when I see it. And for all the talk of peace and love on the West Coast, there was muscle to the movement that started out here. You see, idealism detached from action is just a dream. But idealism allied with pragmatism, with rolling up your sleeves and making the world bend a bit, is very exciting. It's very real. It's very strong. And it's very present in a crowd like you. Last year at DATA, this organization I helped set up, we launched a campaign to summon this spirit in the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty. We're calling it the ONE Campaign. It's based on our belief that the action of one person can change a lot, but the actions of many coming together as one can change the world. Well, we feel that now is the time to prove we're right. There are moments in history when civilization redefines itself. We believe this is one. We believe that this could be the time when the world finally decides that the wanton loss of life in Africa is just no longer acceptable. This could be the time that we finally get serious about changing the future for most people who live on planet Earth. Momentum has been building. Lurching a little, but it's building. This year is a test for us all, especially the leaders of the G8 nations, who really are on the line here, with all the world in history watching. I have been, of late, disappointed with the Bush Administration. They started out with such promise on Africa. They made some really great promises, and actually have fulfilled a lot of them. But some of them they haven't. They don't feel the push from the ground, is the truth. But my disappointment has much more perspective when I talk to American people, and I hear their worries about the deficit, and the fiscal well being of their country. I understand that. But there's much more push from the ground than you'd think, if we got organized. What I try to communicate, and you can help me if you agree, is that aid for Africa is just great value for money at a time when America really needs it. Putting it in the crassest possible terms, the investment reaps huge returns. Not only in lives saved, but in goodwill, stability and security that we'll gain. So this is what I hope that you will do, if I could be so bold, and not have it deducted from my number of wishes. (Laughter) What I hope is that beyond individual merciful acts, that you will tell the politicians to do right by Africa, by America and by the world. Give them permission, if you like, to spend their political capital and your financial capital, your national purse on saving the lives of millions of people. That's really what I would like you to do. Because we also need your intellectual capital: your ideas, your skills, your ingenuity. And you, at this conference, are in a unique position. Some of the technologies we've been talking about, you invented them, or at least revolutionized the way that they're used. Together you have changed the zeitgeist from analog to digital, and pushed the boundaries. And we'd like you to give us that energy. Give us that kind of dreaming, that kind of doing. As I say, there're two things on the line here. There's the continent Africa. But there's also our sense of ourselves. People are starting to figure this out. Movements are springing up. Artists, politicians, pop stars, priests, CEOs, NGOs, mothers' unions, student unions. A lot of people are getting together, and working under this umbrella I told you about earlier, the ONE Campaign. I think they just have one idea in their mind, which is, where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world. (Applause) History, like God, is watching what we do. When the history books get written, I think our age will be remembered for three things. Really, it's just three things this whole age will be remembered for. The digital revolution, yes. The war against terror, yes. And what we did or did not do to put out the fires in Africa. Some say we can't afford to. I say we can't afford not to. Thank you, thank you very much. (Applause) Okay, my three wishes. The ones that TED has offered to grant. You see, if this is true, and I believe it is, that the digital world you all created has uncoupled the creative imagination from the physical constraints of matter, this should be a piece of piss. (Laughter) I should add that this started out as a much longer list of wishes. Most of them impossible, some of them impractical and one or two of them certainly immoral. (Laughter) This business, it gets to be addictive, you know what I mean, when somebody else is picking up the tab. Anyway, here's number one. I wish for you to help build a social movement of more than one million American activists for Africa. That is my first wish. I believe it's possible. A few minutes ago, I talked about all the citizens' campaigns that are springing up. You know, there's lots out there. And with this one campaign as our umbrella, my organization, DATA, and other groups, have been tapping into the energy and the enthusiasm that's out there from Hollywood into the heartland of America. We know there's more than enough energy to power this movement. We just need your help in making it happen. We want all of you here, church America, corporate America, Microsoft America, Apple America, Coke America, Pepsi America, nerd America, noisy America. We can't afford to be cool and sit this one out. I do believe if we build a movement that's one million Americans strong, we're not going to be denied. We will have the ear of Congress. We'll be the first page in Condi Rice's briefing book, and right into the Oval Office. If there's one million Americans — and I really know this — who are ready to make phone calls, who are ready to be on email, I am absolutely sure that we can actually change the course of history, literally, for the continent of Africa. Anyway, so I'd like your help in getting that signed up. I know John Gage and Sun Microsystems are already on board for this, but there's lots of you we'd like to talk to. Right, my second wish, number two. I would like one media hit for every person on the planet who is living on less than one dollar a day. That's one billion media hits. Could be on Google, could be on AOL. Steve Case, Larry, Sergey — they've done a lot already. It could be NBC. It could be ABC. Actually we're talking to ABC today about the Oscars. We have a film, produced by Jon Kamen at Radical Media. But you know, we want, we need some airtime for our ideas. We need to get the math; we need to get the statistics out to the American people. I really believe that old Truman line, that if you give the American people the facts, they'll do the right thing. And, the other thing that's important is that this is not Sally Struthers. This has to be described as an adventure, not a burden. (Video): One by one they step forward, a nurse, a teacher, a homemaker, and lives are saved. The problem is enormous. Every three seconds one person dies. Another three seconds, one more. The situation is so desperate in parts of Africa, Asia, even America, that aid groups, just as they did for the tsunami, are uniting as one, acting as one. We can beat extreme poverty, starvation, AIDS. But we need your help. One more person, letter, voice will mean the difference between life and death for millions of people. Please join us by working together. Americans have an unprecedented opportunity. We can make history. We can start to make poverty history. One, by one, by one. Please visit ONE at this address. We're not asking for your money. We're asking for your voice. Bono: All right. I wish for TED to truly show the power of information, its power to rewrite the rules and transform lives, by connecting every hospital, health clinic and school in one African country. And I would like it to be Ethiopia. I believe we can connect every school in Ethiopia, every health clinic, every hospital — we can connect to the Internet. That is my wish, my third wish. I think it's possible. I think we have the money and brains in the room to do that. And that would be a mind-blowing wish to come true. I've been to Ethiopia, as I said earlier. It's actually where it all started for me. The idea that the Internet, which changed all of our lives, can transform a country — and a continent that has hardly made it to analog, let alone digital — blows my mind. But it didn't start out that way. The first long-distance line from Boston to New York was used in 1885 on the phone. It was just nine years later that Addis Ababa was connected by phone to Harare, which is 500 kilometers away. Since then, not that much has changed. The average waiting time to get a landline in Ethiopia is actually about seven or eight years. But wireless technology wasn't dreamt up then. Anyway, I'm Irish, and as you can see, I know how important talking is. Communication is very important for Ethiopia — will transform the country. Nurses getting better training, pharmacists being able to order supplies, doctors sharing their expertise in all aspects of medicine. It's a very, very good idea to get them wired. And that is my third and final wish for you at the TED conference. Thank you very much once again. (Applause)

Why people believe weird things

Michael Shermer

{0: 'Michael Shermer'}

{0: ['skeptic']}

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

2006-02-23

2006-11-08

TED2006

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'gu', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'lv', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'entertainment', 'faith', 'illusion', 'religion', 'science']

{666: 'A new way to explain explanation', 2178: '9 myths about psychology, debunked', 333: 'What we think we know', 426: 'Play! Experiment! Discover!', 1245: 'Open science now!', 11327: 'Need a new idea? Start at the edge of what is known'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_why_people_believe_weird_things/

Why do people see the Virgin Mary on a cheese sandwich or hear demonic lyrics in "Stairway to Heaven"? Using video and music, skeptic Michael Shermer shows how we convince ourselves to believe -- and overlook the facts.

I'm Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, publisher of "Skeptic" magazine. We investigate claims of the paranormal, pseudo-science, fringe groups and cults, and claims of all kinds between, science and pseudo-science and non-science and junk science, voodoo science, pathological science, bad science, non-science, and plain old non-sense. And unless you've been on Mars recently, you know there's a lot of that out there. Some people call us debunkers, which is kind of a negative term. But let's face it, there's a lot of bunk. We are like the bunko squads of the police departments out there — well, we're sort of like the Ralph Naders of bad ideas, (Laughter) trying to replace bad ideas with good ideas. I'll show you an example of a bad idea. I brought this with me, this was given to us by NBC Dateline to test. It's produced by the Quadro Corporation of West Virginia. It's called the Quadro 2000 Dowser Rod. (Laughter) This was being sold to high-school administrators for $900 apiece. It's a piece of plastic with a Radio Shack antenna attached to it. You could dowse for all sorts of things, but this particular one was built to dowse for marijuana in students' lockers. (Laughter) So the way it works is you go down the hallway, and you see if it tilts toward a particular locker, and then you open the locker. So it looks something like this. I'll show you. (Laughter) Well, it has kind of a right-leaning bias. Well, this is science, so we'll do a controlled experiment. It'll go this way for sure. (Laughter) Sir, do you want to empty your pockets, please, sir? (Laughter) So the question was, can it actually find marijuana in students' lockers? And the answer is, if you open enough of them, yes. (Laughter) (Applause) But in science, we have to keep track of the misses, not just the hits. And that's probably the key lesson to my short talk here: This is how psychics work, astrologers, tarot card readers and so on. People remember the hits and forget the misses. In science, we keep the whole database, and look to see if the number of hits somehow stands out from the total number you'd expect by chance. In this case, we tested it. We had two opaque boxes: one with government-approved THC marijuana, and one with nothing. And it got it 50 percent of the time — (Laughter) which is exactly what you'd expect with a coin-flip model. So that's just a fun little example here of the sorts of things we do. "Skeptic" is the quarterly publication. Each one has a particular theme. This one is on the future of intelligence. Are people getting smarter or dumber? I have an opinion of this myself because of the business I'm in, but in fact, people, it turns out, are getting smarter. Three IQ points per 10 years, going up. Sort of an interesting thing. With science, don't think of skepticism as a thing, or science as a thing. Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things. Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena. I mean, what's more likely: that extraterrestrial intelligences or multi-dimensional beings travel across vast distances of interstellar space to leave a crop circle in Farmer Bob's field in Puckerbrush, Kansas to promote skeptic.com, our web page? Or is it more likely that a reader of "Skeptic" did this with Photoshop? And in all cases we have to ask — (Laughter) What's the more likely explanation? Before we say something is out of this world, we should first make sure that it's not in this world. What's more likely: that Arnold had extraterrestrial help in his run for the governorship, or that the "World Weekly News" makes stuff up? (Laughter) The same theme is expressed nicely here in this Sidney Harris cartoon. For those of you in the back, it says here: "Then a miracle occurs. I think you need to be more explicit here in step two." This single slide completely dismantles the intelligent design arguments. There's nothing more to it than that. (Applause) You can say a miracle occurs, it's just that it doesn't explain anything or offer anything. There's nothing to test. It's the end of the conversation for intelligent design creationists. And it's true, scientists sometimes throw terms out as linguistic place fillers — dark energy or dark matter, something like that — until we figure out what it is, we'll call it this. It's the beginning of the causal chain for science. For intelligent design creationists, it's the end of the chain. So again, we can ask this: what's more likely? Are UFOs alien spaceships, or perceptual cognitive mistakes, or even fakes? This is a UFO shot from my house in Altadena, California, looking down over Pasadena. And if it looks a lot like a Buick hubcap, it's because it is. You don't even need Photoshop or high-tech equipment, you don't need computers. This was shot with a throwaway Kodak Instamatic camera. You just have somebody off on the side with a hubcap ready to go. Camera's ready — that's it. (Laughter) So, although it's possible that most of these things are fake or illusions or so on, and that some of them are real, it's more likely that all of them are fake, like the crop circles. On a more serious note, in all of science we're looking for a balance between data and theory. In the case of Galileo, he had two problems when he turned his telescope to Saturn. First of all, there was no theory of planetary rings. Second of all, his data was grainy and fuzzy, and he couldn't quite make out what he was looking at. So he wrote that he had seen — "I have observed that the furthest planet has three bodies." And this is what he ended up concluding that he saw. So without a theory of planetary rings and with only grainy data, you can't have a good theory. It wasn't solved until 1655. This is Christiaan Huygens's book that catalogs all the mistakes people made trying to figure out what was going on with Saturn. It wasn't till Huygens had two things: He had a good theory of planetary rings and how the solar system operated, and he had better telescopic, more fine-grain data in which he could figure out that as the Earth is going around faster — according to Kepler's Laws — than Saturn, then we catch up with it. And we see the angles of the rings at different angles, there. And that, in fact, turns out to be true. The problem with having a theory is that it may be loaded with cognitive biases. So one of the problems of explaining why people believe weird things is that we have things, on a simple level, and then I'll go to more serious ones. Like, we have a tendency to see faces. This is the face on Mars. In 1976, where there was a whole movement to get NASA to photograph that area because people thought this was monumental architecture made by Martians. Here's the close-up of it from 2001. If you squint, you can still see the face. And when you're squinting, you're turning that from fine-grain to coarse-grain, so you're reducing the quality of your data. And if I didn't tell you what to look for, you'd still see the face, because we're programmed by evolution to see faces. Faces are important for us socially. And of course, happy faces, faces of all kinds are easy to see. You see the happy face on Mars, there. (Laughter) If astronomers were frogs, perhaps they'd see Kermit the Frog. Do you see him there? Little froggy legs. Or if geologists were elephants? Religious iconography. (Laughter) Discovered by a Tennessee baker in 1996. He charged five bucks a head to come see the nun bun till he got a cease-and-desist from Mother Teresa's lawyer. Here's Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Watsonville, just down the street, or is it up the street from here? Tree bark is particularly good because it's nice and grainy, branchy, black-and-white splotchy and you can get the pattern-seeking — humans are pattern-seeking animals. Here's the Virgin Mary on the side of a glass window in Sao Paulo. Here's when the Virgin Mary made her appearance on a cheese sandwich — which I got to actually hold in a Las Vegas casino — of course, this being America. (Laughter) This casino paid $28,500 on eBay for the cheese sandwich. (Laughter) But who does it really look like? The Virgin Mary? (Laughter) It has that sort of puckered lips, 1940s-era look. Virgin Mary in Clearwater, Florida. I actually went to see this one. There was a lot of people there. The faithful come in their wheelchairs and crutches, and so on. We went down and investigated. Just to give you a size, that's Dawkins, me and The Amazing Randi, next to this two, two and a half story-sized image. All these candles, thousands of candles people had lit in tribute to this. So we walked around the backside, to see what was going on. It turns out wherever there's a sprinkler head and a palm tree, you get the effect. Here's the Virgin Mary on the backside, which they started to wipe off. I guess you can only have one miracle per building. (Laughter) So is it really a miracle of Mary, or is it a miracle of Marge? (Laughter) And now I'm going to finish up with another example of this, with auditory illusions. There's this film, "White Noise," with Michael Keaton, about the dead talking back to us. By the way, the whole business of talking to the dead is not that big a deal. Anybody can do it, turns out. It's getting the dead to talk back that's the really hard part. (Laughter) In this case, supposedly, these messages are hidden in electronic phenomena. There's a ReverseSpeech.com web page where I downloaded this stuff. This is the most famous one of all of these. Here's the forward version of the very famous song. (Music with lyrics) If there's a bustle in your hedgerow don't be alarmed now. It's just a spring clean for the May Queen. Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, There's still time to change the road you're on. (Music ends) Couldn't you just listen to that all day? All right, here it is backwards, and see if you can hear the hidden messages that are supposedly in there. (Music with unintelligible lyrics) (Lyrics) Satan! (Unintelligible lyrics continue) What did you get? Audience: Satan! Satan. OK, at least we got "Satan". Now, I'll prime the auditory part of your brain to tell you what you're supposed to hear, and then hear it again. (Music with lyrics) (Music ends) (Laughter) (Applause) You can't miss it when I tell you what's there. (Laughter) I'm going to just end with a positive, nice little story. The Skeptics is a nonprofit educational organization. We're always looking for little good things that people do. And in England, there's a pop singer. One of the top popular singers in England today, Katie Melua. And she wrote a beautiful song. It was in the top five in 2005, called, "Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing." It's a love story — she's sort of the Norah Jones of the UK — about how she much loves her guy, and compared to nine million bicycles, and so forth. And she has this one passage here. (Music) (Lyrics) We are 12 billion light-years from the edge That's a guess, No one can ever say it's true, But I know that I will always be with you. Michael Shermer: Well, that's nice. At least she got it close. In America it'd be, "We're 6,000 light years from the edge." (Laughter) But my friend, Simon Singh, the particle physicist now turned science educator, who wrote the book "The Big Bang," and so on, uses every chance he gets to promote good science. And so he wrote an op-ed piece in "The Guardian" about Katie's song, in which he said, well, we know exactly how far from the edge. You know, it's 13.7 billion light years, and it's not a guess. We know within precise error bars how close it is. So we can say, although not absolutely true, it's pretty close to being true. And, to his credit, Katie called him up after this op-ed piece came out, and said, "I'm so embarrassed. I was in the astronomy club. I should've known better." And she re-cut the song. So I will end with the new version. (Music with lyrics) We are 13.7 billion light years from the edge of the observable universe. That's a good estimate with well-defined error bars. And with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you. (Laughter) How cool is that? (Applause)

How juries are fooled by statistics

Peter Donnelly

{0: 'Peter Donnelly'}

{0: ['mathematician; statistician']}

{0: "Peter Donnelly is an expert in probability theory who applies statistical methods to genetic data -- spurring advances in disease treatment and insight on our evolution. He's also an expert on DNA analysis, and an advocate for sensible statistical analysis in the courtroom."}

2005-07-14

2006-11-08

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'eu', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'genetics', 'science', 'statistics', 'technology']

{92: "The best stats you've ever seen", 22: 'Why people believe weird things', 143: 'Flip your thinking on AIDS in Africa', 2004: 'The hunt for "unexpected genetic heroes"', 408: 'The coming neurological epidemic', 571: "Learning from the gecko's tail"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_how_juries_are_fooled_by_statistics/

Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly reveals the common mistakes humans make in interpreting statistics -- and the devastating impact these errors can have on the outcome of criminal trials.

As other speakers have said, it's a rather daunting experience — a particularly daunting experience — to be speaking in front of this audience. But unlike the other speakers, I'm not going to tell you about the mysteries of the universe, or the wonders of evolution, or the really clever, innovative ways people are attacking the major inequalities in our world. Or even the challenges of nation-states in the modern global economy. My brief, as you've just heard, is to tell you about statistics — and, to be more precise, to tell you some exciting things about statistics. And that's — (Laughter) — that's rather more challenging than all the speakers before me and all the ones coming after me. (Laughter) One of my senior colleagues told me, when I was a youngster in this profession, rather proudly, that statisticians were people who liked figures but didn't have the personality skills to become accountants. (Laughter) And there's another in-joke among statisticians, and that's, "How do you tell the introverted statistician from the extroverted statistician?" To which the answer is, "The extroverted statistician's the one who looks at the other person's shoes." (Laughter) But I want to tell you something useful — and here it is, so concentrate now. This evening, there's a reception in the University's Museum of Natural History. And it's a wonderful setting, as I hope you'll find, and a great icon to the best of the Victorian tradition. It's very unlikely — in this special setting, and this collection of people — but you might just find yourself talking to someone you'd rather wish that you weren't. So here's what you do. When they say to you, "What do you do?" — you say, "I'm a statistician." (Laughter) Well, except they've been pre-warned now, and they'll know you're making it up. And then one of two things will happen. They'll either discover their long-lost cousin in the other corner of the room and run over and talk to them. Or they'll suddenly become parched and/or hungry — and often both — and sprint off for a drink and some food. And you'll be left in peace to talk to the person you really want to talk to. It's one of the challenges in our profession to try and explain what we do. We're not top on people's lists for dinner party guests and conversations and so on. And it's something I've never really found a good way of doing. But my wife — who was then my girlfriend — managed it much better than I've ever been able to. Many years ago, when we first started going out, she was working for the BBC in Britain, and I was, at that stage, working in America. I was coming back to visit her. She told this to one of her colleagues, who said, "Well, what does your boyfriend do?" Sarah thought quite hard about the things I'd explained — and she concentrated, in those days, on listening. (Laughter) Don't tell her I said that. And she was thinking about the work I did developing mathematical models for understanding evolution and modern genetics. So when her colleague said, "What does he do?" She paused and said, "He models things." (Laughter) Well, her colleague suddenly got much more interested than I had any right to expect and went on and said, "What does he model?" Well, Sarah thought a little bit more about my work and said, "Genes." (Laughter) "He models genes." That is my first love, and that's what I'll tell you a little bit about. What I want to do more generally is to get you thinking about the place of uncertainty and randomness and chance in our world, and how we react to that, and how well we do or don't think about it. So you've had a pretty easy time up till now — a few laughs, and all that kind of thing — in the talks to date. You've got to think, and I'm going to ask you some questions. So here's the scene for the first question I'm going to ask you. Can you imagine tossing a coin successively? And for some reason — which shall remain rather vague — we're interested in a particular pattern. Here's one — a head, followed by a tail, followed by a tail. So suppose we toss a coin repeatedly. Then the pattern, head-tail-tail, that we've suddenly become fixated with happens here. And you can count: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 — it happens after the 10th toss. So you might think there are more interesting things to do, but humor me for the moment. Imagine this half of the audience each get out coins, and they toss them until they first see the pattern head-tail-tail. The first time they do it, maybe it happens after the 10th toss, as here. The second time, maybe it's after the fourth toss. The next time, after the 15th toss. So you do that lots and lots of times, and you average those numbers. That's what I want this side to think about. The other half of the audience doesn't like head-tail-tail — they think, for deep cultural reasons, that's boring — and they're much more interested in a different pattern — head-tail-head. So, on this side, you get out your coins, and you toss and toss and toss. And you count the number of times until the pattern head-tail-head appears and you average them. OK? So on this side, you've got a number — you've done it lots of times, so you get it accurately — which is the average number of tosses until head-tail-tail. On this side, you've got a number — the average number of tosses until head-tail-head. So here's a deep mathematical fact — if you've got two numbers, one of three things must be true. Either they're the same, or this one's bigger than this one, or this one's bigger than that one. So what's going on here? So you've all got to think about this, and you've all got to vote — and we're not moving on. And I don't want to end up in the two-minute silence to give you more time to think about it, until everyone's expressed a view. OK. So what you want to do is compare the average number of tosses until we first see head-tail-head with the average number of tosses until we first see head-tail-tail. Who thinks that A is true — that, on average, it'll take longer to see head-tail-head than head-tail-tail? Who thinks that B is true — that on average, they're the same? Who thinks that C is true — that, on average, it'll take less time to see head-tail-head than head-tail-tail? OK, who hasn't voted yet? Because that's really naughty — I said you had to. (Laughter) OK. So most people think B is true. And you might be relieved to know even rather distinguished mathematicians think that. It's not. A is true here. It takes longer, on average. In fact, the average number of tosses till head-tail-head is 10 and the average number of tosses until head-tail-tail is eight. How could that be? Anything different about the two patterns? There is. Head-tail-head overlaps itself. If you went head-tail-head-tail-head, you can cunningly get two occurrences of the pattern in only five tosses. You can't do that with head-tail-tail. That turns out to be important. There are two ways of thinking about this. I'll give you one of them. So imagine — let's suppose we're doing it. On this side — remember, you're excited about head-tail-tail; you're excited about head-tail-head. We start tossing a coin, and we get a head — and you start sitting on the edge of your seat because something great and wonderful, or awesome, might be about to happen. The next toss is a tail — you get really excited. The champagne's on ice just next to you; you've got the glasses chilled to celebrate. You're waiting with bated breath for the final toss. And if it comes down a head, that's great. You're done, and you celebrate. If it's a tail — well, rather disappointedly, you put the glasses away and put the champagne back. And you keep tossing, to wait for the next head, to get excited. On this side, there's a different experience. It's the same for the first two parts of the sequence. You're a little bit excited with the first head — you get rather more excited with the next tail. Then you toss the coin. If it's a tail, you crack open the champagne. If it's a head you're disappointed, but you're still a third of the way to your pattern again. And that's an informal way of presenting it — that's why there's a difference. Another way of thinking about it — if we tossed a coin eight million times, then we'd expect a million head-tail-heads and a million head-tail-tails — but the head-tail-heads could occur in clumps. So if you want to put a million things down amongst eight million positions and you can have some of them overlapping, the clumps will be further apart. It's another way of getting the intuition. What's the point I want to make? It's a very, very simple example, an easily stated question in probability, which every — you're in good company — everybody gets wrong. This is my little diversion into my real passion, which is genetics. There's a connection between head-tail-heads and head-tail-tails in genetics, and it's the following. When you toss a coin, you get a sequence of heads and tails. When you look at DNA, there's a sequence of not two things — heads and tails — but four letters — As, Gs, Cs and Ts. And there are little chemical scissors, called restriction enzymes which cut DNA whenever they see particular patterns. And they're an enormously useful tool in modern molecular biology. And instead of asking the question, "How long until I see a head-tail-head?" — you can ask, "How big will the chunks be when I use a restriction enzyme which cuts whenever it sees G-A-A-G, for example? How long will those chunks be?" That's a rather trivial connection between probability and genetics. There's a much deeper connection, which I don't have time to go into and that is that modern genetics is a really exciting area of science. And we'll hear some talks later in the conference specifically about that. But it turns out that unlocking the secrets in the information generated by modern experimental technologies, a key part of that has to do with fairly sophisticated — you'll be relieved to know that I do something useful in my day job, rather more sophisticated than the head-tail-head story — but quite sophisticated computer modelings and mathematical modelings and modern statistical techniques. And I will give you two little snippets — two examples — of projects we're involved in in my group in Oxford, both of which I think are rather exciting. You know about the Human Genome Project. That was a project which aimed to read one copy of the human genome. The natural thing to do after you've done that — and that's what this project, the International HapMap Project, which is a collaboration between labs in five or six different countries. Think of the Human Genome Project as learning what we've got in common, and the HapMap Project is trying to understand where there are differences between different people. Why do we care about that? Well, there are lots of reasons. The most pressing one is that we want to understand how some differences make some people susceptible to one disease — type-2 diabetes, for example — and other differences make people more susceptible to heart disease, or stroke, or autism and so on. That's one big project. There's a second big project, recently funded by the Wellcome Trust in this country, involving very large studies — thousands of individuals, with each of eight different diseases, common diseases like type-1 and type-2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease, bipolar disease and so on — to try and understand the genetics. To try and understand what it is about genetic differences that causes the diseases. Why do we want to do that? Because we understand very little about most human diseases. We don't know what causes them. And if we can get in at the bottom and understand the genetics, we'll have a window on the way the disease works, and a whole new way about thinking about disease therapies and preventative treatment and so on. So that's, as I said, the little diversion on my main love. Back to some of the more mundane issues of thinking about uncertainty. Here's another quiz for you — now suppose we've got a test for a disease which isn't infallible, but it's pretty good. It gets it right 99 percent of the time. And I take one of you, or I take someone off the street, and I test them for the disease in question. Let's suppose there's a test for HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — and the test says the person has the disease. What's the chance that they do? The test gets it right 99 percent of the time. So a natural answer is 99 percent. Who likes that answer? Come on — everyone's got to get involved. Don't think you don't trust me anymore. (Laughter) Well, you're right to be a bit skeptical, because that's not the answer. That's what you might think. It's not the answer, and it's not because it's only part of the story. It actually depends on how common or how rare the disease is. So let me try and illustrate that. Here's a little caricature of a million individuals. So let's think about a disease that affects — it's pretty rare, it affects one person in 10,000. Amongst these million individuals, most of them are healthy and some of them will have the disease. And in fact, if this is the prevalence of the disease, about 100 will have the disease and the rest won't. So now suppose we test them all. What happens? Well, amongst the 100 who do have the disease, the test will get it right 99 percent of the time, and 99 will test positive. Amongst all these other people who don't have the disease, the test will get it right 99 percent of the time. It'll only get it wrong one percent of the time. But there are so many of them that there'll be an enormous number of false positives. Put that another way — of all of them who test positive — so here they are, the individuals involved — less than one in 100 actually have the disease. So even though we think the test is accurate, the important part of the story is there's another bit of information we need. Here's the key intuition. What we have to do, once we know the test is positive, is to weigh up the plausibility, or the likelihood, of two competing explanations. Each of those explanations has a likely bit and an unlikely bit. One explanation is that the person doesn't have the disease — that's overwhelmingly likely, if you pick someone at random — but the test gets it wrong, which is unlikely. The other explanation is that the person does have the disease — that's unlikely — but the test gets it right, which is likely. And the number we end up with — that number which is a little bit less than one in 100 — is to do with how likely one of those explanations is relative to the other. Each of them taken together is unlikely. Here's a more topical example of exactly the same thing. Those of you in Britain will know about what's become rather a celebrated case of a woman called Sally Clark, who had two babies who died suddenly. And initially, it was thought that they died of what's known informally as "cot death," and more formally as "Sudden Infant Death Syndrome." For various reasons, she was later charged with murder. And at the trial, her trial, a very distinguished pediatrician gave evidence that the chance of two cot deaths, innocent deaths, in a family like hers — which was professional and non-smoking — was one in 73 million. To cut a long story short, she was convicted at the time. Later, and fairly recently, acquitted on appeal — in fact, on the second appeal. And just to set it in context, you can imagine how awful it is for someone to have lost one child, and then two, if they're innocent, to be convicted of murdering them. To be put through the stress of the trial, convicted of murdering them — and to spend time in a women's prison, where all the other prisoners think you killed your children — is a really awful thing to happen to someone. And it happened in large part here because the expert got the statistics horribly wrong, in two different ways. So where did he get the one in 73 million number? He looked at some research, which said the chance of one cot death in a family like Sally Clark's is about one in 8,500. So he said, "I'll assume that if you have one cot death in a family, the chance of a second child dying from cot death aren't changed." So that's what statisticians would call an assumption of independence. It's like saying, "If you toss a coin and get a head the first time, that won't affect the chance of getting a head the second time." So if you toss a coin twice, the chance of getting a head twice are a half — that's the chance the first time — times a half — the chance a second time. So he said, "Here, I'll assume that these events are independent. When you multiply 8,500 together twice, you get about 73 million." And none of this was stated to the court as an assumption or presented to the jury that way. Unfortunately here — and, really, regrettably — first of all, in a situation like this you'd have to verify it empirically. And secondly, it's palpably false. There are lots and lots of things that we don't know about sudden infant deaths. It might well be that there are environmental factors that we're not aware of, and it's pretty likely to be the case that there are genetic factors we're not aware of. So if a family suffers from one cot death, you'd put them in a high-risk group. They've probably got these environmental risk factors and/or genetic risk factors we don't know about. And to argue, then, that the chance of a second death is as if you didn't know that information is really silly. It's worse than silly — it's really bad science. Nonetheless, that's how it was presented, and at trial nobody even argued it. That's the first problem. The second problem is, what does the number of one in 73 million mean? So after Sally Clark was convicted — you can imagine, it made rather a splash in the press — one of the journalists from one of Britain's more reputable newspapers wrote that what the expert had said was, "The chance that she was innocent was one in 73 million." Now, that's a logical error. It's exactly the same logical error as the logical error of thinking that after the disease test, which is 99 percent accurate, the chance of having the disease is 99 percent. In the disease example, we had to bear in mind two things, one of which was the possibility that the test got it right or not. And the other one was the chance, a priori, that the person had the disease or not. It's exactly the same in this context. There are two things involved — two parts to the explanation. We want to know how likely, or relatively how likely, two different explanations are. One of them is that Sally Clark was innocent — which is, a priori, overwhelmingly likely — most mothers don't kill their children. And the second part of the explanation is that she suffered an incredibly unlikely event. Not as unlikely as one in 73 million, but nonetheless rather unlikely. The other explanation is that she was guilty. Now, we probably think a priori that's unlikely. And we certainly should think in the context of a criminal trial that that's unlikely, because of the presumption of innocence. And then if she were trying to kill the children, she succeeded. So the chance that she's innocent isn't one in 73 million. We don't know what it is. It has to do with weighing up the strength of the other evidence against her and the statistical evidence. We know the children died. What matters is how likely or unlikely, relative to each other, the two explanations are. And they're both implausible. There's a situation where errors in statistics had really profound and really unfortunate consequences. In fact, there are two other women who were convicted on the basis of the evidence of this pediatrician, who have subsequently been released on appeal. Many cases were reviewed. And it's particularly topical because he's currently facing a disrepute charge at Britain's General Medical Council. So just to conclude — what are the take-home messages from this? Well, we know that randomness and uncertainty and chance are very much a part of our everyday life. It's also true — and, although, you, as a collective, are very special in many ways, you're completely typical in not getting the examples I gave right. It's very well documented that people get things wrong. They make errors of logic in reasoning with uncertainty. We can cope with the subtleties of language brilliantly — and there are interesting evolutionary questions about how we got here. We are not good at reasoning with uncertainty. That's an issue in our everyday lives. As you've heard from many of the talks, statistics underpins an enormous amount of research in science — in social science, in medicine and indeed, quite a lot of industry. All of quality control, which has had a major impact on industrial processing, is underpinned by statistics. It's something we're bad at doing. At the very least, we should recognize that, and we tend not to. To go back to the legal context, at the Sally Clark trial all of the lawyers just accepted what the expert said. So if a pediatrician had come out and said to a jury, "I know how to build bridges. I've built one down the road. Please drive your car home over it," they would have said, "Well, pediatricians don't know how to build bridges. That's what engineers do." On the other hand, he came out and effectively said, or implied, "I know how to reason with uncertainty. I know how to do statistics." And everyone said, "Well, that's fine. He's an expert." So we need to understand where our competence is and isn't. Exactly the same kinds of issues arose in the early days of DNA profiling, when scientists, and lawyers and in some cases judges, routinely misrepresented evidence. Usually — one hopes — innocently, but misrepresented evidence. Forensic scientists said, "The chance that this guy's innocent is one in three million." Even if you believe the number, just like the 73 million to one, that's not what it meant. And there have been celebrated appeal cases in Britain and elsewhere because of that. And just to finish in the context of the legal system. It's all very well to say, "Let's do our best to present the evidence." But more and more, in cases of DNA profiling — this is another one — we expect juries, who are ordinary people — and it's documented they're very bad at this — we expect juries to be able to cope with the sorts of reasoning that goes on. In other spheres of life, if people argued — well, except possibly for politics — but in other spheres of life, if people argued illogically, we'd say that's not a good thing. We sort of expect it of politicians and don't hope for much more. In the case of uncertainty, we get it wrong all the time — and at the very least, we should be aware of that, and ideally, we might try and do something about it. Thanks very much.

How technology evolves

Kevin Kelly

{0: 'Kevin Kelly'}

{0: ['digital visionary']}

{0: 'There may be no one better to contemplate the meaning of cultural change than Kevin Kelly, whose life story reads like a treatise on the value and impacts of technology.'}

2005-02-24

2006-11-14

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['choice', 'culture', 'evolution', 'future', 'history', 'philosophy', 'science', 'technology']

{319: 'The next 5,000 days of the web', 38: 'The accelerating power of technology', 190: 'The anthropology of mobile phones', 1131: 'Are we ready for neo-evolution?', 1346: 'Back to the future (of 1994)', 72: "Technology's long tail"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_how_technology_evolves/

Tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly asks "What does technology want?" and discovers that its movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of life.

I don't know about you, but I haven't quite figured out exactly what technology means in my life. I've spent the past year thinking about what it really should be about. Should I be pro-technology? Should I embrace it full arms? Should I be wary? Like you, I'm very tempted by the latest thing. But at the other hand, a couple of years ago I gave up all of my possessions, sold all my technology — except for a bicycle — and rode across 3,000 miles on the U.S. back roads under the power of my one body, fuelled mostly by Twinkies and junk food. (Laughter) And I've since then tried to keep technology at arm's length in many ways, so it doesn't master my life. At the same time, I run a website on cool tools, where I issue a daily obsession of the latest things in technology. So I'm still perplexed about what the true meaning of technology is as it relates to humanity, as it relates to nature, as it relates to the spiritual. And I'm not even sure we know what technology is. And one definition of technology is that which is first recorded. This is the first example of the modern use of technology that I can find. It was the suggested syllabus for dealing with the Applied Arts and Science at Cambridge University in 1829. Before that, obviously, technology didn't exist. But obviously it did. I like one of the definitions that Alan Kay has for technology. He says technology is anything that was invented after you were born. (Laughter) So it sums up a lot of what we're talking about. Danny Hillis actually has an update on that — he says technology is anything that doesn't quite work yet. (Laughter) Which also, I think, gets into a little bit of our current idea. But I was interested in another definition of technology. Something, again, that went back to something more fundamental. Something that was deeper. And as I struggled to understand that, I came up with a way of framing the question that seemed to work for me in my investigations. And I'm, this morning, going to talk about this for the first time. So this is a very rough attempt to think out loud. The question that I came up with was this question: what does technology want? And by that, I don't mean, does it want chocolate or vanilla? By what it wants, I mean, what are its inherent trends and biases? What are its tendencies over time? One way to think about this is thinking about biological organisms, which we've heard a lot about. And the trick that Richard Dawkins does, which is to say, to look at them as simply as genes, as vehicles for genes. So he's saying, what do genes want? The selfish gene. And I'm applying a similar trick to say, what if we looked at the universe in our culture through the eyes of technology? What does technology want? Obviously, this in an incomplete question, just as looking at an organism as only a gene is an incomplete way of looking at it. But it's still very, very productive. So I'm attempting to say, if we take technology's view of the world, what does it want? And I think once we ask that question we have to go back, actually, to life. Because obviously, if we keep extending the origins of technology far back, I think we come back to life at some point. So that's where I want to begin my little exploration, is in life. And like you heard from the previous speakers, we don't really know what life there is on Earth right now. We have really no idea. Craig Venter's tremendous and brilliant attempt to DNA sequence things in the ocean is great. Brian Farrell's work is all part of this agenda to try and actually discover all the species on Earth. And one of the things that we should do is just make a grid of the globe and randomly go and inspect all the places that the grid intersects, just to see what's on life. And if we did that with our little Martian probe, which we have not done on Earth, we would begin to see some incredible species. This is not on another planet. These are things that are hidden away on our planet. This is an ant that stores its colleagues' honey in its abdomen. Each one of these organisms that we've described — that you've seen from Jamie and others, these magnificent things — what they're doing, each one of them, is they're hacking the rules of life. I can't think of a single general principle of biology that does not have an exception somewhere by some organism. Every single thing that we can think of — and if you heard Olivia's talk about the sexual habits, you'll realize that there isn't anything we can say that's true for all life, because every single one of them is hacking something about it. This is a solar-powered sea slug. It's a nudibranch that has incorporated chloroplast inside it to drive its energy. This is another version of that. This is a sea dragon, and the one on the bottom, the blue one, is a juvenile that has not yet swallowed the acid, has not yet taken in the brown-green algae pond scum into its body to give it energy. These are hacks, and if we looked at the general shape of the approaches to hacking life there are, current consensus, six kingdoms. Six different broad approaches: the plants, the animals, the fungi, the protests — the little things — the bacteria and the Archaea bacteria. The Archaeas. Those are the general approaches to life. That's one way to look at life on Earth today. But a more interesting way, the current way to take the long view, is to look at it in an evolutionary perspective. And here we have a view of evolution where rather than having evolution go over the linear time, we have it coming out from the center. So in the center is the most primitive, and this is a genealogical chart of all life on earth. This is all the same six kingdoms. You see 4,000 representative species, and you can see where we are. But what I like about this is it shows that every living organism on Earth today is equally evolved. Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans. They've been around just as long and gone through just the same kind of trial and error to get here. But we see that each one of these is actually hacking, and has a different way of finding out how to do life. And if we take the long-term trends of life, if we begin to say, what does evolution want? There's several things that we see. One of the things about evolution is that nowhere on Earth have we ever been where we don't find life. We find life at the bottom of every long-term, long-distance drilling core into the center of rock that we bring up — and there's bacteria in the pores of that rock. And wherever life is, it never retreats. It's ubiquitous and it wants to be more. More and more of the inert matter of the globe is being touched and animated by life. The second thing is is we see diversity. We also see specialization. We see the movement from a general-purpose cell to the more specific and specialized. And we see a drift towards complexity that's very intuitive. And actually, we have current data that does show that there is an actual drift towards complexity over time. And the last thing, I bring back this nudibranch. One of the things we see about life is that it moves from the inner to increasing sociability. And by that it means that there is more and more of life whose entire environment is other life. Like those chloroplast cells — they're completely surrounded by other life. They never touch the inner matter. There is more and more co-evolution. And so the general, long-term trends of evolution are roughly these five: ubiquity, diversity, specialization, complexity and socialization. Now, I took that and said, OK, what are the long-term trends in technology? And again, my question is, what does technology want? And so, remarkably, I discovered that there's also a drift toward specialization. That we see there's a general hammer, and hammers become more and more specific over time. There's obviously diversity. Huge numbers of things. This is all the contents of a Japanese home. I actually had my daughter — gave her a tally counter, and I gave her an assignment last summer to go around and count the number of species of technology in our household. And it came up with 6,000 different species of products. I did some research and found out that the King of England, Henry VIII, had only about 7,000 items in his household. And he was the King of England, and that was the entire wealth of England at the time. So we're seeing huge numbers of diversity in the kinds of things. This is a scene from Star Wars where the 3PO comes out and he sees machines making machines. How depraved! Well, this is actually what we're headed towards: world machines. And the technology is only being thrown out by other technologies. Most machines will only ever be in contact with other technology and not non-technology, or even life. And thirdly, the idea that machines are becoming biological and complex is at this point a cliche. And I'm happy to say, I was partly responsible for that cliche that machines are becoming biological, but that's pretty evident. So the major trends in technology evolution actually are the same as in biological evolution. The same drives that we see towards ubiquity, towards diversity, towards socialization, towards complexity. That is maybe not a big surprise because if we map out, say, the evolution of armor, you can actually follow a sort of an evolutionary-type cladistic tree. I suggest that, in fact, technology is the seventh kingdom of life. That its operations and how it works is so similar that we can think of it as the seventh kingdom. And so it would be sort of approximately up there, coming out of the animal kingdom. And if we were to do that, we would find out — we could actually approach technology in this way. This is Niles Eldredge. He was the co-developer with Stephen Jay Gould of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. But as a sideline, he happens to collect cornets. He has one of the world's largest collections — about 500 of them. And he has decided to treat them as if they were trilobites, or snails, and to do a morphological analysis, and try to derive their genealogical history over time. This is his chart, which is not quite published yet. But the most interesting aspect about this is that if you look at those red lines at the bottom, those indicate basically a parentage of a type of cornet that was no longer made. That does not happen in biology. When something is extinct, you can't have it as your parent. But that does happen in technology. And it turns out that that's so distinctive that you can actually look at this tree, and you can actually use it to determine that this is a technological system versus a biological system. In fact, this idea of resurrecting the whole idea is so important that I began to think about what happens with old technology. And it turns out that, in fact, technologies don't die. So I suggested this to an historian of science, and he said, "Well, what about, you know, come on, what about steam cars? They're not around anymore." Well actually, they are. In fact, they're so around that you can buy new parts for a Stanley steam automobile. And this is a website of a guy who's selling brand new parts for the Stanley automobile. And the thing that I liked is sort of this one-click, add-to-your-cart button — (Laughter) — for buying steam valves. I mean, it was just — it was really there. And so, I began to think about, well, maybe that's just a random sample. Maybe I should do this sort of in a more conservative way. So I took the great big 1895 Montgomery Ward's catalog and I randomly went through it. And I took a page — not quite a random page — I took a page that was actually more difficult than others because lots of the pages are filled with things that are still being made. But I took this page and I said, how many of these things are still being made? And not antiques. I want to know how many of these things are still in production. And the answer is: all of them. All of them are still being produced. So you've got corn shellers. I don't know who needs a corn sheller. Be it corn shellers — you've got ploughs; you've got fan mills; all these things — and these are not, again, antiques. These are — you can order these. You can go to the web and you can buy them now, brand-new made. So in a certain sense, technologies don't die. In fact, you can buy, for 50 bucks, a stone-age knife made exactly the same way that they were made 10,000 years ago. It's short, bone handle, 50 bucks. And in fact, what's important is that this information actually never died out. It's not just that it was resurrected. It's continued all along. And in Papua New Guinea, they were making stone axes until two decades ago, just as a course of practical matters. Even when we try to get rid of a technology, it's actually very hard. So we've all heard about the Amish giving up cars. We've heard about the Japanese giving up guns. We've heard about this and that. But I actually went back and took what I could find, the examples in history where there have been prohibitions against technology, and then I tried to find out when they came back in, because they always came back in. And it turns out that the time, the duration of when they were outlawed and prohibited, is decreasing over time. And that basically, you can delay technology, but you can't kill it. So this makes sense, because in a certain sense what culture is, is the accumulation of ideas. That's what it's for. It's so that ideas don't die out. And when we take that, we take this idea of what culture is doing and add it to what the long-term trajectory — again, in life's evolution — we find that each case — each of the major transitions in life — what they're really about is accelerating and changing the way in which evolution happens. They're actually changing the way in which ideas are generated. So all these steps in evolution are increasing, basically, the evolution of evolvability. So what's happening over time in life is that the ways in which you generate these new ideas, these new hacks, are increasing. And the real tricks are ways in which you kind of explore the way of exploring. And then what we see in the singularity, that prophesized by Kurzweil and others — his idea that technology is accelerating evolution. It's accelerating the way in which we search for ideas. So if you have life hacking — life means hacking, the game of survival — then evolution is a way to extend the game by changing the rules of the game. And what technology is really about is better ways to evolve. That is what we call an "infinite game." That's the definition of "infinite game." A finite game is play to win, and an infinite game is played to keep playing. And I believe that technology is actually a cosmic force. The origins of technology was not in 1829, but was actually at the beginning of the Big Bang, and at that moment the entire huge billions of stars in the universe were compressed. The entire universe was compressed into a little quantum dot, and it was so tight in there, there was no room for any difference at all. That's the definition. There was no temperature. There was no difference whatsoever. And at the Big Bang, what it expanded was the potential for difference. So as it expands and as things expand what we have is the potential for differences, diversity, options, choices, opportunities, possibilities and freedoms. Those are all basically the same thing. And those are the things that technology brings us. That's what technology is bringing us: choices, possibilities, freedoms. That's what it's about. It's this expansion of room to make differences. And so a hammer, when we grab a hammer, that's what we're grabbing. And that's why we continue to grab technology — because we want those things. Those things are good. Differences, freedom, choices, possibilities. And each time we make a new opportunity place, we're allowing a platform to make new ones. And I think it's really important. Because if you can imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano was invented — what a loss to society there would be. Imagine Van Gogh being born before the technologies of cheap oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technologies of film. Somewhere, today, there are millions of young children being born whose technology of self-expression has not yet been invented. We have a moral obligation to invent technology so that every person on the globe has the potential to realize their true difference. We want a trillion zillion species of one individuals. That's what technology really wants. I'm going to skip through some of the objections because I don't have answers to why there's deforestation. I don't have an answer to the fact that there seem to be bad technologies. I don't have an answer to how this impacts on our dignity, other than to suggest that maybe the seventh kingdom, because it's so close to what life is about, maybe we can bring it back and have it help us monitor life. Maybe in some ways the fact that what we're trying to do with technology is find a good home for it. It's a terrible thing to spray DDT on cotton fields, but it's a really good thing to use to eliminate millions of cases of death due to malaria in a small village. Our humanity is actually defined by technology. All the things that we think that we really like about humanity is being driven by technology. This is the infinite game. That's what we're talking about. You see, technology is a way to evolve the evolution. It's a way to explore possibilities and opportunities and create more. And it's actually a way of playing the game, of playing all the games. That's what technology wants. And so when I think about what technology wants, I think that it has to do with the fact that every person here — and I really believe this — every person here has an assignment. And your assignment is to spend your life discovering what your assignment is. That recursive nature is the infinite game. And if you play that well, you'll have other people involved, so even that game extends and continues even when you're gone. That is the infinite game. And what technology is is the medium in which we play that infinite game. And so I think that we should embrace technology because it is an essential part of our journey in finding out who we are. Thank you. (Applause)

The accelerating power of technology

Ray Kurzweil

{0: 'Ray Kurzweil'}

{0: ['inventor', 'futurist']}

{0: "Ray Kurzweil is an engineer who has radically advanced the fields of speech, text and audio technology. He's revered for his dizzying -- yet convincing -- writing on the advance of technology, the limits of biology and the future of the human species."}

2005-02-24

2006-11-14

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'ur', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['biotech', 'business', 'culture', 'future', 'invention', 'robots', 'science', 'technology']

{19: 'How technology evolves', 129: "How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images", 351: 'Health and the human mind', 560: 'A university for the coming singularity', 1346: 'Back to the future (of 1994)', 72: "Technology's long tail"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_the_accelerating_power_of_technology/

Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain and nanobots will be operating your consciousness.

Well, it's great to be here. We've heard a lot about the promise of technology, and the peril. I've been quite interested in both. If we could convert 0.03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the earth into energy, we could meet all of our projected needs for 2030. We can't do that today because solar panels are heavy, expensive and very inefficient. There are nano-engineered designs, which at least have been analyzed theoretically, that show the potential to be very lightweight, very inexpensive, very efficient, and we'd be able to actually provide all of our energy needs in this renewable way. Nano-engineered fuel cells could provide the energy where it's needed. That's a key trend, which is decentralization, moving from centralized nuclear power plants and liquid natural gas tankers to decentralized resources that are environmentally more friendly, a lot more efficient and capable and safe from disruption. Bono spoke very eloquently, that we have the tools, for the first time, to address age-old problems of disease and poverty. Most regions of the world are moving in that direction. In 1990, in East Asia and the Pacific region, there were 500 million people living in poverty — that number now is under 200 million. The World Bank projects by 2011, it will be under 20 million, which is a reduction of 95 percent. I did enjoy Bono's comment linking Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley. Being from the Massachusetts high-tech community myself, I'd point out that we were hippies also in the 1960s, although we hung around Harvard Square. But we do have the potential to overcome disease and poverty, and I'm going to talk about those issues, if we have the will. Kevin Kelly talked about the acceleration of technology. That's been a strong interest of mine, and a theme that I've developed for some 30 years. I realized that my technologies had to make sense when I finished a project. That invariably, the world was a different place when I would introduce a technology. And, I noticed that most inventions fail, not because the R&D department can't get it to work — if you look at most business plans, they will actually succeed if given the opportunity to build what they say they're going to build — and 90 percent of those projects or more will fail, because the timing is wrong — not all the enabling factors will be in place when they're needed. So I began to be an ardent student of technology trends, and track where technology would be at different points in time, and began to build the mathematical models of that. It's kind of taken on a life of its own. I've got a group of 10 people that work with me to gather data on key measures of technology in many different areas, and we build models. And you'll hear people say, well, we can't predict the future. And if you ask me, will the price of Google be higher or lower than it is today three years from now, that's very hard to say. Will WiMax CDMA G3 be the wireless standard three years from now? That's hard to say. But if you ask me, what will it cost for one MIPS of computing in 2010, or the cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2012, or the cost of sending a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2014, it turns out that those are very predictable. There are remarkably smooth exponential curves that govern price performance, capacity, bandwidth. And I'm going to show you a small sample of this, but there's really a theoretical reason why technology develops in an exponential fashion. And a lot of people, when they think about the future, think about it linearly. They think they're going to continue to develop a problem or address a problem using today's tools, at today's pace of progress, and fail to take into consideration this exponential growth. The Genome Project was a controversial project in 1990. We had our best Ph.D. students, our most advanced equipment around the world, we got 1/10,000th of the project done, so how're we going to get this done in 15 years? And 10 years into the project, the skeptics were still going strong — says, "You're two-thirds through this project, and you've managed to only sequence a very tiny percentage of the whole genome." But it's the nature of exponential growth that once it reaches the knee of the curve, it explodes. Most of the project was done in the last few years of the project. It took us 15 years to sequence HIV — we sequenced SARS in 31 days. So we are gaining the potential to overcome these problems. I'm going to show you just a few examples of how pervasive this phenomena is. The actual paradigm-shift rate, the rate of adopting new ideas, is doubling every decade, according to our models. These are all logarithmic graphs, so as you go up the levels it represents, generally multiplying by factor of 10 or 100. It took us half a century to adopt the telephone, the first virtual-reality technology. Cell phones were adopted in about eight years. If you put different communication technologies on this logarithmic graph, television, radio, telephone were adopted in decades. Recent technologies — like the PC, the web, cell phones — were under a decade. Now this is an interesting chart, and this really gets at the fundamental reason why an evolutionary process — and both biology and technology are evolutionary processes — accelerate. They work through interaction — they create a capability, and then it uses that capability to bring on the next stage. So the first step in biological evolution, the evolution of DNA — actually it was RNA came first — took billions of years, but then evolution used that information-processing backbone to bring on the next stage. So the Cambrian Explosion, when all the body plans of the animals were evolved, took only 10 million years. It was 200 times faster. And then evolution used those body plans to evolve higher cognitive functions, and biological evolution kept accelerating. It's an inherent nature of an evolutionary process. So Homo sapiens, the first technology-creating species, the species that combined a cognitive function with an opposable appendage — and by the way, chimpanzees don't really have a very good opposable thumb — so we could actually manipulate our environment with a power grip and fine motor coordination, and use our mental models to actually change the world and bring on technology. But anyway, the evolution of our species took hundreds of thousands of years, and then working through interaction, evolution used, essentially, the technology-creating species to bring on the next stage, which were the first steps in technological evolution. And the first step took tens of thousands of years — stone tools, fire, the wheel — kept accelerating. We always used then the latest generation of technology to create the next generation. Printing press took a century to be adopted; the first computers were designed pen-on-paper — now we use computers. And we've had a continual acceleration of this process. Now by the way, if you look at this on a linear graph, it looks like everything has just happened, but some observer says, "Well, Kurzweil just put points on this graph that fall on that straight line." So, I took 15 different lists from key thinkers, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Museum of Natural History, Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar on the same — and these people were not trying to make my point; these were just lists in reference works, and I think that's what they thought the key events were in biological evolution and technological evolution. And again, it forms the same straight line. You have a little bit of thickening in the line because people do have disagreements, what the key points are, there's differences of opinion when agriculture started, or how long the Cambrian Explosion took. But you see a very clear trend. There's a basic, profound acceleration of this evolutionary process. Information technologies double their capacity, price performance, bandwidth, every year. And that's a very profound explosion of exponential growth. A personal experience, when I was at MIT — computer taking up about the size of this room, less powerful than the computer in your cell phone. But Moore's Law, which is very often identified with this exponential growth, is just one example of many, because it's basically a property of the evolutionary process of technology. I put 49 famous computers on this logarithmic graph — by the way, a straight line on a logarithmic graph is exponential growth — that's another exponential. It took us three years to double our price performance of computing in 1900, two years in the middle; we're now doubling it every one year. And that's exponential growth through five different paradigms. Moore's Law was just the last part of that, where we were shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit, but we had electro-mechanical calculators, relay-based computers that cracked the German Enigma Code, vacuum tubes in the 1950s predicted the election of Eisenhower, discreet transistors used in the first space flights and then Moore's Law. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam, another paradigm came out of left field to continue the exponential growth. They were shrinking vacuum tubes, making them smaller and smaller. That hit a wall. They couldn't shrink them and keep the vacuum. Whole different paradigm — transistors came out of the woodwork. In fact, when we see the end of the line for a particular paradigm, it creates research pressure to create the next paradigm. And because we've been predicting the end of Moore's Law for quite a long time — the first prediction said 2002, until now it says 2022. But by the teen years, the features of transistors will be a few atoms in width, and we won't be able to shrink them any more. That'll be the end of Moore's Law, but it won't be the end of the exponential growth of computing, because chips are flat. We live in a three-dimensional world; we might as well use the third dimension. We will go into the third dimension and there's been tremendous progress, just in the last few years, of getting three-dimensional, self-organizing molecular circuits to work. We'll have those ready well before Moore's Law runs out of steam. Supercomputers — same thing. Processor performance on Intel chips, the average price of a transistor — 1968, you could buy one transistor for a dollar. You could buy 10 million in 2002. It's pretty remarkable how smooth an exponential process that is. I mean, you'd think this is the result of some tabletop experiment, but this is the result of worldwide chaotic behavior — countries accusing each other of dumping products, IPOs, bankruptcies, marketing programs. You would think it would be a very erratic process, and you have a very smooth outcome of this chaotic process. Just as we can't predict what one molecule in a gas will do — it's hopeless to predict a single molecule — yet we can predict the properties of the whole gas, using thermodynamics, very accurately. It's the same thing here. We can't predict any particular project, but the result of this whole worldwide, chaotic, unpredictable activity of competition and the evolutionary process of technology is very predictable. And we can predict these trends far into the future. Unlike Gertrude Stein's roses, it's not the case that a transistor is a transistor. As we make them smaller and less expensive, the electrons have less distance to travel. They're faster, so you've got exponential growth in the speed of transistors, so the cost of a cycle of one transistor has been coming down with a halving rate of 1.1 years. You add other forms of innovation and processor design, you get a doubling of price performance of computing every one year. And that's basically deflation — 50 percent deflation. And it's not just computers. I mean, it's true of DNA sequencing; it's true of brain scanning; it's true of the World Wide Web. I mean, anything that we can quantify, we have hundreds of different measurements of different, information-related measurements — capacity, adoption rates — and they basically double every 12, 13, 15 months, depending on what you're looking at. In terms of price performance, that's a 40 to 50 percent deflation rate. And economists have actually started worrying about that. We had deflation during the Depression, but that was collapse of the money supply, collapse of consumer confidence, a completely different phenomena. This is due to greater productivity, but the economist says, "But there's no way you're going to be able to keep up with that. If you have 50 percent deflation, people may increase their volume 30, 40 percent, but they won't keep up with it." But what we're actually seeing is that we actually more than keep up with it. We've had 28 percent per year compounded growth in dollars in information technology over the last 50 years. I mean, people didn't build iPods for 10,000 dollars 10 years ago. As the price performance makes new applications feasible, new applications come to the market. And this is a very widespread phenomena. Magnetic data storage — that's not Moore's Law, it's shrinking magnetic spots, different engineers, different companies, same exponential process. A key revolution is that we're understanding our own biology in these information terms. We're understanding the software programs that make our body run. These were evolved in very different times — we'd like to actually change those programs. One little software program, called the fat insulin receptor gene, basically says, "Hold onto every calorie, because the next hunting season may not work out so well." That was in the interests of the species tens of thousands of years ago. We'd like to actually turn that program off. They tried that in animals, and these mice ate ravenously and remained slim and got the health benefits of being slim. They didn't get diabetes; they didn't get heart disease; they lived 20 percent longer; they got the health benefits of caloric restriction without the restriction. Four or five pharmaceutical companies have noticed this, felt that would be interesting drug for the human market, and that's just one of the 30,000 genes that affect our biochemistry. We were evolved in an era where it wasn't in the interests of people at the age of most people at this conference, like myself, to live much longer, because we were using up the precious resources which were better deployed towards the children and those caring for them. So, life — long lifespans — like, that is to say, much more than 30 — weren't selected for, but we are learning to actually manipulate and change these software programs through the biotechnology revolution. For example, we can inhibit genes now with RNA interference. There are exciting new forms of gene therapy that overcome the problem of placing the genetic material in the right place on the chromosome. There's actually a — for the first time now, something going to human trials, that actually cures pulmonary hypertension — a fatal disease — using gene therapy. So we'll have not just designer babies, but designer baby boomers. And this technology is also accelerating. It cost 10 dollars per base pair in 1990, then a penny in 2000. It's now under a 10th of a cent. The amount of genetic data — basically this shows that smooth exponential growth doubled every year, enabling the genome project to be completed. Another major revolution: the communications revolution. The price performance, bandwidth, capacity of communications measured many different ways; wired, wireless is growing exponentially. The Internet has been doubling in power and continues to, measured many different ways. This is based on the number of hosts. Miniaturization — we're shrinking the size of technology at an exponential rate, both wired and wireless. These are some designs from Eric Drexler's book — which we're now showing are feasible with super-computing simulations, where actually there are scientists building molecule-scale robots. One has one that actually walks with a surprisingly human-like gait, that's built out of molecules. There are little machines doing things in experimental bases. The most exciting opportunity is actually to go inside the human body and perform therapeutic and diagnostic functions. And this is less futuristic than it may sound. These things have already been done in animals. There's one nano-engineered device that cures type 1 diabetes. It's blood cell-sized. They put tens of thousands of these in the blood cell — they tried this in rats — it lets insulin out in a controlled fashion, and actually cures type 1 diabetes. What you're watching is a design of a robotic red blood cell, and it does bring up the issue that our biology is actually very sub-optimal, even though it's remarkable in its intricacy. Once we understand its principles of operation, and the pace with which we are reverse-engineering biology is accelerating, we can actually design these things to be thousands of times more capable. An analysis of this respirocyte, designed by Rob Freitas, indicates if you replace 10 percent of your red blood cells with these robotic versions, you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath. You could sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours — so, "Honey, I'm in the pool," will take on a whole new meaning. It will be interesting to see what we do in our Olympic trials. Presumably we'll ban them, but then we'll have the specter of teenagers in their high schools gyms routinely out-performing the Olympic athletes. Freitas has a design for a robotic white blood cell. These are 2020-circa scenarios, but they're not as futuristic as it may sound. There are four major conferences on building blood cell-sized devices; there are many experiments in animals. There's actually one going into human trial, so this is feasible technology. If we come back to our exponential growth of computing, 1,000 dollars of computing is now somewhere between an insect and a mouse brain. It will intersect human intelligence in terms of capacity in the 2020s, but that'll be the hardware side of the equation. Where will we get the software? Well, it turns out we can see inside the human brain, and in fact not surprisingly, the spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is doubling every year. And with the new generation of scanning tools, for the first time we can actually see individual inter-neural fibers and see them processing and signaling in real time — but then the question is, OK, we can get this data now, but can we understand it? Doug Hofstadter wonders, well, maybe our intelligence just isn't great enough to understand our intelligence, and if we were smarter, well, then our brains would be that much more complicated, and we'd never catch up to it. It turns out that we can understand it. This is a block diagram of a model and simulation of the human auditory cortex that actually works quite well — in applying psychoacoustic tests, gets very similar results to human auditory perception. There's another simulation of the cerebellum — that's more than half the neurons in the brain — again, works very similarly to human skill formation. This is at an early stage, but you can show with the exponential growth of the amount of information about the brain and the exponential improvement in the resolution of brain scanning, we will succeed in reverse-engineering the human brain by the 2020s. We've already had very good models and simulation of about 15 regions out of the several hundred. All of this is driving exponentially growing economic progress. We've had productivity go from 30 dollars to 150 dollars per hour of labor in the last 50 years. E-commerce has been growing exponentially. It's now a trillion dollars. You might wonder, well, wasn't there a boom and a bust? That was strictly a capital-markets phenomena. Wall Street noticed that this was a revolutionary technology, which it was, but then six months later, when it hadn't revolutionized all business models, they figured, well, that was wrong, and then we had this bust. All right, this is a technology that we put together using some of the technologies we're involved in. This will be a routine feature in a cell phone. It would be able to translate from one language to another. So let me just end with a couple of scenarios. By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities. But if we go to 2029, we really have the full maturity of these trends, and you have to appreciate how many turns of the screw in terms of generations of technology, which are getting faster and faster, we'll have at that point. I mean, we will have two-to-the-25th-power greater price performance, capacity and bandwidth of these technologies, which is pretty phenomenal. It'll be millions of times more powerful than it is today. We'll have completed the reverse-engineering of the human brain, 1,000 dollars of computing will be far more powerful than the human brain in terms of basic raw capacity. Computers will combine the subtle pan-recognition powers of human intelligence with ways in which machines are already superior, in terms of doing analytic thinking, remembering billions of facts accurately. Machines can share their knowledge very quickly. But it's not just an alien invasion of intelligent machines. We are going to merge with our technology. These nano-bots I mentioned will first be used for medical and health applications: cleaning up the environment, providing powerful fuel cells and widely distributed decentralized solar panels and so on in the environment. But they'll also go inside our brain, interact with our biological neurons. We've demonstrated the key principles of being able to do this. So, for example, full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system, the nano-bots shut down the signals coming from your real senses, replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were in the virtual environment, and then it'll feel like you're in that virtual environment. You can go there with other people, have any kind of experience with anyone involving all of the senses. "Experience beamers," I call them, will put their whole flow of sensory experiences in the neurological correlates of their emotions out on the Internet. You can plug in and experience what it's like to be someone else. But most importantly, it'll be a tremendous expansion of human intelligence through this direct merger with our technology, which in some sense we're doing already. We routinely do intellectual feats that would be impossible without our technology. Human life expectancy is expanding. It was 37 in 1800, and with this sort of biotechnology, nano-technology revolutions, this will move up very rapidly in the years ahead. My main message is that progress in technology is exponential, not linear. Many — even scientists — assume a linear model, so they'll say, "Oh, it'll be hundreds of years before we have self-replicating nano-technology assembly or artificial intelligence." If you really look at the power of exponential growth, you'll see that these things are pretty soon at hand. And information technology is increasingly encompassing all of our lives, from our music to our manufacturing to our biology to our energy to materials. We'll be able to manufacture almost anything we need in the 2020s, from information, in very inexpensive raw materials, using nano-technology. These are very powerful technologies. They both empower our promise and our peril. So we have to have the will to apply them to the right problems. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Fight injustice with raw video

Peter Gabriel

{0: 'Peter Gabriel'}

{0: ['musician', 'activist']}

{0: 'Peter Gabriel writes incredible songs but, as the co-founder of WITNESS and TheElders.org, is also a powerful human rights advocate.'}

2006-02-23

2006-12-06

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sv', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['activism', 'collaboration', 'culture', 'film', 'global issues', 'music', 'social change', 'storytelling', 'art']

{75: 'Why we should invest in a free press', 170: 'My journey into movies that matter', 84: 'My wish: Let my photographs bear witness', 171: 'An Iraq war movie crowd-sourced from soldiers', 713: 'Photographing the hidden story', 615: 'The music of a war child'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_gabriel_fight_injustice_with_raw_video/

Musician and activist Peter Gabriel shares his very personal motivation for standing up for human rights with the watchdog group WITNESS -- and tells stories of citizen journalists in action.

I love trees, and I'm very lucky, because we live near a wonderful arboretum, and Sundays, usually, I'd go there with my wife and now, with my four-year-old, and we'd climb in the trees, we'd play hide and seek. The second school I was at had big trees too, had a fantastic tulip tree, I think it was the biggest in the country, and it also had a lot of wonderful bushes and vegetation around it, around the playing fields. One day I was grabbed by some of my classmates, and taken in the bushes — I was stripped; I was attacked; I was abused; and this came out of the blue. Now, the reason I say that, because, afterwards, I was thinking — well, I went back into the school — I felt dirty; I felt betrayed; I felt ashamed, but mainly — mainly, I felt powerless. And 30 years later I was sitting in an airplane, next to a lady called Veronica, who came from Chile, and we were on a human rights tour, and she was starting to tell me what it was like to be tortured, and, from my very privileged position, this was the only reference point that I had. And it was an amazing learning experience because, for me, human rights have been something in which I had, you know, a part-time interest, but, mainly, it was something that happened to other people over there. But I got a phone call from Bono in 1985 and, as you know, he's a great singer, but he's a magnificent hustler, and — (Laughter) — a very hard guy to say no to, and he was saying, you know, just after I'd done the Biko song, we're going to do a tour for Amnesty, you have to be on it, and really that was the first time that I'd been out and started meeting people who'd watched their family being shot in front of them, who'd had a partner thrown out of an airplane into an ocean, and suddenly this world of human rights arrived in my world, and I couldn't really walk away in quite the same way as before. So I got involved with this tour, which was for Amnesty, and then in '88 I took over Bono's job trying to learn how to hustle. I didn't do it as well, but we managed to get Youssou N'Dour, Sting, Tracy Chapman, and Bruce Springsteen to go 'round the world for Amnesty, and it was an amazing experience. And, once again, I got an extraordinary education, and it was the first time, really, that I'd met a lot of these people in the different countries, and these human rights stories became very physical, and, again, I couldn't really walk away quite so comfortably. But the thing that really amazed me, that I had no idea, was that you could suffer in this way and then have your whole experience, your story, denied, buried and forgotten. And it seemed that whenever there was a camera around, or a video or film camera, it was a great deal harder to do — for those in power to bury the story. And Reebok set up a foundation after these Human Rights Now tours and there was a decision then — well, we made a proposal, for a couple of years, about trying to set up a division that was going to give cameras to human rights activists. It didn't really get anywhere, and then the Rodney King incident happened, and people thought, OK, if you have a camera in the right place at the right time, or, perhaps, the wrong time, depending who you are, then you can actually start doing something, and campaigning, and being heard, and telling people about what's going on. So, WITNESS was started in '92 and it's since given cameras out in over 60 countries. And we campaign with activist groups and help them tell their story and, in fact, I will show you in a moment one of the most recent campaigns, and I'm afraid it's a story from Uganda, and, although we had a wonderful story from Uganda yesterday, this one isn't quite so good. In the north of Uganda, there are something like 1.5 million internally displaced people, people who are not refugees in another country, but because of the civil war, which has been going on for about 20 years, they have nowhere to live. And 20,000 kids have been taken away to become child soldiers, and the International Criminal Court is going after five of the leaders of the — now, what's it called? I forget the name of the of the army — it's Lord's Resistance Army, I believe — but the government, also, doesn't have a clean sheet, so if we could run the first video. (Music) Woman: Life in the camp is never simple. Even today life is difficult. We stay because of the fear that what pushed us into the camp ... still exists back home. Text: "Between Two Fires: Torture and Displacement in Northern Uganda" Man: When we were at home, it was Kony's [rebel] soldiers disturbing us. At first, we were safe in the camp. But later the government soldiers began mistreating us a lot. (Chanting) Jennifer: A soldier walked onto the road, asking where we'd been. Evelyn and I hid behind my mother. Evelyn: He ordered us to sit down, so we sat down. The other soldier also came. Jennifer: The man came and started undressing me. The other one carried Evelyn aside. The one who was defiling me then left me and went to rape Evelyn. And the one who was raping Evelyn came and defiled me also. Man: The soldiers with clubs this long beat us to get a confession. They kept telling us, "Tell the truth!" as they beat us. Woman: They insisted that I was lying. At that moment, they fired and shot off my fingers. I fell. They ran to join the others ... leaving me for dead. (Music) Text: Uganda ratified the Convention Against Torture in 1986. Torture is defined as any act by which severe pain of suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by a person acting in an official capacity to obtain information or a confession, to punish, coerce or intimidate. Peter Gabriel: So torture is not something that always happens on other soil. In my country, it was — we had been looking at pictures of British soldiers beating up young Iraqis; we've got Abu Ghraib; we've got Guantanamo Bay. I had a driver on my way to Newark Airport, and he told me a story that, in the middle of the night, 4 a.m., he'd been taken out of his home in Queens — taken to a place in the Midwest, that he was interrogated and tortured and returned to the street four weeks later, because he had the same — he was Middle Eastern, and he had the same name as one of the 9/11 pilots, and that may or may not be true — I didn't think he was a liar, though. And, I think, if we look around the world, as well as the polar ice caps melting, human rights, which have been fought for, for many hundreds of years in some cases, are, also, eroding very fast, and that is something that we need to take a look at and, maybe, start campaigning for. I mean, here, too, one of our partners was at Van Jones and the Books Not Bars project — they have managed, with their footage in California to change the youth correction systems employed, and it's much — much — I think, more humane methods are being looked at, how you should lock up young kids, and that's questionable to start off. And as the story of Mr. Morales, just down the road, excuse me, Mr. Gabriel, would you mind if we delayed your execution a little bit? No, not at all, no problem, take your time. But this, surely, whoever that man is, whatever he's done, this is cruel and unusual punishment. Anyway, WITNESS has been trying to arm the brave people who often put their lives at risk around the world, with cameras, and I'd like to show you just a little more of that. Thank you. (Thunder) Text: You can say a story is fabricated. (Music) Text: You can say a jury is corrupt. You can say a person is lying. You can say you don't trust newspapers. But you can't say what you just saw never happened. Help WITNESS give cameras to the world. Shoot a video; expose injustice; reveal the truth; show us what's wrong with the world; and maybe we can help make it right. WITNESS. All the video you have just seen was recorded by human rights groups working with WITNESS. (Applause) PG: WITNESS was born of technological innovation — in a sense the small, portable, DV cam was really what allowed it to come into being. And we've also been trying to get computers out to the world, so that groups can communicate much more effectively, campaign much more effectively, but now we have the wonderful possibility, which is given to us from the mobile phone with the camera in it, because that is cheap; it's ubiquitous; and it's moving fast all around the world — and it's very exciting for us. And so, the dream is that we could have a world in which anyone who has anything bad happen to them of this sort has a chance of getting their story uploaded, being seen, being watched, that they really know that they can be heard, that there would be a giant website, maybe, a little like Google Earth, and you could fly over and find out the realities of what's going, for the world's inhabitants. In a way what this technology is allowing is, really, that a lot of the problems of the world can have a human face, that we can actually see who's dying of AIDS or who's being beaten up, for the first time, and we can hear their stories in a way that the blogger culture — if we can move that into these sort of fields, I think we can really transform the world in all sorts of ways. There could be a new movement growing up, rising from the ground, reaching for the light, and growing strong, just like a tree. Thank you.

If I controlled the Internet

Rives

{0: ' Rives'}

{0: ['performance poet', 'multimedia artist']}

{0: 'Performance artist and storyteller Rives has been called "the first 2.0 poet," using images, video and technology to bring his words to life. '}

2006-11-30

2006-12-14

TEDSalon 2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lt', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'entertainment', 'love', 'performance', 'philosophy', 'poetry']

{148: 'The 4 a.m. mystery', 383: 'A story of mixed emoticons', 981: 'My web playroom', 2061: 'A Magna Carta for the web', 26913: 'The case for a decentralized internet', 1693: 'The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_if_i_controlled_the_internet/

How many poets could cram eBay, Friendster and Monster.com into 3-minute poem worthy of a standing ovation? Enjoy Rives' unique talent.

I wrote this poem after hearing a pretty well known actress tell a very well known interviewer on television, "I'm really getting into the Internet lately. I just wish it were more organized." So ... (Laughter) If I controlled the Internet, you could auction your broken heart on eBay. Take the money; go to Amazon; buy a phonebook for a country you've never been to — call folks at random until you find someone who flirts really well in a foreign language. (Laughter) If I were in charge of the Internet, you could Mapquest your lover's mood swings. Hang left at cranky, right at preoccupied, U-turn on silent treatment, all the way back to tongue kissing and good lovin'. You could navigate and understand every emotional intersection. Some days, I'm as shallow as a baking pan, but I still stretch miles in all directions. If I owned the Internet, Napster, Monster and Friendster.com would be one big website. That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job and you're really just chattin' with your pals. (Laughter) Heck, if I ran the Web, you could email dead people. (Laughter) They would not email you back (Laughter) — but you'd get an automated reply. (Laughter) Their name in your inbox (Laughter) — it's all you wanted anyway. And a message saying, "Hey, it's me. I miss you. (Laughter) Listen, you'll see being dead is dandy. Now you go back to raising kids and waging peace and craving candy." If I designed the Internet, childhood.com would be a loop of a boy in an orchard, with a ski pole for a sword, trashcan lid for a shield, shouting, "I am the emperor of oranges. I am the emperor of oranges. I am the emperor of oranges." Now follow me, OK? (Laughter) Grandma.com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit-bath instructions. One, two, three. That links with hotdiggitydog.com. That is my grandfather. They take you to gruff-ex-cop-on-his-fourth-marriage.dad. He forms an attachment to kind-of-ditzy-but-still-sends-ginger-snaps-for-Christmas.mom, who downloads the boy in the orchard, the emperor of oranges, who grows up to be me — the guy who usually goes too far. So if I were emperor of the Internet, I guess I'd still be mortal, huh? But at that point, I would probably already have the lowest possible mortgage and the most enlarged possible penis (Laughter) — so I would outlaw spam on my first day in office. I wouldn't need it. I'd be like some kind of Internet genius, and me, I'd like to upgrade to deity and maybe just like that — pop! — I'd go wireless. (Laughter) Huh? Maybe Google would hire this. I could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus until the World Wide Web is as wise, as wild and as organized as I think a modern-day miracle/oracle can get, but, ooh-eee, you want to bet just how whack and un-PC your Mac or PC is going to be when I'm rocking hot-shit-hot-shot-god.net? I guess it's just like life. It is not a question of if you can — it's: do ya? We can interfere with the interface. We can make "You've got Hallelujah" the national anthem of cyberspace every lucky time we log on. You don't say a prayer. You don't write a psalm. You don't chant an "om." You send one blessed email to whomever you're thinking of at dah-da-la-dat-da-dah-da-la-dat.com. Thank you, TED. (Applause)

The killer American diet that's sweeping the planet

Dean Ornish

{0: 'Dean Ornish'}

{0: ['physician', 'author']}

{0: "Dean Ornish is a clinical professor at UCSF and founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute. He's a leading expert on fighting illness -- particularly heart disease with dietary and lifestyle changes."}

2006-02-23

2006-12-14

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'eo', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'gl', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'mk', 'ms', 'my', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'uz', 'vi', 'zh', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'disease', 'food', 'global issues', 'health', 'health care', 'obesity', 'science']

{263: "What's wrong with what we eat", 348: "What's wrong with school lunches", 248: 'How the news distorts our worldview', 377: 'Healing through diet', 24361: 'What is obesity?', 2194: 'How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_ornish_the_killer_american_diet_that_s_sweeping_the_planet/

Forget the latest disease in the news: Cardiovascular disease kills more people than everything else combined -- and it’s mostly preventable. Dr. Dean Ornish explains how changing our eating habits can save lives.

With all the legitimate concerns about AIDS and avian flu — and we'll hear about that from the brilliant Dr. Brilliant later today — I want to talk about the other pandemic, which is cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension — all of which are completely preventable for at least 95 percent of people just by changing diet and lifestyle. And what's happening is that there's a globalization of illness occurring, that people are starting to eat like us, and live like us, and die like us. And in one generation, for example, Asia's gone from having one of the lowest rates of heart disease and obesity and diabetes to one of the highest. And in Africa, cardiovascular disease equals the HIV and AIDS deaths in most countries. So there's a critical window of opportunity we have to make an important difference that can affect the lives of literally millions of people, and practice preventive medicine on a global scale. Heart and blood vessel diseases still kill more people — not only in this country, but also worldwide — than everything else combined, and yet it's completely preventable for almost everybody. It's not only preventable; it's actually reversible. And for the last almost 29 years, we've been able to show that by simply changing diet and lifestyle, using these very high-tech, expensive, state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost interventions can be like — quantitative arteriography, before and after a year, and cardiac PET scans. We showed a few months ago — we published the first study showing you can actually stop or reverse the progression of prostate cancer by making changes in diet and lifestyle, and 70 percent regression in the tumor growth, or inhibition of the tumor growth, compared to only nine percent in the control group. And in the MRI and MR spectroscopy here, the prostate tumor activity is shown in red — you can see it diminishing after a year. Now there is an epidemic of obesity: two-thirds of adults and 15 percent of kids. What's really concerning to me is that diabetes has increased 70 percent in the past 10 years, and this may be the first generation in which our kids live a shorter life span than we do. That's pitiful, and it's preventable. Now these are not election returns, these are the people — the number of the people who are obese by state, beginning in '85, '86, '87 — these are from the CDC website — '88, '89, '90, '91 — you get a new category — '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, '97, '98, '99, 2000, 2001 — it gets worse. We're kind of devolving. (Laughter) Now what can we do about this? Well, you know, the diet that we've found that can reverse heart disease and cancer is an Asian diet. But the people in Asia are starting to eat like we are, which is why they're starting to get sick like we are. So I've been working with a lot of the big food companies. They can make it fun and sexy and hip and crunchy and convenient to eat healthier foods, like — I chair the advisory boards to McDonald's, and PepsiCo, and ConAgra, and Safeway, and soon Del Monte, and they're finding that it's good business. The salads that you see at McDonald's came from the work — they're going to have an Asian salad. At Pepsi, two-thirds of their revenue growth came from their better foods. And so if we can do that, then we can free up resources for buying drugs that you really do need for treating AIDS and HIV and malaria and for preventing avian flu. Thank you.

8 secrets of success

Richard St. John

{0: 'Richard St. John'}

{0: ['marketer', 'success analyst']}

{0: 'A self-described average guy who found success doing what he loved, Richard St. John spent more than a decade researching the lessons of success -- and distilling them into 8 words, 3 minutes and one successful book.'}

2005-02-23

2006-12-14

TED2005

en

['af', 'am', 'ar', 'arq', 'az', 'bg', 'bn', 'bs', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'eo', 'es', 'et', 'eu', 'fa', 'fil', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'gu', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'kk', 'km', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'lv', 'mg', 'mk', 'ml', 'mn', 'mr', 'ms', 'my', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'so', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'sw', 'ta', 'te', 'th', 'tl', 'tr', 'tt', 'ug', 'uk', 'ur', 'uz', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'happiness', 'psychology', 'success', 'work']

{66: 'Do schools kill creativity?', 202: '5 dangerous things you should let your kids do', 93: 'The paradox of choice', 1384: 'Why you will fail to have a great career', 2182: 'How to run a company with (almost) no rules', 2341: "Why some of us don't have one true calling"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_st_john_8_secrets_of_success/

Why do people succeed? Is it because they're smart? Or are they just lucky? Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success.

This is really a two-hour presentation I give to high school students, cut down to three minutes. And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. She said, "What leads to success?" And I felt really badly, because I couldn't give her a good answer. So I get off the plane, and I come to TED. And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! So why don't I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids? So here we are, seven years, 500 interviews later, and I'm going to tell you what really leads to success and makes TEDsters tick. And the first thing is passion. Freeman Thomas says, "I'm driven by my passion." TEDsters do it for love; they don't do it for money. Carol Coletta says, "I would pay someone to do what I do." And the interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway. Work! Rupert Murdoch said to me, "It's all hard work. Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun." Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes! (Laughter) TEDsters do have fun working. And they work hard. I figured, they're not workaholics. They're workafrolics. (Laughter) Good! (Applause) Alex Garden says, "To be successful, put your nose down in something and get damn good at it." There's no magic; it's practice, practice, practice. And it's focus. Norman Jewison said to me, "I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one thing." And push! David Gallo says, "Push yourself. Physically, mentally, you've got to push, push, push." You've got to push through shyness and self-doubt. Goldie Hawn says, "I always had self-doubts. I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. I didn't think I'd make it." Now it's not always easy to push yourself, and that's why they invented mothers. (Laughter) (Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, "My mother pushed me." (Laughter) Serve! Sherwin Nuland says, "It was a privilege to serve as a doctor." A lot of kids want to be millionaires. The first thing I say is: "OK, well you can't serve yourself; you've got to serve others something of value. Because that's the way people really get rich." Ideas! TEDster Bill Gates says, "I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company." I'd say it was a pretty good idea. And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas — it's just doing some very simple things. And I give lots of evidence. Persist! Joe Kraus says, "Persistence is the number one reason for our success." You've got to persist through failure. You've got to persist through crap! Which of course means "Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure." (Laughter) So, the answer to this question is simple: Pay 4,000 bucks and come to TED. (Laughter) Or failing that, do the eight things — and trust me, these are the big eight things that lead to success. Thank you TEDsters for all your interviews! (Applause)

The hidden world of shadow cities

Robert Neuwirth

{0: 'Robert Neuwirth'}

{0: ['author']}

{0: 'Robert Neuwirth’s writings on the street-level reality of the developing world have opened a new dialogue on development and economics.'}

2005-07-14

2007-01-02

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'cities', 'culture', 'entrepreneur', 'future', 'global issues', 'social change', 'poverty', 'policy', 'global development']

{643: 'Photographs of secret sites', 1846: 'Ingenious homes in unexpected places', 2128: 'My architectural philosophy? Bring the community into the process', 57144: 'What if the poor were part of city planning?', 1920: 'How architectural innovations migrate across borders', 1429: 'The 4 commandments of cities'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_neuwirth_the_hidden_world_of_shadow_cities/

Robert Neuwirth, author of "Shadow Cities," finds the world's squatter sites -- where a billion people now make their homes -- to be thriving centers of ingenuity and innovation. He takes us on a tour.

Let me show you some images of what I consider to be the cities of tomorrow. So, that's Kibera, the largest squatter community in Nairobi. This is the squatter community in Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Bombay, India, what's called Mumbai these days. This is Hosinia, the largest and most urbanized favela in Rio de Janeiro. And this is Sultanbelyi, which is one of the largest squatter communities in Istanbul. They are what I consider to be the cities of tomorrow, the new urban world. Now, why do I say that? To tell you about that I have to talk about this fellow here, his name is Julius. And I met Julius the last week that I was living in Kibera. So, I had been there almost three months, and I was touring around the city going to different squatter areas and Julius was tagging along, and he was bug eyed and at certain points we were walking around, he grabbed my hand for support, which is something most Kenyans would never consider doing. They're very polite and they don't get so forward so quickly. And I found out later that it was Julius' first day in Nairobi, and he's one of many. So, close to 200,000 people a day migrate from the rural to the urban areas. That's, and I'm going to be fair to the statisticians who talked this morning, not almost 1.5 million people a week, but almost 1.4 million people a week but I'm a journalist, and we exaggerate, so almost 1.5 million people a week, close to 70 million people a year. And if you do the math, that's 130 people every minute. So, that'll be — in the 18 minutes that I'm given to talk here, between two and three thousand people will have journeyed to the cities. And here are the statistics. Today — a billion squatters, one in six people on the planet. 2030 — two billion squatters, one in four people on the planet. And the estimate is that in 2050, there'll be three billion squatters, better than one in three people on earth. So, these are the cities of the future, and we have to engage them. And I was thinking this morning of the good life, and before I show you the rest of my presentation, I'm going to violate TED rules here, and I'm going to read you something from my book as quickly as I can. Because I think it says something about reversing our perception of what we think the good life is. So — "The hut was made of corrugated metal, set on a concrete pad. It was a 10 by 10 cell. Armstrong O'Brian, Jr. shared it with three other men. Armstrong and his friends had no water — they bought it from a nearby tap owner — no toilet — the families in this compound shared a single pit-latrine — and no sewers or sanitation. They did have electricity, but it was illegal service tapped from someone else's wires, and could only power one feeble bulb. This was Southland, a small shanty community on the western side of Nairobi, Kenya. But it could've been anywhere in the city, because more than half the city of Nairobi lives like this. 1.5 million people stuffed into mud or metal huts with no services, no toilets, no rights. "Armstrong explained the brutal reality of their situation: they paid 1,500 shillings in rent, about 20 bucks a month, a relatively high price for a Kenyan shantytown, and they could not afford to be late with the money. 'In case you owe one month, the landlord will come with his henchmen and bundle you out. He will confiscate your things,' Armstrong said. 'Not one month, one day,' his roommate Hilary Kibagendi Onsomu, who was cooking ugali, the spongy white cornmeal concoction that is the staple food in the country, cut into the conversation. They called their landlord a Wabenzi, meaning that he is a person who has enough money to drive a Mercedes-Benz. Hilary served the ugali with a fry of meat and tomatoes; the sun slammed down on the thin steel roof; and we perspired as we ate. "After we finished, Armstrong straightened his tie, put on a wool sports jacket, and we headed out into the glare. Outside a mound of garbage formed the border between Southland and the adjacent legal neighborhood of Langata. It was perhaps eight feet tall, 40 feet long, and 10 feet wide. And it was set in a wider watery ooze. As we passed, two boys were climbing the mount Kenya of trash. They couldn't have been more than five or six years old. They were barefoot, and with each step their toes sank into the muck sending hundreds of flies scattering from the rancid pile. I thought they might be playing King of the Hill, but I was wrong. Once atop the pile, one of the boys lowered his shorts, squatted, and defecated. The flies buzzed hungrily around his legs. When 20 families — 100 people or so — share a single latrine, a boy pooping on a garbage pile is perhaps no big thing. But it stood in jarring contrast to something Armstrong had said as we were eating — that he treasured the quality of life in his neighborhood. "For Armstrong, Southland wasn't constrained by its material conditions. Instead, the human spirit radiated out from the metal walls and garbage heaps to offer something no legal neighborhood could: freedom. 'This place is very addictive,' he had said. 'It's a simple life, but nobody is restricting you. Nobody is controlling what you do. Once you have stayed here, you cannot go back.' He meant back beyond that mountain of trash, back in the legal city, of legal buildings, with legal leases and legal rights. 'Once you have stayed here,' he said, 'you can stay for the rest of your life.'" So, he has hope, and this is where these communities start. This is perhaps the most primitive shanty that you can find in Kibera, little more than a stick-and-mud hut next to a garbage heap. This is getting ready for the monsoon in Bombay, India. This is home improvement: putting plastic tarps on your roof. This is in Rio de Janeiro, and it's getting a bit better, right? We're seeing scavenged terra cotta tile and little pieces of signs, and plaster over the brick, some color, and this is Sulay Montakaya's house in Sultanbelyi, and it's getting even better. He's got a fence; he scavenged a door; he's got new tile on the roof. And then you get Rocinha and you can see that it's getting even better. The buildings here are multi-story. They develop — you can see on the far right one where it seems to just stack on top of each other, room, after room, after room. And what people do is they develop their home on one or two stories, and they sell their loggia or roof rights, and someone else builds on top of their building, and then that person sells the roof rights, and someone else builds on top of their building. All of these buildings are made out of reinforced concrete and brick. And then you get Sultanbelyi, in Turkey, where it's even built to a higher level of design. The crud in the front is mattress stuffing, and you see that all over Turkey. People dry out or air out their mattress stuffing on their roofs. But the green building, on behind, you can see that the top floor is not occupied, so people are building with the possibility of expansion. And it's built to a pretty high standard of design. And then you finally get squatter homes like this, which is built on the suburban model. Hey, that's a single family home in the squatter community. That's also in Istanbul, Turkey. They're quite vital places, these communities. This is the main drag of Rocinha, the Estrada da Gavea, and there's a bus route that runs through it, lots of people out on the street. These communities in these cities are actually more vital than the illegal communities. They have more things going on in them. This is a typical pathway in Rocinha called a "beco" — these are how you get around the community. It's on very steep ground. They're built on the hills, inland from the beaches in Rio, and you can see that the houses are just cantilevered over the natural obstructions. So, that's just a rock in the hillside. And these becos are normally very crowded, and people hump furniture up them, or refrigerators up them, all sorts of things. Beer is all carried in on your shoulders. Beer is a very important thing in Brazil. This is commerce in Kenya, right along the train tracks, so close to the train tracks that the merchants sometimes have to pull the merchandise out of the way. This is a marketplace, also in Kenya, Toi Market, lots of dealers, in almost everything you want to buy. Those green things in the foreground are mangoes. This is a shopping street in Kibera, and you can see that there's a soda dealer, a health clinic, two beauty salons, a bar, two grocery stores, and a church, and more. It's a typical downtown street; it just happens to be self-built. This here, on the right-hand side, is what's called a — if you look at the fine print under the awning — it's a hotel. And what hotel means, in Kenya and India, is an eating-place. So, that's a restaurant. People steal electrical power — this is Rio. People tap in and they have thieves who are called "grillos" or "crickets," and they steal the electrical power and wire the neighborhood. People burn trash to get rid of the garbage, and they dig their own sewer channels. Talk about more plastic bags than plankton. And sometimes they have natural trash-disposal. And when they have more money they cement their streets, and they put in sewers and good water pipes, and stuff like that. This is water going to Rio. People run their water pipes all over the place, and that little hut right there has a pump in it, and that's what people do: they steal electricity; they install a pump and they tap into the water main, and pump water up to their houses. So, the question is how do you go from the mud-hut village, to the more developed city, to the even highly developed Sultanbelyi? I say there are two things. One is people need a guarantee they won't be evicted. That does not necessarily mean property rights, and I would disagree with Hernando de Soto on that question, because property rights create a lot of complications. They're most often sold to people, and people then wind up in debt and have to pay back the debt, and sometimes have to sell their property in order to pay back the debt. There's a whole variety of other reasons why property rights sometimes don't work in these cases, but they do need security of tenure. And they need access to politics, and that can mean two things. That can mean community organizing from below, but it can also mean possibilities from above. And I say that because the system in Turkey is notable. Turkey has two great laws that protect squatters. One is that — it's called "gecekondu" in Turkish, which means "built overnight," and if you build your house overnight in Turkey, you can't be evicted without due process of law, if they don't catch you during the night. And the second aspect is that once you have 2,000 people in the community, you can petition the government to be recognized as a legal sub-municipality. And when you're a legal sub-municipality, you suddenly have politics. You're allowed to have an elected government, collect taxes, provide municipal services, and that's exactly what they do. So, these are the civic leaders of the future. The woman in the center is Geeta Jiwa. She lives in one of those tents on the highway median in Mumbai. That's Sureka Gundi; she also lives with her family on the tent along the same highway median. They're very outspoken. They're very active. They can be community leaders. This woman is Nine, which means "grandma" in Turkish. And there were three old ladies who lived in — that's her self-built house behind her — and they've lived there for 30 or 40 years, and they are the backbone of the community there. This is Richard Muthama Peter, and he is an itinerant street photographer in Kibera. He makes money taking pictures of the neighborhood, and the people in the neighborhood, and is a great resource in the community. And finally my choice to run for mayor of Rio is Cezinio, the fruit merchant with his two kids here, and a more honest and giving and caring man I don't know. The future of these communities is in the people and in our ability to work with those people. So, I think the message I take, from what I read from the book, from what Armstrong said, and from all these people, is that these are neighborhoods. The issue is not urban poverty. The issue is not the larger, over-arching thing. The issue is for us to recognize that these are neighborhoods — this is a legitimate form of urban development — and that cities have to engage these residents, because they are building the cities of the future. Thank you very much.

Global priorities bigger than climate change

Bjorn Lomborg

{0: 'Bjorn Lomborg'}

{0: ['global prioritizer']}

{0: "Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg heads the Copenhagen Consensus, which has prioritized the world's greatest problems -- global warming, world poverty, disease -- based on how effective our solutions might be. It's a thought-provoking, even provocative list."}

2005-02-02

2007-01-02

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'gl', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['AIDS', 'Africa', 'business', 'choice', 'climate change', 'culture', 'disaster relief', 'economics', 'environment', 'future']

{248: 'How the news distorts our worldview', 92: "The best stats you've ever seen", 143: 'Flip your thinking on AIDS in Africa', 85: 'My wish: Rebuilding Rwanda', 192: 'A critical look at geoengineering against climate change', 1746: 'The why and how of effective altruism'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_global_priorities_bigger_than_climate_change/

Given $50 billion to spend, which would you solve first, AIDS or global warming? Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg comes up with surprising answers.

What I'd like to talk about is really the biggest problems in the world. I'm not going to talk about "The Skeptical Environmentalist" — probably that's also a good choice. (Laughter) But I am going talk about: what are the big problems in the world? And I must say, before I go on, I should ask every one of you to try and get out pen and paper because I'm actually going to ask you to help me to look at how we do that. So get out your pen and paper. Bottom line is, there is a lot of problems out there in the world. I'm just going to list some of them. There are 800 million people starving. There's a billion people without clean drinking water. Two billion people without sanitation. There are several million people dying of HIV and AIDS. The lists go on and on. There's two billions of people who will be severely affected by climate change — so on. There are many, many problems out there. In an ideal world, we would solve them all, but we don't. We don't actually solve all problems. And if we do not, the question I think we need to ask ourselves — and that's why it's on the economy session — is to say, if we don't do all things, we really have to start asking ourselves, which ones should we solve first? And that's the question I'd like to ask you. If we had say, 50 billion dollars over the next four years to spend to do good in this world, where should we spend it? We identified 10 of the biggest challenges in the world, and I will just briefly read them: climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, population migration, sanitation and water, and subsidies and trade barriers. We believe that these in many ways encompass the biggest problems in the world. The obvious question would be to ask, what do you think are the biggest things? Where should we start on solving these problems? But that's a wrong problem to ask. That was actually the problem that was asked in Davos in January. But of course, there's a problem in asking people to focus on problems. Because we can't solve problems. Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don't have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems, but the point is to prioritize solutions to problems. And that would be — of course that gets a little more complicated. To climate change that would be like Kyoto. To communicable diseases, it might be health clinics or mosquito nets. To conflicts, it would be U.N.'s peacekeeping forces, and so on. The point that I would like to ask you to try to do, is just in 30 seconds — and I know this is in a sense an impossible task — write down what you think is probably some of the top priorities. And also — and that's, of course, where economics gets evil — to put down what are the things we should not do, first. What should be at the bottom of the list? Please, just take 30 seconds, perhaps talk to your neighbor, and just figure out what should be the top priorities and the bottom priorities of the solutions that we have to the world's biggest issues. The amazing part of this process — and of course, I mean, I would love to — I only have 18 minutes, I've already given you quite a substantial amount of my time, right? I'd love to go into, and get you to think about this process, and that's actually what we did. And I also strongly encourage you, and I'm sure we'll also have these discussions afterwards, to think about, how do we actually prioritize? Of course, you have to ask yourself, why on Earth was such a list never done before? And one reason is that prioritization is incredibly uncomfortable. Nobody wants to do this. Of course, every organization would love to be on the top of such a list. But every organization would also hate to be not on the top of the list. And since there are many more not-number-one spots on the list than there is number ones, it makes perfect sense not to want to do such a list. We've had the U.N. for almost 60 years, yet we've never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world, and said, which of them should we do first? So it doesn't mean that we are not prioritizing — any decision is a prioritization, so of course we are still prioritizing, if only implicitly — and that's unlikely to be as good as if we actually did the prioritization, and went in and talked about it. So what I'm proposing is really to say that we have, for a very long time, had a situation when we've had a menu of choices. There are many, many things we can do out there, but we've not had the prices, nor the sizes. We have not had an idea. Imagine going into a restaurant and getting this big menu card, but you have no idea what the price is. You know, you have a pizza; you've no idea what the price is. It could be at one dollar; it could be 1,000 dollars. It could be a family-size pizza; it could be a very individual-size pizza, right? We'd like to know these things. And that is what the Copenhagen Consensus is really trying to do — to try to put prices on these issues. And so basically, this has been the Copenhagen Consensus' process. We got 30 of the world's best economists, three in each area. So we have three of world's top economists write about climate change. What can we do? What will be the cost and what will be the benefit of that? Likewise in communicable diseases. Three of the world's top experts saying, what can we do? What would be the price? What should we do about it, and what will be the outcome? And so on. Then we had some of the world's top economists, eight of the world's top economists, including three Nobel Laureates, meet in Copenhagen in May 2004. We called them the "dream team." The Cambridge University prefects decided to call them the Real Madrid of economics. That works very well in Europe, but it doesn't really work over here. And what they basically did was come out with a prioritized list. And then you ask, why economists? And of course, I'm very happy you asked that question — (Laughter) — because that's a very good question. The point is, of course, if you want to know about malaria, you ask a malaria expert. If you want to know about climate, you ask a climatologist. But if you want to know which of the two you should deal with first, you can't ask either of them, because that's not what they do. That is what economists do. They prioritize. They make that in some ways disgusting task of saying, which one should we do first, and which one should we do afterwards? So this is the list, and this is the one I'd like to share with you. Of course, you can also see it on the website, and we'll also talk about it more, I'm sure, as the day goes on. They basically came up with a list where they said there were bad projects — basically, projects where if you invest a dollar, you get less than a dollar back. Then there's fair projects, good projects and very good projects. And of course, it's the very good projects we should start doing. I'm going to go from backwards so that we end up with the best projects. These were the bad projects. As you might see the bottom of the list was climate change. This offends a lot of people, and that's probably one of the things where people will say I shouldn't come back, either. And I'd like to talk about that, because that's really curious. Why is it it came up? And I'll actually also try to get back to this because it's probably one of the things that we'll disagree with on the list that you wrote down. The reason why they came up with saying that Kyoto — or doing something more than Kyoto — is a bad deal is simply because it's very inefficient. It's not saying that global warming is not happening. It's not saying that it's not a big problem. But it's saying that what we can do about it is very little, at a very high cost. What they basically show us, the average of all macroeconomic models, is that Kyoto, if everyone agreed, would cost about 150 billion dollars a year. That's a substantial amount of money. That's two to three times the global development aid that we give the Third World every year. Yet it would do very little good. All models show it will postpone warming for about six years in 2100. So the guy in Bangladesh who gets a flood in 2100 can wait until 2106. Which is a little good, but not very much good. So the idea here really is to say, well, we've spent a lot of money doing a little good. And just to give you a sense of reference, the U.N. actually estimate that for half that amount, for about 75 billion dollars a year, we could solve all major basic problems in the world. We could give clean drinking water, sanitation, basic healthcare and education to every single human being on the planet. So we have to ask ourselves, do we want to spend twice the amount on doing very little good? Or half the amount on doing an amazing amount of good? And that is really why it becomes a bad project. It's not to say that if we had all the money in the world, we wouldn't want to do it. But it's to say, when we don't, it's just simply not our first priority. The fair projects — notice I'm not going to comment on all these — but communicable diseases, scale of basic health services — just made it, simply because, yes, scale of basic health services is a great thing. It would do a lot of good, but it's also very, very costly. Again, what it tells us is suddenly we start thinking about both sides of the equation. If you look at the good projects, a lot of sanitation and water projects came in. Again, sanitation and water is incredibly important, but it also costs a lot of infrastructure. So I'd like to show you the top four priorities which should be at least the first ones that we deal with when we talk about how we should deal with the problems in the world. The fourth best problem is malaria — dealing with malaria. The incidence of malaria is about a couple of [million] people get infected every year. It might even cost up towards a percentage point of GDP every year for affected nations. If we invested about 13 billion dollars over the next four years, we could bring that incidence down to half. We could avoid about 500,000 people dying, but perhaps more importantly, we could avoid about a [million] people getting infected every year. We would significantly increase their ability to deal with many of the other problems that they have to deal with — of course, in the long run, also to deal with global warming. This third best one was free trade. Basically, the model showed that if we could get free trade, and especially cut subsidies in the U.S. and Europe, we could basically enliven the global economy to an astounding number of about 2,400 billion dollars a year, half of which would accrue to the Third World. Again, the point is to say that we could actually pull two to three hundred million people out of poverty, very radically fast, in about two to five years. That would be the third best thing we could do. The second best thing would be to focus on malnutrition. Not just malnutrition in general, but there's a very cheap way of dealing with malnutrition, namely, the lack of micronutrients. Basically, about half of the world's population is lacking in iron, zinc, iodine and vitamin A. If we invest about 12 billion dollars, we could make a severe inroad into that problem. That would be the second best investment that we could do. And the very best project would be to focus on HIV/AIDS. Basically, if we invest 27 billion dollars over the next eight years, we could avoid 28 new million cases of HIV/AIDS. Again, what this does and what it focuses on is saying there are two very different ways that we can deal with HIV/AIDS. One is treatment; the other one is prevention. And again, in an ideal world, we would do both. But in a world where we don't do either, or don't do it very well, we have to at least ask ourselves where should we invest first. And treatment is much, much more expensive than prevention. So basically, what this focuses on is saying, we can do a lot more by investing in prevention. Basically for the amount of money that we spend, we can do X amount of good in treatment, and 10 times as much good in prevention. So again, what we focus on is prevention rather than treatment, at first rate. What this really does is that it makes us think about our priorities. I'd like to have you look at your priority list and say, did you get it right? Or did you get close to what we came up with here? Well, of course, one of the things is climate change again. I find a lot of people find it very, very unlikely that we should do that. We should also do climate change, if for no other reason, simply because it's such a big problem. But of course, we don't do all problems. There are many problems out there in the world. And what I want to make sure of is, if we actually focus on problems, that we focus on the right ones. The ones where we can do a lot of good rather than a little good. And I think, actually — Thomas Schelling, one of the participants in the dream team, he put it very, very well. One of things that people forget, is that in 100 years, when we're talking about most of the climate change impacts will be, people will be much, much richer. Even the most pessimistic impact scenarios of the U.N. estimate that the average person in the developing world in 2100 will be about as rich as we are today. Much more likely, they will be two to four times richer than we are. And of course, we'll be even richer than that. But the point is to say, when we talk about saving people, or helping people in Bangladesh in 2100, we're not talking about a poor Bangladeshi. We're actually talking about a fairly rich Dutch guy. And so the real point, of course, is to say, do we want to spend a lot of money helping a little, 100 years from now, a fairly rich Dutch guy? Or do we want to help real poor people, right now, in Bangladesh, who really need the help, and whom we can help very, very cheaply? Or as Schelling put it, imagine if you were a rich — as you will be — a rich Chinese, a rich Bolivian, a rich Congolese, in 2100, thinking back on 2005, and saying, "How odd that they cared so much about helping me a little bit through climate change, and cared so fairly little about helping my grandfather and my great grandfather, whom they could have helped so much more, and who needed the help so much more?" So I think that really does tell us why it is we need to get our priorities straight. Even if it doesn't accord to the typical way we see this problem. Of course, that's mainly because climate change has good pictures. We have, you know, "The Day After Tomorrow" — it looks great, right? It's a good film in the sense that I certainly want to see it, right, but don't expect Emmerich to cast Brad Pitt in his next movie digging latrines in Tanzania or something. (Laughter) It just doesn't make for as much of a movie. So in many ways, I think of the Copenhagen Consensus and the whole discussion of priorities as a defense for boring problems. To make sure that we realize it's not about making us feel good. It's not about making things that have the most media attention, but it's about making places where we can actually do the most good. The other objections, I think, that are important to say, is that I'm somehow — or we are somehow — positing a false choice. Of course, we should do all things, in an ideal world — I would certainly agree. I think we should do all things, but we don't. In 1970, the developed world decided we were going to spend twice as much as we did, right now, than in 1970, on the developing world. Since then our aid has halved. So it doesn't look like we're actually on the path of suddenly solving all big problems. Likewise, people are also saying, but what about the Iraq war? You know, we spend 100 billion dollars — why don't we spend that on doing good in the world? I'm all for that. If any one of you guys can talk Bush into doing that, that's fine. But the point, of course, is still to say, if you get another 100 billion dollars, we still want to spend that in the best possible way, don't we? So the real issue here is to get ourselves back and think about what are the right priorities. I should just mention briefly, is this really the right list that we got out? You know, when you ask the world's best economists, you inevitably end up asking old, white American men. And they're not necessarily, you know, great ways of looking at the entire world. So we actually invited 80 young people from all over the world to come and solve the same problem. The only two requirements were that they were studying at the university, and they spoke English. The majority of them were, first, from developing countries. They had all the same material but they could go vastly outside the scope of discussion, and they certainly did, to come up with their own lists. And the surprising thing was that the list was very similar — with malnutrition and diseases at the top and climate change at the bottom. We've done this many other times. There's been many other seminars and university students, and different things. They all come out with very much the same list. And that gives me great hope, really, in saying that I do believe that there is a path ahead to get us to start thinking about priorities, and saying, what is the important thing in the world? Of course, in an ideal world, again we'd love to do everything. But if we don't do it, then we can start thinking about where should we start? I see the Copenhagen Consensus as a process. We did it in 2004, and we hope to assemble many more people, getting much better information for 2008, 2012. Map out the right path for the world — but also to start thinking about political triage. To start thinking about saying, "Let's do not the things where we can do very little at a very high cost, not the things that we don't know how to do, but let's do the great things where we can do an enormous amount of good, at very low cost, right now." At the end of the day, you can disagree with the discussion of how we actually prioritize these, but we have to be honest and frank about saying, if there's some things we do, there are other things we don't do. If we worry too much about some things, we end by not worrying about other things. So I hope this will help us make better priorities, and think about how we better work for the world. Thank you.

Dreams from endangered cultures

Wade Davis

{0: 'Wade Davis'}

{0: ['anthropologist', 'ethnobotanist']}

{0: 'A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Wade Davis has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”'}

2003-02-03

2007-01-09

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'bn', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'kn', 'ko', 'lt', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'sw', 'ta', 'te', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['anthropology', 'culture', 'environment', 'film', 'global issues', 'language', 'photography', 'indigenous peoples']

{273: 'The worldwide web of belief and ritual', 40: 'The story of life in photographs', 34: 'Photos of endangered cultures', 2141: "What the people of the Amazon know that you don't", 1729: 'The silent drama of photography', 299: 'A hero of the Congo forest'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_dreams_from_endangered_cultures/

With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate.

You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel and one of the delights of ethnographic research is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way, or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, or that in the Himalaya, the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma, is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago. And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives. We're all born. We all bring our children into the world. We go through initiation rites. We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art. But what's interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture. And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara — this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with a month ago — or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma, Everest, the goddess mother of the world. All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth. And this is an idea, if you think about it, can only fill you with hope. Now, together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet, and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. And you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere, and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy. It's the symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species. And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere — and, if anything, at a far greater rate. No biologists, for example, would dare suggest that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true, and yet that — the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity — scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss. When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey, fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children. They're no longer being taught to babies, which means, effectively, unless something changes, they're already dead. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your language, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors or anticipate the promise of the children? And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks, because every two weeks, some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better, wouldn't the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great, let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese. Let's make it Kogi." And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language. And so, what I'd like to do with you today is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere, a brief journey through the ethnosphere, to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost. Now, there are many of us who sort of forget that when I say "different ways of being," I really do mean different ways of being. Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon, the people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east in the belly of sacred snakes. Now, this is a people who cognitively do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of the forest upon which the people depend. They have a curious language and marriage rule which is called "linguistic exogamy:" you must marry someone who speaks a different language. And this is all rooted in the mythological past, yet the curious thing is in these long houses, where there are six or seven languages spoken because of intermarriage, you never hear anyone practicing a language. They simply listen and then begin to speak. Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with, the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador, an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958. In 1957, five missionaries attempted contact and made a critical mistake. They dropped from the air 8 x 10 glossy photographs of themselves in what we would say to be friendly gestures, forgetting that these people of the rainforest had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. They picked up these photographs from the forest floor, tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure, found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards from the devil, so they speared the five missionaries to death. But the Waorani didn't just spear outsiders. They speared each other. 54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other. We traced genealogies back eight generations, and we found two instances of natural death and when we pressured the people a little bit about it, they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old that he died getting old, so we speared him anyway. (Laughter) But at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge of the forest that was astonishing. Their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces and tell you what species left it behind. In the early '80s, I had a really astonishing assignment when I was asked by my professor at Harvard if I was interested in going down to Haiti, infiltrating the secret societies which were the foundation of Duvalier's strength and Tonton Macoutes, and securing the poison used to make zombies. In order to make sense out of sensation, of course, I had to understand something about this remarkable faith of Vodoun. And Voodoo is not a black magic cult. On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview. It's interesting. If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what would you say? Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever. There's always one continent left out, the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa had no religious beliefs. Well, of course, they did and Voodoo is simply the distillation of these very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. But, what makes Voodoo so interesting is that it's this living relationship between the living and the dead. So, the living give birth to the spirits. The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water, responding to the rhythm of the dance to momentarily displace the soul of the living, so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god. That's why the Voodooists like to say that "You white people go to church and speak about God. We dance in the temple and become God." And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit — how can you be harmed? So you see these astonishing demonstrations: Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance handling burning embers with impunity, a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation. Now, of all the peoples that I've ever been with, the most extraordinary are the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia, in the wake of the conquest, these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain. In a bloodstained continent, these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish. To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary. The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years: two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother's womb; now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic — or we might say the ecological — balance. And at the end of this amazing initiation, one day they're suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes of the stunningly beautiful landscape, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back and says, "You see? It's really as I've told you. It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect." They call themselves the "elder brothers" and they say we, who are the younger brothers, are the ones responsible for destroying the world. Now, this level of intuition becomes very important. Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape, we either invoke Rousseau and the old canard of the "noble savage," which is an idea racist in its simplicity, or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are. Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia. There's not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness. Now, what does that mean? It means that a young kid from the Andes who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. Whether it's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant. What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world. I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. That made me a different human being than my friends amongst the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation. Now, if you begin to look at the idea that these cultures could create different realities, you could begin to understand some of their extraordinary discoveries. Take this plant here. It's a photograph I took in the Northwest Amazon just last April. This is ayahuasca, which many of you have heard about, the most powerful psychoactive preparation of the shaman's repertoire. What makes ayahuasca fascinating is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation, but the elaboration of it. It's made really of two different sources: on the one hand, this woody liana which has in it a series of beta-carbolines, harmine, harmaline, mildly hallucinogenic — to take the vine alone is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke drift across your consciousness — but it's mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family called Psychotria viridis. This plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines, very close to brain serotonin, dimethyltryptamine, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine. If you've ever seen the Yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses, that substance they make from a different set of species also contains methoxydimethyltryptamine. To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. (Laughter) It doesn't create the distortion of reality; it creates the dissolution of reality. In fact, I used to argue with my professor, Richard Evan Shultes — who is a man who sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the magic mushrooms in Mexico in the 1930s — I used to argue that you couldn't classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because by the time you're under the effects there's no one home anymore to experience a hallucination. (Laughter) But the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally because they're denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase. They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. Now, the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. How, in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way, created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts? Well, we use that great euphemism, "trial and error," which is exposed to be meaningless. But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us." Well, what does that mean? This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, all of which are referable to our eye as one species. And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants. I mean, don't you know anything?" And I said, "No." Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. Now, that's not going to get you a Ph.D. at Harvard, but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens. (Laughter) Now — (Applause) — the problem — the problem is that even those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful but somehow reduced to the margins of history as the real world, meaning our world, moves on. Well, the truth is the 20th century, 300 years from now, is not going to be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations, but rather as the era in which we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. Now, the problem isn't change. All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life. And the problem is not technology itself. The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an American stopped being an American when he gave up the horse and buggy. It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power, the crude face of domination. Wherever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away; these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to: whether it's the egregious deforestation in the homeland of the Penan — a nomadic people from Southeast Asia, from Sarawak — a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago, and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution on the banks of the rivers, where you can see the river itself is soiled with the silt that seems to be carrying half of Borneo away to the South China Sea, where the Japanese freighters hang light in the horizon ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forest — or, in the case of the Yanomami, it's the disease entities that have come in, in the wake of the discovery of gold. Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, where I'm doing a lot of research recently, you'll see it's a crude face of political domination. You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy. And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet until you move through it at the ground level. I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa that I understood the face behind the statistics you hear about: 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes, 1.2 million people killed by the cadres during the Cultural Revolution. This young man's father had been ascribed to the Panchen Lama. That meant he was instantly killed at the time of the Chinese invasion. His uncle fled with His Holiness in the Diaspora that took the people to Nepal. His mother was incarcerated for the crime of being wealthy. He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two to hide beneath her skirt tails because she couldn't bear to be without him. The sister who had done that brave deed was put into an education camp. One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband of Mao, and for that transgression, she was given seven years of hard labor. The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold. And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said, before she died, that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities. And it's humbling to remember that our species has, perhaps, been around for [150,000] years. The Neolithic Revolution — which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood; we created hierarchy specialization surplus — is only 10,000 years ago. The modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old. Now, that shallow history doesn't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices. And it's within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens find a way to flourish. And there are great moments of optimism. This is a photograph I took at the northern tip of Baffin Island when I went narwhal hunting with some Inuit people, and this man, Olayuk, told me a marvelous story of his grandfather. The Canadian government has not always been kind to the Inuit people, and during the 1950s, to establish our sovereignty, we forced them into settlements. This old man's grandfather refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his weapons, all of his tools. Now, you must understand that the Inuit did not fear the cold; they took advantage of it. The runners of their sleds were originally made of fish wrapped in caribou hide. So, this man's grandfather was not intimidated by the Arctic night or the blizzard that was blowing. He simply slipped outside, pulled down his sealskin trousers and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of a blade. He put a spray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife and as it finally froze solid, he butchered a dog with it. He skinned the dog and improvised a harness, took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled, harnessed up an adjacent dog, and disappeared over the ice floes, shit knife in belt. Talk about getting by with nothing. (Laughter) And this, in many ways — (Applause) — is a symbol of the resilience of the Inuit people and of all indigenous people around the world. The Canadian government in April of 1999 gave back to total control of the Inuit an area of land larger than California and Texas put together. It's our new homeland. It's called Nunavut. It's an independent territory. They control all mineral resources. An amazing example of how a nation-state can seek restitution with its people. And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious at least to all of all us who've traveled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they're not remote at all. They're homelands of somebody. They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked geography of hope. So, what we're trying to do at the National Geographic, finally, is, we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything. We think that polemics — (Applause) — we think that polemics are not persuasive, but we think that storytelling can change the world, and so we are probably the best storytelling institution in the world. We get 35 million hits on our website every month. 156 nations carry our television channel. Our magazines are read by millions. And what we're doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we're going to take our audience to places of such cultural wonder that they cannot help but come away dazzled by what they have seen, and hopefully, therefore, embrace gradually, one by one, the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Photos of endangered cultures

Phil Borges

{0: 'Phil Borges'}

{0: ['photographer']}

{0: "Dentist-turned-photographer Phil Borges documents the world's disappearing cultures, capturing portraits of exiled Tibetan monks and many of the world’s embattled tribal and indigenous cultures."}

2006-02-23

2007-01-09

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['activism', 'culture', 'design', 'film', 'global issues', 'photography', 'social change', 'storytelling', 'art', 'indigenous peoples']

{2264: "Gorgeous portraits of the world's vanishing people", 2141: "What the people of the Amazon know that you don't", 1789: 'Where is home?', 1009: 'What a bike ride can teach you', 713: 'Photographing the hidden story', 23: 'Fight injustice with raw video'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/phil_borges_photos_of_endangered_cultures/

Photographer Phil Borges shows rarely seen images of people from the mountains of Dharamsala, India, and the jungles of the Ecuadorean Amazon. In documenting these endangered cultures, he intends to help preserve them.

A fact came out of MIT, couple of years ago. Ken Hale, who's a linguist, said that of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now, 3,000 aren't spoken by the children. So that in one generation, we're going to halve our cultural diversity. He went on to say that every two weeks, an elder goes to the grave carrying the last spoken word of that culture. So an entire philosophy, a body of knowledge about the natural world that had been empirically gleaned over centuries, goes away. And this happens every two weeks. So for the last 20 years, since my dental experience, I have been traveling the world and coming back with stories about some of these people. What I'd like to do right now is share some of those stories with you. This is Tamdin. She is a 69-year-old nun. She was thrown in prison in Tibet for two years for putting up a little tiny placard protesting the occupation of her country. And when I met her, she had just taken a walk over the Himalayas from Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, into Nepal, across to India — 30 days — to meet her leader, the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama lives in Dharamsala, India. So I took this picture three days after she arrived, and she had this beat-up pair of tennis shoes on, with her toes sticking out. And she crossed in March, and there's a lot of snow at 18,500 feet in March. This is Paldin. Paldin is a 62-year-old monk. And he spent 33 years in prison. His whole monastery was thrown into prison at the time of the uprising, when the Dalai Lama had to leave Tibet. And he was beaten, starved, tortured — lost all his teeth while in prison. And when I met him, he was a kind gentle old man. And it really impressed me — I met him two weeks after he got out of prison — that he went through that experience, and ended up with the demeanor that he had. So I was in Dharamsala meeting these people, and I'd spent about five weeks there, and I was hearing these similar stories of these refugees that had poured out of Tibet into Dharamsala. And it just so happened, on the fifth week, there was a public teaching by the Dalai Lama. And I was watching this crowd of monks and nuns, many of which I had just interviewed, and heard their stories, and I watched their faces, and they gave us a little FM radio, and we could listen to the translation of his teachings. And what he said was: treat your enemies as if they were precious jewels, because it's your enemies that build your tolerance and patience on the road to your enlightenment. That hit me so hard, telling these people that had been through this experience. So, two months later, I went into Tibet, and I started interviewing the people there, taking my photographs. That's what I do. I interview and do portraits. And this is a little girl. I took her portrait up on top of the Jokhang Temple. And I'd snuck in — because it's totally illegal to have a picture of the Dalai Lama in Tibet — it's the quickest way you can get arrested. So I snuck in a bunch of little wallet-sized pictures of the Dalai Lama, and I would hand them out. And when I gave them to the people, they'd either hold them to their heart, or they'd hold them up to their head and just stay there. And this is — well, at the time — I did this 10 years ago — that was 36 years after the Dalai Lama had left. So I was going in, interviewing these people and doing their portraits. This is Jigme and her sister, Sonam. And they live up on the Chang Tang, the Tibetan Plateau, way in the western part of the country. This is at 17,000 feet. And they had just come down from the high pastures, at 18,000 feet. Same thing: gave her a picture, she held it up to her forehead. And I usually hand out Polaroids when I do these, because I'm setting up lights, and checking my lights, and when I showed her her Polaroid, she screamed and ran into her tent. This is Tenzin Gyatso; he was found to be the Buddha of Compassion at the age of two, out in a peasant's house, way out in the middle of nowhere. At the age of four, he was installed as the 14th Dalai Lama. As a teenager, he faced the invasion of his country, and had to deal with it — he was the leader of the country. Eight years later, when they discovered there was a plot to kill him, they dressed him up like a beggar and snuck him out of the country on horseback, and took the same trip that Tamdin did. And he's never been back to his country since. And if you think about this man, 46 years later, still sticking to this non-violent response to a severe political and human rights issue. And the young people, young Tibetans, are starting to say, listen, this doesn't work. You know, violence as a political tool is all the rage right now. And he still is holding this line. So this is our icon to non-violence in our world — one of our living icons. This is another leader of his people. This is Moi. This is in the Ecuadorian Amazon. And Moi is 35 years old. And this area of the Ecuadorian Amazon — oil was discovered in 1972. And in this period of time — since that time — as much oil, or twice as much oil as was spilled in the Exxon Valdez accident, was spilled in this little area of the Amazon, and the tribes in this area have constantly had to move. And Moi belongs to the Huaorani tribe, and they're known as very fierce, they're known as "auca." And they've managed to keep out the seismologists and the oil workers with spears and blowguns. And we spent — I was with a team — two weeks with these guys out in the jungle watching them hunt. This was on a monkey hunt, hunting with curare-tipped darts. And the knowledge that these people have about the natural environment is incredible. They could hear things, smell things, see things I couldn't see. And I couldn't even see the monkeys that they were getting with these darts. This is Yadira, and Yadira is five years old. She's in a tribe that's neighboring the Huaorani. And her tribe has had to move three times in the last 10 years because of the oil spills. And we never hear about that. And the latest infraction against these people is, as part of Plan Colombia, we're spraying Paraquat or Round Up, whatever it is — we're defoliating thousands of acres of the Ecuadorian Amazon in our war on drugs. And these people are the people who take the brunt of it. This is Mengatoue. He's the shaman of the Huaorani, and he said to us, you know, I'm an older man now; I'm getting tired, you know; I'm tired of spearing these oil workers. I wish they would just go away. And I was — I usually travel alone when I do my work, but I did this — I hosted a program for Discovery, and when I went down with the team, I was quite concerned about going in with a whole bunch of people, especially into the Huaorani, deep into the Huaorani tribe. And as it turned out, these guys really taught me a thing or two about blending in with the locals. (Laughter) One of the things I did just before 9/11 — August of 2001 — I took my son, Dax, who was 16 at the time, and I took him to Pakistan. Because at first I wanted — you know, I've taken him on a couple of trips, but I wanted him to see people that live on a dollar a day or less. I wanted him to get an experience in the Islamic world and I also wanted him to — I was going there to work with a group, do a story on a group called the Kalash, that are a group of animists, 3,000 animists, that live — very small area — surrounded by Islam — there's 3,000 of these Kalash left; they're incredible people. So it was a great experience for him. He stayed up all night with them, drumming and dancing. And he brought a soccer ball, and we had soccer every night in this little village. And then we went up and met their shaman. By the way, Mengatoue was the shaman of his tribe as well. And this is John Doolikahn, who's the shaman of the Kalash. And he's up in the mountains, right on the border with Afghanistan. In fact, on that other side is the area, Tora Bora, the area where Osama bin Laden's supposed to be. This is the tribal area. And we watched and stayed with John Doolikahn. And the shaman — I did a whole series on shamanism, which is an interesting phenomenon. But around the world, they go into trance in different ways, and in Pakistan, the way they do it is they burn juniper leaves and they sacrifice an animal, pour the blood of the animal on the leaves and then inhale the smoke. And they're all praying to the mountain gods as they go into trance. You know, getting kids used to different realities, I think, is so important. What Dan Dennett said the other day — having a curriculum where they study different religions, just to make a mental flexibility, give them a mental flexibility in different belief systems — I think this is so necessary in our world today as you see these clash of beliefs taking place. And all the security issues they cause us. So, one thing we did five years ago: we started a program that links kids in indigenous communities with kids in the United States. So we first hooked up a spot in the Navajo Nation with a classroom in Seattle. We now have 15 sites. We have one in Kathmandu, Nepal; Dharamsala, India; Takaungu, Kenya — Takaungu is one-third Christian, one-third Muslim and one-third animist, the community is — Ollantaytambo, Peru, and Arctic Village, Alaska. This is Daniel; he's one of our students in Arctic Village, Alaska. He lives in this log cabin — no running water, no heat other than — no windows and high-speed Internet connection. And this is — I see this rolling out all over — this is our site in Ollantaytambo, Peru, four years ago, where they first saw their first computers; now they have computers in their classrooms. And the way we've done this — we teach digital storytelling to these kids. And we have them tell stories about issues in their community in their community that they care about. And this is in Peru, where the kids told the story about a river that they cleaned up. And the way we do it is, we do it in workshops, and we bring people who want to learn digital workflow and storytelling, and have them work with the kids. And just this last year we've taken a group of teenagers in, and this has worked the best. So our dream is to bring teenagers together, so they'll have a community service experience as well as a cross-cultural experience, as they teach kids in these areas and help them build their communication infrastructure. This is teaching Photoshop in the Tibetan children's village in Dharamsala. We have the website, where the kids all get their homepage. This is all their movies. We've got about 60 movies that these kids have made, and they're quite incredible. The one I want to show you — after we get them to make the movies, we have a night where we show the movies to the community. And this is in Takaungu — we've got a generator and a digital projector, and we're projecting it up against a barn, and showing one of the movies that they made. And if you get a chance, you can go to our website, and you'll see the incredible work these kids do. The other thing: I wanted to give indigenous people a voice. That was one of the big motivating factors. But the other motivating factor is the insular nature of our country. National Geographic just did a Roper Study of 18 to 26 year olds in our country and in nine other industrialized countries. It was a two million dollar study. United States came in second to last in geographic knowledge. 70 percent of the kids couldn't find Afghanistan or Iraq on a map; 60 percent couldn't find India; 30 percent couldn't find the Pacific Ocean. And this is a study that was just done a couple of years ago. So what I'd like to show you now, in the couple of minutes I have left, is a film that a student made in Guatemala. We just had a workshop in Guatemala. A week before we got to the workshop, a massive landslide, caused by Hurricane Stan, last October, came in and buried 600 people alive in their village. And this kid lived in the village — he wasn't there at the time — and this is the little movie he put together about that. And he hadn't seen a computer before we did this movie. We taught him Photoshop and — yeah, we can play it. This is an old Mayan funeral chant that he got from his grandfather. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Is this our final century?

Martin Rees

{0: 'Martin Rees'}

{0: ['astrophysicist']}

{0: "Lord Martin Rees, one of the world's most eminent astronomers, is an emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and the UK's Astronomer Royal. He is one of our key thinkers on the future of humanity in the cosmos."}

2005-07-14

2007-01-17

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['astronomy', 'climate change', 'complexity', 'cosmos', 'science', 'social change', 'technology', 'time', 'universe']

{167: '10 ways the world could end', 68: 'Progress is not a zero-sum game', 365: 'Why do societies collapse?', 876: 'Why we need the explorers', 468: 'Join the SETI search', 23913: 'Is there a center of the universe?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_rees_is_this_our_final_century/

Speaking as both an astronomer and "a concerned member of the human race," Sir Martin Rees examines our planet and its future from a cosmic perspective. He urges action to prevent dark consequences from our scientific and technological development.

If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their interests in business lie on or near the Earth's surface. The odd one out is an astronomer, and I am one of that strange breed. (Laughter) My talk will be in two parts. I'll talk first as an astronomer, and then as a worried member of the human race. But let's start off by remembering that Darwin showed how we're the outcome of four billion years of evolution. And what we try to do in astronomy and cosmology is to go back before Darwin's simple beginning, to set our Earth in a cosmic context. And let me just run through a few slides. This was the impact that happened last week on a comet. If they'd sent a nuke, it would have been rather more spectacular than what actually happened last Monday. So that's another project for NASA. That's Mars from the European Mars Express, and at New Year. This artist's impression turned into reality when a parachute landed on Titan, Saturn's giant moon. It landed on the surface. This is pictures taken on the way down. That looks like a coastline. It is indeed, but the ocean is liquid methane — the temperature minus 170 degrees centigrade. If we go beyond our solar system, we've learned that the stars aren't twinkly points of light. Each one is like a sun with a retinue of planets orbiting around it. And we can see places where stars are forming, like the Eagle Nebula. We see stars dying. In six billion years, the sun will look like that. And some stars die spectacularly in a supernova explosion, leaving remnants like that. On a still bigger scale, we see entire galaxies of stars. We see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled. And to the cosmologist, these galaxies are just the atoms, as it were, of the large-scale universe. This picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky. Through a small telescope, this would look quite blank, but you see here hundreds of little, faint smudges. Each is a galaxy, fully like ours or Andromeda, which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us. The stars in those galaxies probably don't have planets around them. There's scant chance of life there — that's because there's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carbon and iron, the building blocks of planets and of life. We believe that all of this emerged from a Big Bang — a hot, dense state. So how did that amorphous Big Bang turn into our complex cosmos? I'm going to show you a movie simulation 16 powers of 10 faster than real time, which shows a patch of the universe where the expansions have subtracted out. But you see, as time goes on in gigayears at the bottom, you will see structures evolve as gravity feeds on small, dense irregularities, and structures develop. And we'll end up after 13 billion years with something looking rather like our own universe. And we compare simulated universes like that — I'll show you a better simulation at the end of my talk — with what we actually see in the sky. Well, we can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science. If my research group had a logo, it would be this picture here: an ouroboros, where you see the micro-world on the left — the world of the quantum — and on the right the large-scale universe of planets, stars and galaxies. We know our universes are united though — links between left and right. The everyday world is determined by atoms, how they stick together to make molecules. Stars are fueled by how the nuclei in those atoms react together. And, as we've learned in the last few years, galaxies are held together by the gravitational pull of so-called dark matter: particles in huge swarms, far smaller even than atomic nuclei. But we'd like to know the synthesis symbolized at the very top. The micro-world of the quantum is understood. On the right hand side, gravity holds sway. Einstein explained that. But the unfinished business for 21st-century science is to link together cosmos and micro-world with a unified theory — symbolized, as it were, gastronomically at the top of that picture. (Laughter) And until we have that synthesis, we won't be able to understand the very beginning of our universe because when our universe was itself the size of an atom, quantum effects could shake everything. And so we need a theory that unifies the very large and the very small, which we don't yet have. One idea, incidentally — and I had this hazard sign to say I'm going to speculate from now on — is that our Big Bang was not the only one. One idea is that our three-dimensional universe may be embedded in a high-dimensional space, just as you can imagine on these sheets of paper. You can imagine ants on one of them thinking it's a two-dimensional universe, not being aware of another population of ants on the other. So there could be another universe just a millimeter away from ours, but we're not aware of it because that millimeter is measured in some fourth spatial dimension, and we're imprisoned in our three. And so we believe that there may be a lot more to physical reality than what we've normally called our universe — the aftermath of our Big Bang. And here's another picture. Bottom right depicts our universe, which on the horizon is not beyond that, but even that is just one bubble, as it were, in some vaster reality. Many people suspect that just as we've gone from believing in one solar system to zillions of solar systems, one galaxy to many galaxies, we have to go to many Big Bangs from one Big Bang, perhaps these many Big Bangs displaying an immense variety of properties. Well, let's go back to this picture. There's one challenge symbolized at the top, but there's another challenge to science symbolized at the bottom. You want to not only synthesize the very large and the very small, but we want to understand the very complex. And the most complex things are ourselves, midway between atoms and stars. We depend on stars to make the atoms we're made of. We depend on chemistry to determine our complex structure. We clearly have to be large, compared to atoms, to have layer upon layer of complex structure. We clearly have to be small, compared to stars and planets — otherwise we'd be crushed by gravity. And in fact, we are midway. It would take as many human bodies to make up the sun as there are atoms in each of us. The geometric mean of the mass of a proton and the mass of the sun is 50 kilograms, within a factor of two of the mass of each person here. Well, most of you anyway. The science of complexity is probably the greatest challenge of all, greater than that of the very small on the left and the very large on the right. And it's this science, which is not only enlightening our understanding of the biological world, but also transforming our world faster than ever. And more than that, it's engendering new kinds of change. And I now move on to the second part of my talk, and the book "Our Final Century" was mentioned. If I was not a self-effacing Brit, I would mention the book myself, and I would add that it's available in paperback. (Laughter) And in America it was called "Our Final Hour" because Americans like instant gratification. (Laughter) But my theme is that in this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains, may change human beings themselves. And human beings, their physique and character, has not changed for thousands of years. It may change this century. It's new in our history. And the human impact on the global environment — greenhouse warming, mass extinctions and so forth — is unprecedented, too. And so, this makes this coming century a challenge. Bio- and cybertechnologies are environmentally benign in that they offer marvelous prospects, while, nonetheless, reducing pressure on energy and resources. But they will have a dark side. In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind on disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure — error rather than terror. And even a tiny probability of catastrophe is unacceptable when the downside could be of global consequence. In fact, some years ago, Bill Joy wrote an article expressing tremendous concern about robots taking us over, etc. I don't go along with all that, but it's interesting that he had a simple solution. It was what he called "fine-grained relinquishment." He wanted to give up the dangerous kind of science and keep the good bits. Now, that's absurdly naive for two reasons. First, any scientific discovery has benign consequences as well as dangerous ones. And also, when a scientist makes a discovery, he or she normally has no clue what the applications are going to be. And so what this means is that we have to accept the risks if we are going to enjoy the benefits of science. We have to accept that there will be hazards. And I think we have to go back to what happened in the post-War era, post-World War II, when the nuclear scientists who'd been involved in making the atomic bomb, in many cases were concerned that they should do all they could to alert the world to the dangers. And they were inspired not by the young Einstein, who did the great work in relativity, but by the old Einstein, the icon of poster and t-shirt, who failed in his scientific efforts to unify the physical laws. He was premature. But he was a moral compass — an inspiration to scientists who were concerned with arms control. And perhaps the greatest living person is someone I'm privileged to know, Joe Rothblatt. Equally untidy office there, as you can see. He's 96 years old, and he founded the Pugwash movement. He persuaded Einstein, as his last act, to sign the famous memorandum of Bertrand Russell. And he sets an example of the concerned scientist. And I think to harness science optimally, to choose which doors to open and which to leave closed, we need latter-day counterparts of people like Joseph Rothblatt. We need not just campaigning physicists, but we need biologists, computer experts and environmentalists as well. And I think academics and independent entrepreneurs have a special obligation because they have more freedom than those in government service, or company employees subject to commercial pressure. I wrote my book, "Our Final Century," as a scientist, just a general scientist. But there's one respect, I think, in which being a cosmologist offered a special perspective, and that's that it offers an awareness of the immense future. The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture — outside the American Bible Belt, anyway — (Laughter) but most people, even those who are familiar with evolution, aren't mindful that even more time lies ahead. The sun has been shining for four and a half billion years, but it'll be another six billion years before its fuel runs out. On that schematic picture, a sort of time-lapse picture, we're halfway. And it'll be another six billion before that happens, and any remaining life on Earth is vaporized. There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be there, experiencing the sun's demise, but any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria. The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go, here on Earth and probably far beyond. So we are still at the beginning of the emergence of complexity in our Earth and beyond. If you represent the Earth's lifetime by a single year, say from January when it was made to December, the 21st-century would be a quarter of a second in June — a tiny fraction of the year. But even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective, our century is very, very special, the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet. As I should have shown this earlier, it will not be humans who witness the end point of the sun; it will be creatures as different from us as we are from bacteria. When Einstein died in 1955, one striking tribute to his global status was this cartoon by Herblock in the Washington Post. The plaque reads, "Albert Einstein lived here." And I'd like to end with a vignette, as it were, inspired by this image. We've been familiar for 40 years with this image: the fragile beauty of land, ocean and clouds, contrasted with the sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints. But let's suppose some aliens had been watching our pale blue dot in the cosmos from afar, not just for 40 years, but for the entire 4.5 billion-year history of our Earth. What would they have seen? Over nearly all that immense time, Earth's appearance would have changed very gradually. The only abrupt worldwide change would have been major asteroid impacts or volcanic super-eruptions. Apart from those brief traumas, nothing happens suddenly. The continental landmasses drifted around. Ice cover waxed and waned. Successions of new species emerged, evolved and became extinct. But in just a tiny sliver of the Earth's history, the last one-millionth part, a few thousand years, the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture. Change has accelerated as human populations rose. Then other things happened even more abruptly. Within just 50 years — that's one hundredth of one millionth of the Earth's age — the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise, and ominously fast. The planet became an intense emitter of radio waves — the total output from all TV and cell phones and radar transmissions. And something else happened. Metallic objects — albeit very small ones, a few tons at most — escaped into orbit around the Earth. Some journeyed to the moons and planets. A race of advanced extraterrestrials watching our solar system from afar could confidently predict Earth's final doom in another six billion years. But could they have predicted this unprecedented spike less than halfway through the Earth's life? These human-induced alterations occupying overall less than a millionth of the elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed? If they continued their vigil, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? Will some spasm foreclose Earth's future? Or will the biosphere stabilize? Or will some of the metallic objects launched from the Earth spawn new oases, a post-human life elsewhere? The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein — humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth as depicted here. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Progress is not a zero-sum game

Robert Wright

{0: 'Robert Wright'}

{0: ['journalist', 'philosopher']}

{0: 'The best-selling author of "Nonzero," "The Moral Animal" and "The Evolution of God," Robert Wright draws on his wide-ranging knowledge of science, religion, psychology, history and politics to figure out what makes humanity tick -- and what makes us moral. '}

2006-02-02

2007-01-17

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'uk', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'global issues', 'war', 'collaboration', 'evolutionary psychology']

{163: 'The surprising decline in violence', 42: 'Is this our final century?', 341: 'The moral roots of liberals and conservatives', 801: 'Science can answer moral questions', 1642: 'How common threats can make common (political) ground', 216: 'The new power of collaboration'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_wright_progress_is_not_a_zero_sum_game/

Author Robert Wright explains "non-zero-sumness" -- the network of linked fortunes and cooperation that has guided our evolution to this point -- and how we can use it to help save humanity today.

I've got apparently 18 minutes to convince you that history has a direction, an arrow; that in some fundamental sense, it's good; that the arrow points to something positive. Now, when the TED people first approached me about giving this upbeat talk — (Laughter) — that was before the cartoon of Muhammad had triggered global rioting. It was before the avian flu had reached Europe. It was before Hamas had won the Palestinian election, eliciting various counter-measures by Israel. And to be honest, if I had known when I was asked to give this upbeat talk that even as I was giving the upbeat talk, the apocalypse would be unfolding — (Laughter) — I might have said, "Is it okay if I talk about something else?" But I didn't, OK. So we're here. I'll do what I can. I'll do what I can. I've got to warn you: the sense in which my worldview is upbeat has always been kind of subtle, sometimes even elusive. (Laughter) The sense in which I can be uplifting and inspiring — I mean, there's always been a kind of a certain grim dimension to the way I try to uplift, so if grim inspiration — (Laughter) — if grim inspiration is not a contradiction in terms, that is, I'm afraid, the most you can hope for. OK, today — that's if I succeed. I'll see what I can do. OK? Now, in one sense, the claim that history has a direction is not that controversial. If you're just talking about social structure, OK, clearly that's gotten more complex a little over the last 10,000 years — has reached higher and higher levels. And in fact, that's actually sustaining a long-standing trend that predates human beings, OK, that biological evolution was doing for us. Because what happened in the beginning, this stuff encases itself in a cell, then cells start hanging out together in societies. Eventually they get so close, they form multicellular organisms, then you get complex multicellular organisms; they form societies. But then at some point, one of these multicellular organisms does something completely amazing with this stuff, which is it launches a whole second kind of evolution: cultural evolution. And amazingly, that evolution sustains the trajectory that biological evolution had established toward greater complexity. By cultural evolution we mean the evolution of ideas. A lot of you have heard the term "memes." The evolution of technology, I pay a lot of attention to, so, you know, one of the first things you got was a little hand axe. Generations go by, somebody says, hey, why don't we put it on a stick? (Laughter) Just absolutely delights the little ones. Next best thing to a video game. This may not seem to impress, but technological evolution is progressive, so another 10, 20,000 years, and armaments technology takes you here. (Laughter) Impressive. And the rate of technological evolution speeds up, so a mere quarter of a century after this, you get this, OK. (Laughter) And this. (Laughter) I'm sorry — it was a cheap laugh, but I wanted to find a way to transition back to this idea of the unfolding apocalypse, and I thought that might do it. (Applause) So, what threatens to happen with this unfolding apocalypse is the collapse of global social organization. Now, first let me remind you how much work it took to get us where we are, to be on the brink of true global social organization. Originally, you had the most complex societies, the hunter-gatherer village. Stonehenge is the remnant of a chiefdom, which is what you get with the invention of agriculture: multi-village polity with centralized rule. With the invention of writing, you start getting cities. This is blurry. I kind of like that because it makes it look like a one-celled organism and reminds you how many levels organic organization has already moved through to get to this point. And then you get to, you know, you get empires. I want to stress, you know, social organization can transcend political bounds. This is the Silk Road connecting the Chinese Empire and the Roman Empire. So you had social complexity spanning the whole continent, even if no polity did similarly. Today, you've got nation states. Point is: there's obviously collaboration and organization going on beyond national bounds. This is actually just a picture of the earth at night, and I'm just putting it up because I think it's pretty. Does kind of convey the sense that this is an integrated system. Now, I explained this growth of complexity by reference to something called "non-zero sumness." Assuming that a few of you did not do the assigned reading, very quickly, the key idea is the distinction between zero-sum games, in which correlations are inverse: always a winner and a loser. Non-zero-sum games in which correlations can be positive, OK. So like in tennis, usually it's win-lose; it always adds up to zero-zero-sum. But if you're playing doubles, the person on your side of the net, they're in the same boat as you, so you're playing a non-zero-sum game with them. It's either for the better or for the worse, OK. A lot of forms of non-zero-sum behavior in the realm of economics and so on in everyday life often leads to cooperation. The argument I make is basically that, well, non-zero-sum games have always been part of life. You have them in hunter-gatherer societies, but then through technological evolution, new forms of technology arise that facilitate or encourage the playing of non-zero-sum games, involving more people over larger territory. Social structure adapts to accommodate this possibility and to harness this productive potential, so you get cities, you know, and you get all the non-zero-sum games you don't think about that are being played across the world. Like, have you ever thought when you buy a car, how many people on how many different continents contributed to the manufacture of that car? Those are people in effect you're playing a non-zero-sum game with. I mean, there are certainly plenty of them around. Now, this sounds like an intrinsically upbeat worldview in a way, because when you think of non-zero, you think win-win, you know, that's good. Well, there are a few reasons that actually it's not intrinsically upbeat. First of all, it can accommodate; it doesn't deny the existence of inequality exploitation war. But there's a more fundamental reason that it's not intrinsically upbeat, because a non-zero-sum game, all it tells you for sure is that the fortunes will be correlated for better or worse. It doesn't necessarily predict a win-win outcome. So, in a way, the question is: on what grounds am I upbeat at all about history? And the answer is, first of all, on balance I would say people have played their games to more win-win outcomes than lose-lose outcomes. On balance, I think history is a net positive in the non-zero-sum game department. And a testament to this is the thing that most amazes me, most impresses me, and most uplifts me, which is that there is a moral dimension to history; there is a moral arrow. We have seen moral progress over time. 2,500 years ago, members of one Greek city-state considered members of another Greek city-state subhuman and treated them that way. And then this moral revolution arrived, and they decided that actually, no, Greeks are human beings. It's just the Persians who aren't fully human and don't deserve to be treated very nicely. But this was progress — you know, give them credit. And now today, we've seen more progress. I think — I hope — most people here would say that all people everywhere are human beings, deserve to be treated decently, unless they do something horrendous, regardless of race or religion. And you have to read your ancient history to realize what a revolution that has been, OK. This was not a prevalent view, few thousand years ago, and I attribute it to this non-zero-sum dynamic. I think that's the reason there is as much tolerance toward nationalities, ethnicities, religions as there is today. If you asked me, you know, why am I not in favor of bombing Japan, well, I'm only half-joking when I say they built my car. We have this non-zero-sum relationship, and I think that does lead to a kind of a tolerance to the extent that you realize that someone else's welfare is positively correlated with yours — you're more likely to cut them a break. I kind of think this is a kind of a business-class morality. Unfortunately, I don't fly trans-Atlantic business class often enough to know, or any other kind of business class really, but I assume that in business class, you don't hear many expressions of, you know, bigotry about racial groups or ethnic groups, because the people who are flying trans-Atlantic business class are doing business with all these people; they're making money off all these people. And I really do think that, in that sense at least, capitalism has been a constructive force, and more fundamentally, it's a non-zero-sumness that has been a constructive force in expanding people's realm of moral awareness. I think the non-zero-sum dynamic, which is not only economic by any means — it's not always commerce — but it has driven us to the verge of a moral truth, which is the fundamental equality of everyone. It has done that. As it has moved global, moved us toward a global level of social organization, it has driven us toward moral truth. I think that's wonderful. Now, back to the unfolding apocalypse. And you may wonder, OK, that's all fine, sounds great — moral direction in history — but what about this so-called clash of civilizations? Well, first of all, I would emphasize that it fits into the non-zero-sum framework, OK. If you look at the relationship between the so-called Muslim world and Western world — two terms I don't like, but can't really avoid; in such a short span of time, they're efficient if nothing else — it is non-zero-sum. And by that I mean, if people in the Muslim world get more hateful, more resentful, less happy with their place in the world, it'll be bad for the West. If they get more happy, it'll be good for the West. So that is a non-zero-sum dynamic. And I would say the non-zero-sum dynamic is only going to grow more intense over time because of technological trends, but more intense in a kind of negative way. It's the downside correlation of their fortunes that will become more and more possible. And one reason is because of something I call the "growing lethality of hatred." More and more, it's possible for grassroots hatred abroad to manifest itself in the form of organized violence on American soil. And that's pretty new, and I think it's probably going to get a lot worse — this capacity — because of trends in information technology, in technologies that can be used for purposes of munitions like biotechnology and nanotechnology. We may be hearing more about that today. And there's something I worry about especially, which is that this dynamic will lead to a kind of a feedback cycle that puts us on a slippery slope. What I have in mind is: terrorism happens here; we overreact to it. That, you know, we're not sufficiently surgical in our retaliation leads to more hatred abroad, more terrorism. We overreact because being human, we feel like retaliating, and it gets worse and worse and worse. You could call this the positive feedback of negative vibes, but I think in something so spooky, we really shouldn't have the word positive there at all, even in a technical sense. So let's call it the death spiral of negativity. (Laughter) I assure you if it happens, at the end, both the West and the Muslim world will have suffered. So, what do we do? Well, first of all, we can do a lot more with arms control, the international regulation of dangerous technologies. I have a whole global governance sermon that I will spare you right now, because I don't think that's going to be enough anyway, although it's essential. I think we're going to have to have a major round of moral progress in the world. I think you're just going to have to see less hatred among groups, less bigotry, and, you know, racial groups, religious groups, whatever. I've got to admit I feel silly saying that. It sounds so kind of Pollyannaish. I feel like Rodney King, you know, saying, why can't we all just get along? But hey, I don't really see any alternative, given the way I read the situation. There's going to have to be moral progress. There's going to have to be a lessening of the amount of hatred in the world, given how dangerous it's becoming. In my defense, I'd say, as naive as this may sound, it's ultimately grounded in cynicism. That is to say — (Laughter) — thank you, thank you. That is to say, remember: my whole view of morality is that it boils down to self-interest. It's when people's fortunes are correlated. It's when your welfare conduces to mine, that I decide, oh yeah, I'm all in favor of your welfare. That's what's responsible for this growth of this moral progress so far, and I'm saying we once again have a correlation of fortunes, and if people respond to it intelligently, we will see the development of tolerance and so on — the norms that we need, you know. We will see the further evolution of this kind of business-class morality. So, these two things, you know, if they get people's attention and drive home the positive correlation and people do what's in their self-interests, which is further the moral evolution, then they could actually have a constructive effect. And that's why I lump growing lethality of hatred and death spiral of negativity under the general rubric, reasons to be cheerful. (Laughter) Doing the best I can, OK. (Laughter) I never called myself Mr. Uplift. I'm just doing what I can here. (Laughter) Now, launching a moral revolution has got to be hard, right? I mean, what do you do? And I think the answer is a lot of different people are going to have to do a lot of different things. We all start where we are. Speaking as an American who has children whose security 10, 20, 30 years down the road I worry about — what I personally want to start out doing is figuring out why so many people around the world hate us, OK. I think that's a worthy research project myself. I also like it because it's an intrinsically kind of morally redeeming exercise. Because to understand why somebody in a very different culture does something — somebody you're kind of viewing as alien, who's doing things you consider strange in a culture you consider strange — to really understand why they do the things they do is a morally redeeming accomplishment, because you've got to relate their experience to yours. To really understand it, you've got to say, "Oh, I get it. So when they feel resentful, it's kind of like the way I feel resentful when this happens, and for somewhat the same reasons." That's true understanding. And I think that is an expansion of your moral compass when you manage to do that. It's especially hard to do when people hate you, OK, because you don't really, in a sense, want to completely understand why people hate you. I mean, you want to hear the reason, but you don't want to be able to relate to it. You don't want it to make sense, right? (Laughter) You don't want to say, "Well, yeah, I can kind of understand how a human being in those circumstances would hate the country I live in." That's not a pleasant thing, but I think it's something that we're going to have to get used to and work on. Now, I want to stress that to understand, you know — there are people who don't like this whole business of understanding the grassroots, the root causes of things; they don't want to know why people hate us. I want to understand it. The reason you're trying to understand why they hate us, is to get them to quit hating us. The idea when you go through this moral exercise of really coming to appreciate their humanity and better understand them, is part of an effort to get them to appreciate your humanity in the long run. I think it's the first step toward that. That's the long-term goal. There are people who worry about this, and in fact, I, myself, apparently, was denounced on national TV a couple of nights ago because of an op-ed I'd written. It was kind of along these lines, and the allegation was that I have, quote, "affection for terrorists." Now, the good news is that the person who said it was Ann Coulter. (Laughter) (Applause) I mean, if you've got to have an enemy, do make it Ann Coulter. (Laughter) But it's not a crazy concern, OK, because understanding behavior can lead to a kind of empathy, and it can make it a little harder to deliver tough love, and so on. But I think we're a lot closer to erring on the side of not comprehending the situation clearly enough, than in comprehending it so clearly that we just can't, you know, get the army out to kill terrorists. So I'm not really worried about it. So — (Laughter) — I mean, we're going to have to work on a lot of fronts, but if we succeed — if we succeed — then once again, non-zero-sumness and the recognition of non-zero-sum dynamics will have forced us to a higher moral level. And a kind of saving higher moral level, something that kind of literally saves the world. If you look at the word "salvation" in the Bible — the Christian usage that we're familiar with — saving souls, that people go to heaven — that's actually a latecomer. The original meaning of the word "salvation" in the Bible is about saving the social system. "Yahweh is our Savior" means "He has saved the nation of Israel," which at the time, was a pretty high-level social organization. Now, social organization has reached the global level, and I guess, if there's good news I can say I'm bringing you, it's just that all the salvation of the world requires is the intelligent pursuit of self-interests in a disciplined and careful way. It's going to be hard. I say we give it a shot anyway because we've just come too far to screw it up now. Thanks. (Applause)

The era of open innovation

Charles Leadbeater

{0: 'Charles Leadbeater'}

{0: ['innovation consultant']}

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

2005-07-14

2007-01-31

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'collaboration', 'culture', 'economics', 'innovation', 'invention', 'media', 'open-source', 'product design']

{216: 'The new power of collaboration', 247: 'The new open-source economics', 274: 'Institutions vs. collaboration', 1492: 'Four principles for the open world', 1855: 'Government -- investor, risk-taker, innovator', 255: 'The thinking behind 50x15'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_leadbeater_the_era_of_open_innovation/

In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't.

What I'm going to do, in the spirit of collaborative creativity, is simply repeat many of the points that the three people before me have already made, but do them — this is called "creative collaboration;" it's actually called "borrowing" — but do it through a particular perspective, and that is to ask about the role of users and consumers in this emerging world of collaborative creativity that Jimmy and others have talked about. Let me just ask you, to start with, this simple question: who invented the mountain bike? Because traditional economic theory would say, well, the mountain bike was probably invented by some big bike corporation that had a big R&D lab where they were thinking up new projects, and it came out of there. It didn't come from there. Another answer might be, well, it came from a sort of lone genius working in his garage, who, working away on different kinds of bikes, comes up with a bike out of thin air. It didn't come from there. The mountain bike came from users, came from young users, particularly a group in Northern California, who were frustrated with traditional racing bikes, which were those sort of bikes that Eddy Merckx rode, or your big brother, and they're very glamorous. But also frustrated with the bikes that your dad rode, which sort of had big handlebars like that, and they were too heavy. So, they got the frames from these big bikes, put them together with the gears from the racing bikes, got the brakes from motorcycles, and sort of mixed and matched various ingredients. And for the first, I don't know, three to five years of their life, mountain bikes were known as "clunkers." And they were just made in a community of bikers, mainly in Northern California. And then one of these companies that was importing parts for the clunkers decided to set up in business, start selling them to other people, and gradually another company emerged out of that, Marin, and it probably was, I don't know, 10, maybe even 15, years, before the big bike companies realized there was a market. Thirty years later, mountain bike sales and mountain bike equipment account for 65 percent of bike sales in America. That's 58 billion dollars. This is a category entirely created by consumers that would not have been created by the mainstream bike market because they couldn't see the need, the opportunity; they didn't have the incentive to innovate. The one thing I think I disagree with about Yochai's presentation is when he said the Internet causes this distributive capacity for innovation to come alive. It's when the Internet combines with these kinds of passionate pro-am consumers — who are knowledgeable; they've got the incentive to innovate; they've got the tools; they want to — that you get this kind of explosion of creative collaboration. And out of that, you get the need for the kind of things that Jimmy was talking about, which is our new kinds of organization, or a better way to put it: how do we organize ourselves without organizations? That's now possible; you don't need an organization to be organized, to achieve large and complex tasks, like innovating new software programs. So this is a huge challenge to the way we think creativity comes about. The traditional view, still enshrined in much of the way that we think about creativity — in organizations, in government — is that creativity is about special people: wear baseball caps the wrong way round, come to conferences like this, in special places, elite universities, R&D labs in the forests, water, maybe special rooms in companies painted funny colors, you know, bean bags, maybe the odd table-football table. Special people, special places, think up special ideas, then you have a pipeline that takes the ideas down to the waiting consumers, who are passive. They can say "yes" or "no" to the invention. That's the idea of creativity. What's the policy recommendation out of that if you're in government, or you're running a large company? More special people, more special places. Build creative clusters in cities; create more R&D parks, so on and so forth. Expand the pipeline down to the consumers. Well this view, I think, is increasingly wrong. I think it's always been wrong, because I think always creativity has been highly collaborative, and it's probably been largely interactive. But it's increasingly wrong, and one of the reasons it's wrong is that the ideas are flowing back up the pipeline. The ideas are coming back from the consumers, and they're often ahead of the producers. Why is that? Well, one issue is that radical innovation, when you've got ideas that affect a large number of technologies or people, have a great deal of uncertainty attached to them. The payoffs to innovation are greatest where the uncertainty is highest. And when you get a radical innovation, it's often very uncertain how it can be applied. The whole history of telephony is a story of dealing with that uncertainty. The very first landline telephones, the inventors thought that they would be used for people to listen in to live performances from West End theaters. When the mobile telephone companies invented SMS, they had no idea what it was for; it was only when that technology got into the hands of teenage users that they invented the use. So the more radical the innovation, the more the uncertainty, the more you need innovation in use to work out what a technology is for. All of our patents, our entire approach to patents and invention, is based on the idea that the inventor knows what the invention is for; we can say what it's for. More and more, the inventors of things will not be able to say that in advance. It will be worked out in use, in collaboration with users. We like to think that invention is a sort of moment of creation: there is a moment of birth when someone comes up with an idea. The truth is that most creativity is cumulative and collaborative; like Wikipedia, it develops over a long period of time. The second reason why users are more and more important is that they are the source of big, disruptive innovations. If you want to find the big new ideas, it's often difficult to find them in mainstream markets, in big organizations. And just look inside large organizations and you'll see why that is so. So, you're in a big corporation. You're obviously keen to go up the corporate ladder. Do you go into your board and say, "Look, I've got a fantastic idea for an embryonic product in a marginal market, with consumers we've never dealt with before, and I'm not sure it's going to have a big payoff, but it could be really, really big in the future?" No, what you do, is you go in and you say, "I've got a fantastic idea for an incremental innovation to an existing product we sell through existing channels to existing users, and I can guarantee you get this much return out of it over the next three years." Big corporations have an in-built tendency to reinforce past success. They've got so much sunk in it that it's very difficult for them to spot emerging new markets. Emerging new markets, then, are the breeding grounds for passionate users. Best example: who in the music industry, 30 years ago, would have said, "Yes, let's invent a musical form which is all about dispossessed black men in ghettos expressing their frustration with the world through a form of music that many people find initially quite difficult to listen to. That sounds like a winner; we'll go with it." (Laughter). So what happens? Rap music is created by the users. They do it on their own tapes, with their own recording equipment; they distribute it themselves. 30 years later, rap music is the dominant musical form of popular culture — would never have come from the big companies. Had to start — this is the third point — with these pro-ams. This is the phrase that I've used in some stuff which I've done with a think tank in London called Demos, where we've been looking at these people who are amateurs — i.e., they do it for the love of it — but they want to do it to very high standards. And across a whole range of fields — from software, astronomy, natural sciences, vast areas of leisure and culture like kite-surfing, so on and so forth — you find people who want to do things because they love it, but they want to do these things to very high standards. They work at their leisure, if you like. They take their leisure very seriously: they acquire skills; they invest time; they use technology that's getting cheaper — it's not just the Internet: cameras, design technology, leisure technology, surfboards, so on and so forth. Largely through globalization, a lot of this equipment has got a lot cheaper. More knowledgeable consumers, more educated, more able to connect with one another, more able to do things together. Consumption, in that sense, is an expression of their productive potential. Why, we found, people were interested in this, is that at work they don't feel very expressed. They don't feel as if they're doing something that really matters to them, so they pick up these kinds of activities. This has huge organizational implications for very large areas of life. Take astronomy as an example, which Yochai has already mentioned. Twenty years ago, 30 years ago, only big professional astronomers with very big telescopes could see far into space. And there's a big telescope in Northern England called Jodrell Bank, and when I was a kid, it was amazing, because the moon shots would take off, and this thing would move on rails. And it was huge — it was absolutely enormous. Now, six amateur astronomers, working with the Internet, with Dobsonian digital telescopes — which are pretty much open source — with some light sensors developed over the last 10 years, the Internet — they can do what Jodrell Bank could only do 30 years ago. So here in astronomy, you have this vast explosion of new productive resources. The users can be producers. What does this mean, then, for our organizational landscape? Well, just imagine a world, for the moment, divided into two camps. Over here, you've got the old, traditional corporate model: special people, special places; patent it, push it down the pipeline to largely waiting, passive consumers. Over here, let's imagine we've got Wikipedia, Linux, and beyond — open source. This is open; this is closed. This is new; this is traditional. Well, the first thing you can say, I think with certainty, is what Yochai has said already — is there is a great big struggle between those two organizational forms. These people over there will do everything they can to stop these kinds of organizations succeeding, because they're threatened by them. And so the debates about copyright, digital rights, so on and so forth — these are all about trying to stifle, in my view, these kinds of organizations. What we're seeing is a complete corruption of the idea of patents and copyright. Meant to be a way to incentivize invention, meant to be a way to orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge, they are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place. Let me just give you two examples. The first is: imagine yourself going to a venture capitalist and saying, "I've got a fantastic idea. I've invented this brilliant new program that is much, much better than Microsoft Outlook." Which venture capitalist in their right mind is going to give you any money to set up a venture competing with Microsoft, with Microsoft Outlook? No one. That is why the competition with Microsoft is bound to come — will only come — from an open-source kind of project. So, there is a huge competitive argument about sustaining the capacity for open-source and consumer-driven innovation, because it's one of the greatest competitive levers against monopoly. There'll be huge professional arguments as well. Because the professionals, over here in these closed organizations — they might be academics; they might be programmers; they might be doctors; they might be journalists — my former profession — say, "No, no — you can't trust these people over here." When I started in journalism — Financial Times, 20 years ago — it was very, very exciting to see someone reading the newspaper. And you'd kind of look over their shoulder on the Tube to see if they were reading your article. Usually they were reading the share prices, and the bit of the paper with your article on was on the floor, or something like that, and you know, "For heaven's sake, what are they doing! They're not reading my brilliant article!" And we allowed users, readers, two places where they could contribute to the paper: the letters page, where they could write a letter in, and we would condescend to them, cut it in half, and print it three days later. Or the op-ed page, where if they knew the editor — had been to school with him, slept with his wife — they could write an article for the op-ed page. Those were the two places. Shock, horror: now, the readers want to be writers and publishers. That's not their role; they're supposed to read what we write. But they don't want to be journalists. The journalists think that the bloggers want to be journalists; they don't want to be journalists; they just want to have a voice. They want to, as Jimmy said, they want to have a dialogue, a conversation. They want to be part of that flow of information. What's happening there is that the whole domain of creativity is expanding. So, there's going to be a tremendous struggle. But, also, there's going to be tremendous movement from the open to the closed. What you'll see, I think, is two things that are critical, and these, I think, are two challenges for the open movement. The first is: can we really survive on volunteers? If this is so critical, do we not need it funded, organized, supported in much more structured ways? I think the idea of creating the Red Cross for information and knowledge is a fantastic idea, but can we really organize that, just on volunteers? What kind of changes do we need in public policy and funding to make that possible? What's the role of the BBC, for instance, in that world? What should be the role of public policy? And finally, what I think you will see is the intelligent, closed organizations moving increasingly in the open direction. So it's not going to be a contest between two camps, but, in between them, you'll find all sorts of interesting places that people will occupy. New organizational models coming about, mixing closed and open in tricky ways. It won't be so clear-cut; it won't be Microsoft versus Linux — there'll be all sorts of things in between. And those organizational models, it turns out, are incredibly powerful, and the people who can understand them will be very, very successful. Let me just give you one final example of what that means. I was in Shanghai, in an office block built on what was a rice paddy five years ago — one of the 2,500 skyscrapers they've built in Shanghai in the last 10 years. And I was having dinner with this guy called Timothy Chan. Timothy Chan set up an Internet business in 2000. Didn't go into the Internet, kept his money, decided to go into computer games. He runs a company called Shanda, which is the largest computer games company in China. Nine thousand servers all over China, has 250 million subscribers. At any one time, there are four million people playing one of his games. How many people does he employ to service that population? 500 people. Well, how can he service 250 million people from 500 employees? Because basically, he doesn't service them. He gives them a platform; he gives them some rules; he gives them the tools and then he kind of orchestrates the conversation; he orchestrates the action. But actually, a lot of the content is created by the users themselves. And it creates a kind of stickiness between the community and the company which is really, really powerful. The best measure of that: so you go into one of his games, you create a character that you develop in the course of the game. If, for some reason, your credit card bounces, or there's some other problem, you lose your character. You've got two options. One option: you can create a new character, right from scratch, but with none of the history of your player. That costs about 100 dollars. Or you can get on a plane, fly to Shanghai, queue up outside Shanda's offices — cost probably 600, 700 dollars — and reclaim your character, get your history back. Every morning, there are 600 people queuing outside their offices to reclaim these characters. (Laughter) So this is about companies built on communities, that provide communities with tools, resources, platforms in which they can share. He's not open source, but it's very, very powerful. So here is one of the challenges, I think, for people like me, who do a lot of work with government. If you're a games company, and you've got a million players in your game, you only need one percent of them to be co-developers, contributing ideas, and you've got a development workforce of 10,000 people. Imagine you could take all the children in education in Britain, and one percent of them were co-developers of education. What would that do to the resources available to the education system? Or if you got one percent of the patients in the NHS to, in some sense, be co-producers of health. The reason why — despite all the efforts to cut it down, to constrain it, to hold it back — why these open models will still start emerging with tremendous force, is that they multiply our productive resources. And one of the reasons they do that is that they turn users into producers, consumers into designers. Thank you very much.

How the "ghost map" helped end a killer disease

Steven Johnson

{0: 'Steven Johnson'}

{0: ['writer']}

{0: 'Steven Berlin Johnson examines the intersection of science, technology and personal experience.'}

2006-11-30

2007-01-31

TEDSalon 2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sl', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['cities', 'culture', 'design', 'health', 'history', 'map', 'science', 'urban planning', 'disease']

{58: 'My wish: Help me stop pandemics', 2150: "Social maps that reveal a city's intersections — and separations", 12346: 'The genius of the London Tube Map', 1582: 'Making sense of maps', 1865: 'How an obese town lost a million pounds', 1840: "Let's treat violence like a contagious disease"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_how_the_ghost_map_helped_end_a_killer_disease/

Author Steven Johnson takes us on a 10-minute tour of The Ghost Map, his book about a cholera outbreak in 1854 London and the impact it had on science, cities and modern society.

If you haven't ordered yet, I generally find the rigatoni with the spicy tomato sauce goes best with diseases of the small intestine. (Laughter) So, sorry — it just feels like I should be doing stand-up up here because of the setting. No, what I want to do is take you back to 1854 in London for the next few minutes, and tell the story — in brief — of this outbreak, which in many ways, I think, helped create the world that we live in today, and particularly the kind of city that we live in today. This period in 1854, in the middle part of the 19th century, in London's history, is incredibly interesting for a number of reasons. But I think the most important one is that London was this city of 2.5 million people, and it was the largest city on the face of the planet at that point. But it was also the largest city that had ever been built. And so the Victorians were trying to live through and simultaneously invent a whole new scale of living: this scale of living that we, you know, now call "metropolitan living." And it was in many ways, at this point in the mid-1850s, a complete disaster. They were basically a city living with a modern kind of industrial metropolis with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. So people, for instance, just to gross you out for a second, had cesspools of human waste in their basement. Like, a foot to two feet deep. And they would just kind of throw the buckets down there and hope that it would somehow go away, and of course it never really would go away. And all of this stuff, basically, had accumulated to the point where the city was incredibly offensive to just walk around in. It was an amazingly smelly city. Not just because of the cesspools, but also the sheer number of livestock in the city would shock people. Not just the horses, but people had cows in their attics that they would use for milk, that they would hoist up there and keep them in the attic until literally their milk ran out and they died, and then they would drag them off to the bone boilers down the street. So, you would just walk around London at this point and just be overwhelmed with this stench. And what ended up happening is that an entire emerging public health system became convinced that it was the smell that was killing everybody, that was creating these diseases that would wipe through the city every three or four years. And cholera was really the great killer of this period. It arrived in London in 1832, and every four or five years another epidemic would take 10,000, 20,000 people in London and throughout the U.K. And so the authorities became convinced that this smell was this problem. We had to get rid of the smell. And so, in fact, they concocted a couple of early, you know, founding public-health interventions in the system of the city, one of which was called the "Nuisances Act," which they got everybody as far as they could to empty out their cesspools and just pour all that waste into the river. Because if we get it out of the streets, it'll smell much better, and — oh right, we drink from the river. So what ended up happening, actually, is they ended up increasing the outbreaks of cholera because, as we now know, cholera is actually in the water. It's a waterborne disease, not something that's in the air. It's not something you smell or inhale; it's something you ingest. And so one of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing. So this was the state of London in 1854, and in the middle of all this carnage and offensive conditions, and in the midst of all this scientific confusion about what was actually killing people, it was a very talented classic 19th century multi-disciplinarian named John Snow, who was a local doctor in Soho in London, who had been arguing for about four or five years that cholera was, in fact, a waterborne disease, and had basically convinced nobody of this. The public health authorities had largely ignored what he had to say. And he'd made the case in a number of papers and done a number of studies, but nothing had really stuck. And part of — what's so interesting about this story to me is that in some ways, it's a great case study in how cultural change happens, how a good idea eventually comes to win out over much worse ideas. And Snow labored for a long time with this great insight that everybody ignored. And then on one day, August 28th of 1854, a young child, a five-month-old girl whose first name we don't know, we know her only as Baby Lewis, somehow contracted cholera, came down with cholera at 40 Broad Street. You can't really see it in this map, but this is the map that becomes the central focus in the second half of my book. It's in the middle of Soho, in this working class neighborhood, this little girl becomes sick and it turns out that the cesspool, that they still continue to have, despite the Nuisances Act, bordered on an extremely popular water pump, local watering hole that was well known for the best water in all of Soho, that all the residents from Soho and the surrounding neighborhoods would go to. And so this little girl inadvertently ended up contaminating the water in this popular pump, and one of the most terrifying outbreaks in the history of England erupted about two or three days later. Literally, 10 percent of the neighborhood died in seven days, and much more would have died if people hadn't fled after the initial outbreak kicked in. So it was this incredibly terrifying event. You had these scenes of entire families dying over the course of 48 hours of cholera, alone in their one-room apartments, in their little flats. Just an extraordinary, terrifying scene. Snow lived near there, heard about the outbreak, and in this amazing act of courage went directly into the belly of the beast because he thought an outbreak that concentrated could actually potentially end up convincing people that, in fact, the real menace of cholera was in the water supply and not in the air. He suspected an outbreak that concentrated would probably involve a single point source. One single thing that everybody was going to because it didn't have the traditional slower path of infections that you might expect. And so he went right in there and started interviewing people. He eventually enlisted the help of this amazing other figure, who's kind of the other protagonist of the book — this guy, Henry Whitehead, who was a local minister, who was not at all a man of science, but was incredibly socially connected; he knew everybody in the neighborhood. And he managed to track down, Whitehead did, many of the cases of people who had drunk water from the pump, or who hadn't drunk water from the pump. And eventually Snow made a map of the outbreak. He found increasingly that people who drank from the pump were getting sick. People who hadn't drunk from the pump were not getting sick. And he thought about representing that as a kind of a table of statistics of people living in different neighborhoods, people who hadn't, you know, percentages of people who hadn't, but eventually he hit upon the idea that what he needed was something that you could see. Something that would take in a sense a higher-level view of all this activity that had been happening in the neighborhood. And so he created this map, which basically ended up representing all the deaths in the neighborhoods as black bars at each address. And you can see in this map, the pump right at the center of it and you can see that one of the residences down the way had about 15 people dead. And the map is actually a little bit bigger. As you get further and further away from the pump, the deaths begin to grow less and less frequent. And so you can see this something poisonous emanating out of this pump that you could see in a glance. And so, with the help of this map, and with the help of more evangelizing that he did over the next few years and that Whitehead did, eventually, actually, the authorities slowly started to come around. It took much longer than sometimes we like to think in this story, but by 1866, when the next big cholera outbreak came to London, the authorities had been convinced — in part because of this story, in part because of this map — that in fact the water was the problem. And they had already started building the sewers in London, and they immediately went to this outbreak and they told everybody to start boiling their water. And that was the last time that London has seen a cholera outbreak since. So, part of this story, I think — well, it's a terrifying story, it's a very dark story and it's a story that continues on in many of the developing cities of the world. It's also a story really that is fundamentally optimistic, which is to say that it's possible to solve these problems if we listen to reason, if we listen to the kind of wisdom of these kinds of maps, if we listen to people like Snow and Whitehead, if we listen to the locals who understand what's going on in these kinds of situations. And what it ended up doing is making the idea of large-scale metropolitan living a sustainable one. When people were looking at 10 percent of their neighborhoods dying in the space of seven days, there was a widespread consensus that this couldn't go on, that people weren't meant to live in cities of 2.5 million people. But because of what Snow did, because of this map, because of the whole series of reforms that happened in the wake of this map, we now take for granted that cities have 10 million people, cities like this one are in fact sustainable things. We don't worry that New York City is going to collapse in on itself quite the way that, you know, Rome did, and be 10 percent of its size in 100 years or 200 years. And so that in a way is the ultimate legacy of this map. It's a map of deaths that ended up creating a whole new way of life, the life that we're enjoying here today. Thank you very much.

Four American characters

Anna Deavere Smith

{0: 'Anna Deavere Smith'}

{0: ['actor', 'playwright', 'social critic']}

{0: "Anna Deavere Smith's ground-breaking solo shows blur the lines between theater and journalism, using text from real-life encounters to create gripping portraits."}

2005-02-25

2007-02-09

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['MacArthur grant', 'United States', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'history', 'interview', 'performance', 'performance art', 'race', 'sports', 'storytelling', 'theater']

{86: 'Letting go of God', 26: 'If I controlled the Internet', 374: 'Aliens, love -- where are they?', 1378: 'We need to talk about an injustice', 347: 'Once upon a time, my mother ...', 527: 'A one-woman global village'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/anna_deavere_smith_four_american_characters/

Writer and actor Anna Deavere Smith gives life to author Studs Terkel, convict Paulette Jenkins, a Korean shopkeeper and a bull rider, excerpts from her solo show "On the Road: A Search for American Character."

So my grandfather told me when I was a little girl, "If you say a word often enough, it becomes you." And having grown up in a segregated city, Baltimore, Maryland, I sort of use that idea to go around America with a tape recorder — thank God for technology — to interview people, thinking that if I walked in their words — which is also why I don't wear shoes when I perform — if I walked in their words, that I could sort of absorb America. I was also inspired by Walt Whitman, who wanted to absorb America and have it absorb him. So these four characters are going to be from that work that I've been doing for many years now, and well over, I don't know, a couple of thousand people I've interviewed. Anybody out here old enough to know Studs Terkel, that old radio man? So I thought he would be the perfect person to go to to ask about a defining moment in American history. You know, he was "born in 1912, the year the Titanic sank, greatest ship every built. Hits the tip of an iceberg, and bam, it went down. It went down and I came up. Wow, some century." (Laughter) So this is his answer about a defining moment in American history. "Defining moment in American history, I don't think there's one; you can't say Hiroshima, that's a big one — I can't think of any one moment I would say is a defining moment. The gradual slippage — 'slippage' is the word used by the people in Watergate, moral slippage — it's a gradual kind of thing, combination of things. You see, we also have the technology. I say, less and less the human touch. "Oh, let me kind of tell you a funny little play bit. The Atlanta airport is a modern airport, and they should leave the gate there. These trains that take you out to a concourse and on to a destination. And these trains are smooth, and they're quiet and they're efficient. And there's a voice on the train, you know the voice was a human voice. You see in the old days we had robots, robots imitated humans. Now we have humans imitating robots. So we got this voice on this train: Concourse One: Omaha, Lincoln. Concourse Two: Dallas, Fort Worth. Same voice. Just as a train is about to go, a young couple rush in and they're just about to close the pneumatic doors. And that voice, without losing a beat, says, 'Because of late entry, we're delayed 30 seconds.' Just then, everybody's looking at this couple with hateful eyes and the couple's going like this, you know, shrinking. Well, I'd happened to have had a couple of drinks before boarding — I do that to steel my nerves — and so I imitate a train call, holding my hand on my — 'George Orwell, your time has come,' you see. Well, some of you are laughing. Everybody laughs when I say that, but not on this train. Silence. And so suddenly they're looking at me. So here I am with the couple, the three of us shrinking at the foot of Calvary about to be up, you know. "Just then I see a baby, a little baby in the lap of a mother. I know it's Hispanic because she's speaking Spanish to her companion. So I'm going to talk to the baby. So I say to the baby, holding my hand over my mouth because my breath must be 100 proof, I say to the baby, 'Sir or Madam, what is your considered opinion of the human species?' And the baby looks, you know, the way babies look at you clearly, starts laughing, starts busting out with this crazy little laugh. I say, 'Thank God for a human reaction, we haven't lost yet.' "But you see, the human touch, you see, it's disappearing. You know, you see, you've got to question the official truth. You know the thing that was so great about Mark Twain — you know we honor Mark Twain, but we don't read him. We read 'Huck Finn,' of course, we read 'Huck Finn' of course. I mean, Huck, of course, was tremendous. Remember that great scene on the raft, remember what Huck did? You see, here's Huck; he's an illiterate kid; he's had no schooling, but there's something in him. And the official truth, the truth was, the law was, that a black man was a property, was a thing, you see. And Huck gets on the raft with a property named Jim, a slave, see. And he hears that Jim is going to go and take his wife and kids and steal them from the woman who owns them, and Huck says, 'Ooh, oh my God, ooh, ooh — that woman, that woman never did anybody any harm. Ooh, he's going to steal; he's going to steal; he's going to do a terrible thing.' Just then, two slavers caught up, guys chasing slaves, looking for Jim. 'Anybody up on that raft with you?' Huck says, 'Yeah.' 'Is he black or white?' 'White.' And they go off. And Huck said, 'Oh my God, oh my God, I lied, I lied, ooh, I did a terrible thing, did a terrible thing — why do I feel so good?' "But it's the goodness of Huck, that stuff that Huck's been made of, you see, all been buried; it's all been buried. So the human touch, you see, it's disappearing. So you ask about a defining moment — ain't no defining moment in American history for me. It's an accretion of moments that add up to where we are now, where trivia becomes news. And more and more, less and less awareness of the pain of the other. Huh. You know, I don't know if you could use this or not, but I was quoting Wright Morris, a writer from Nebraska, who says, 'We're more and more into communications and less and less into communication.' Okay, kids, I got to scram, got to go see my cardiologist." And that's Studs Terkel. (Applause) So, talk about risk taking. I'm going to do somebody that nobody likes. You know, most actors want to do characters that are likeable — well, not always, but the notion, especially at a conference like this, I like to inspire people. But since this was called "risk taking," I'm doing somebody who I never do, because she's so unlikeable that one person actually came backstage and told me to take her out of the show she was in. And I'm doing her because I think we think of risk, at a conference like this, as a good thing. But there are certain other connotations to the word "risk," and the same thing about the word "nature." What is nature? Maxine Greene, who's a wonderful philosopher who's as old as Studs, and was the head of a philosophy — great, big philosophy kind of an organization — I went to her and asked her what are the two things that she doesn't know, that she still wants to know. And she said, "Well, personally, I still feel like I have to curtsey when I see the president of my university. And I still feel as though I've got to get coffee for my male colleagues, even though I've outlived most of them." And she said, "And then intellectually, I don't know enough about the negative imagination. And September 11th certainly taught us that that's a whole area we don't investigate." So this piece is about a negative imagination. It raises questions about what nature is, what Mother Nature is, and about what a risk can be. And I got this in the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women. Everything I do is word for word off a tape. And I title things because I think people speak in organic poems, and this is called "A Mirror to Her Mouth." And this is an inmate named Paulette Jenkins. "I began to learn how to cover it up, because I didn't want nobody to know that this was happening in my home. I want everybody to think we were a normal family. I mean we had all the materialistic things, but that didn't make my children pain any less; that didn't make their fears subside. I ran out of excuses about how we got black eyes and busted lips and bruises. I didn't had no more excuses. And he beat me too. But that didn't change the fact that it was a nightmare for my family; it was a nightmare. And I failed them dramatically, because I allowed it to go on and on and on. "But the night that Myesha got killed — and the intensity just grew and grew and grew, until one night we came home from getting drugs, and he got angry with Myesha, and he started beating her, and he put her in a bathtub. Oh, he would use a belt. He had a belt because he had this warped perverted thing that Myesha was having sex with her little brother and they was fondling each other — that would be his reason. I'm just talking about the particular night that she died. And so he put her in the bathtub, and I was in the bedroom with the baby. "And four months before this happened, four months before Myesha died, I thought I could really fix this man. So I had a baby by him — insane — thinking that if I gave him his own kid, he would leave mine alone. And it didn't work, didn't work. And I ended up with three children, Houston, Myesha and Dominic, who was four months old when I came to jail. "And I was in the bedroom. Like I said, he had her in the bathroom and he — he — every time he hit her, she would fall. And she would hit her head on the tub. It happened continuously, repeatedly. I could hear it, but I dared not to move. I didn't move. I didn't even go and see what was happening. I just sat there and listened. And then he put her in the hallway. He told her, just set there. And so she set there for about four or five hours. And then he told her, get up. And when she got up, she says she couldn't see. Her face was bruised. She had a black eye. All around her head was just swollen; her head was about two sizes of its own size. I told him, 'Let her go to sleep.' He let her go to sleep. "The next morning she was dead. He went in to check on her for school, and he got very excited. He says, 'She won't breathe.' I knew immediately that she was dead. I didn't even want to accept the fact that she was dead, so I went in and I put a mirror to her mouth — there was no thing, nothing, coming out of her mouth. He said, he said, he said, 'We can't, we can't let nobody find out about this.' He say, 'You've got to help me.' I agree. I agree. "I mean, I've been keeping a secret for years and years and years, so it just seemed like second hand to me, just to keep on keeping it a secret. So we went to the mall and we told a police that we had, like, lost her, that she was missing. We told a security guard that she was missing, though she wasn't missing. And we told the security guard what we had put on her and we went home and we dressed her in exactly the same thing that we had told the security guard that we had put on her. "And then we got the baby and my other child, and we drove out to, like, I-95. I was so petrified and so numb, all I could look was in the rear-view mirror. And he just laid her right on the shoulder of the highway. My own child, I let that happen to." So that's an investigation of the negative imagination. (Applause) When I started this project called "On the Road: A Search For an American Character" with my tape recorder, I thought that I was going to go around America and find it in all its aspects — bull riders, cowboys, pig farmers, drum majorettes — but I sort of got tripped on race relations, because my first big show was a show about a race riot. And so I went to both — two race riots, one of which was the Los Angeles riot. And this next piece is from that. Because this is what I would say I've learned the most about race relations, from this piece. It's a kind of an aria, I would say, and in many tapes that I have. Everybody knows that the Los Angeles riots happened because four cops beat up a black man named Rodney King. It was captured on videotape — technology — and it was played all over the world. Everybody thought the four cops would go to jail. They did not, so there were riots. And what a lot of people forget, is there was a second trial, ordered by George Bush, Sr. And that trial came back with two cops going to jail and two cops declared innocent. I was at that trial. And I mean, the people just danced in the streets because they were afraid there was going to be another riot. Explosion of joy that this verdict had come back this way. So there was a community that didn't — the Korean-Americans, whose stores had been burned to the ground. And so this woman, Mrs. Young-Soon Han, I suppose will have taught me the most that I have learned about race. And she asks also a question that Studs talks about: this notion of the "official truth," to question the "official truth." So what she's questioning here, she's taking a chance and questioning what justice is in society. And this is called, "Swallowing the Bitterness." "I used to believe America was the best. I watched in Korea many luxurious Hollywood lifestyle movie. I never saw any poor man, any black. Until 1992, I used to believe America was the best — I still do; I don't deny that because I am a victim. But at the end of '92, when we were in such turmoil, and having all the financial problems, and all the mental problems, I began to really realize that Koreans are completely left out of this society and we are nothing. Why? Why do we have to be left out? We didn't qualify for medical treatment, no food stamp, no GR, no welfare, anything. Many African-Americans who never work got minimum amount of money to survive. We didn't get any because we have a car and a house. And we are high taxpayer. Where do I find justice? "OK. OK? OK. OK. Many African-Americans probably think that they won by the trial. I was sitting here watching them the morning after the verdict, and all the day they were having a party, they celebrated, all of South Central, all the churches. And they say, 'Well, finally justice has been done in this society.' Well, what about victims' rights? They got their rights by destroying innocent Korean merchants. They have a lot of respect, as I do, for Dr. Martin King. He is the only model for black community; I don't care Jesse Jackson. He is the model of non-violence, non-violence — and they would all like to be in his spirit. "But what about 1992? They destroyed innocent people. And I wonder if that is really justice for them, to get their rights in that way. I was swallowing the bitterness, sitting here alone and watching them. They became so hilarious, but I was happy for them. I was glad for them. At least they got something back, OK. Let's just forget about Korean victims and other victims who were destroyed by them. They fought for their rights for over two centuries, and maybe because they sacrifice other minorities, Hispanic, Asian, we would suffer more in the mainstream. That's why I understand; that's why I have a mixed feeling about the verdict. "But I wish that, I wish that, I wish that I could be part of the enjoyment. I wish that I could live together with black people. But after the riot, it's too much difference. The fire is still there. How do you say it? [Unclear]. Igniting, igniting, igniting fire. Igniting fire. It's still there; it can burst out anytime." Mrs. Young-Soon Han. (Applause) The other reason that I don't wear shoes is just in case I really feel like I have to cuddle up and get into the feet of somebody, walking really in somebody else's shoes. And I told you that in — you know, I didn't give you the year, but in '79 I thought that I was going to go around and find bull riders and pig farmers and people like that, and I got sidetracked on race relations. Finally, I did find a bull rider, two years ago. And I've been going to the rodeos with him, and we've bonded. And he's the lead in an op-ed I did about the Republican Convention. He's a Republican — I won't say anything about my party affiliation, but anyway — so this is my dear, dear Brent Williams, and this is on toughness, in case anybody needs to know about being tough for the work that you do. I think there's a real lesson in this. And this is called "Toughness." "Well, I'm an optimist. I mean basically I'm an optimist. I mean, you know, I mean, it's like my wife, Jolene, her family's always saying, you know, you ever think he's just a born loser? It seems like he has so much bad luck, you know. But then when that bull stepped on my kidney, you know, I didn't lose my kidney — I could have lost my kidney, I kept my kidney, so I don't think I'm a born loser. I think that's good luck. (Laughter) "And, I mean, funny things like this happen. I was in a doctor's office last CAT scan, and there was a Reader's Digest, October 2002. It was like, 'seven ways to get lucky.' And it says if you want to get lucky, you know, you've got to be around positive people. I mean, like even when I told my wife that you want to come out here and talk to me, she's like, 'She's just talking; she's just being nice to you. She's not going to do that.' "And then you called me up and you said you wanted to come out here and interview me and she went and looked you up on the Internet. She said, 'Look who she is. You're not even going to be able to answer her questions.' (Laughter) And she was saying you're going to make me look like an idiot because I've never been to college, and I wouldn't be talking professional or anything. I said, 'Well look, the woman talked to me for four hours. You know, if I wasn't talking — you know, like, you know, she wanted me to talk, I don't think she would even come out here.' "Confidence? Well, I think I ride more out of determination than confidence. I mean, confidence is like, you know, you've been on that bull before; you know you can ride him. I mean, confidence is kind of like being cocky, but in a good way. But determination, you know, it's like just, you know, 'Fuck the form, get the horn.' (Laughter) That's Tuff Hedeman, in the movie '8 Seconds.' I mean, like, Pat O'Mealey always said when I was a boy, he say, 'You know, you got more try than any kid I ever seen.' And try and determination is the same thing. Determination is, like, you're going to hang on that bull, even if you're riding upside down. Determination's like, you're going to ride till your head hits the back of the dirt. "Freedom? It would have to be the rodeo. "Beauty? I don't think I know what beauty is. Well, you know, I guess that'd have to be the rodeo too. I mean, look how we are, the roughy family, palling around and shaking hands and wrestling around me. It's like, you know, racking up our credit cards on entry fees and gas. We ride together, we, you know, we, we eat together and we sleep together. I mean, I can't even imagine what it's going to be like the last day I rodeo. I mean, I'll be alright. I mean, I have my ranch and everything, but I actually don't even want to think the day that comes. I mean, I guess it just be like — I guess it be like the day my brother died. "Toughness? Well, we was in West Jordan, Utah, and this bull shoved my face right through the metal shoots in a — you know, busted my face all up and had to go to the hospital. And they had to sew me up and straighten my nose out. And I had to go and ride in the rodeo that night, so I didn't want them to put me under anesthesia, or whatever you call it. And so they sewed my face up. And then they had to straighten out my nose, and they took these rods and shoved them up my nose and went up through my brains and felt like it was coming out the top of my head, and everybody said that it should have killed me, but it didn't, because I guess I have a high tolerance for pain. (Laughter) But the good thing was, once they shoved those rods up there and straightened my nose out, I could breathe, and I hadn't been able to breathe since I broke my nose in the high school rodeo." Thank you. (Applause)

Everyday inventions

Saul Griffith

{0: 'Saul Griffith'}

{0: ['inventor']}

{0: 'Inventor Saul Griffith looks for elegant ways to make real things, from low-cost eyeglasses to a kite that tows boats. His latest projects include open-source inventions and elegant new ways to generate power.'}

2006-02-23

2007-02-19

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['MacArthur grant', 'collaboration', 'design', 'innovation', 'invention', 'materials', 'open-source', 'product design', 'technology']

{90: 'Unleash your creativity in a Fab Lab', 2: 'Simple designs to save a life', 266: 'Designing objects that tell stories', 1707: 'The emergence of "4D printing"', 843: 'Computing a theory of all knowledge', 1215: 'Can we make things that make themselves?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/saul_griffith_everyday_inventions/

Inventor and MacArthur fellow Saul Griffith shares some innovative ideas from his lab -- from "smart rope" to a house-sized kite for towing large loads.

So anyway, who am I? I usually say to people, when they say, "What do you do?" I say, "I do hardware," because it sort of conveniently encompasses everything I do. And I recently said that to a venture capitalist casually at some Valley event, to which he replied, "How quaint." (Laughter) And I sort of really was dumbstruck. And I really should have said something smart. And now I've had a little bit of time to think about it, I would have said, "Well, you know, if we look at the next 100 years and we've seen all these problems in the last few days, most of the big issues — clean water, clean energy — and they're interchangeable in some respects — and cleaner, more functional materials — they all look to me to be hardware problems. This doesn't mean we should ignore software, or information, or computation." And that's in fact probably what I'm going to try and tell you about. So, this talk is going to be about how do we make things and what are the new ways that we're going to make things in the future. Now, TED sends you a lot of spam if you're a speaker about "do this, do that" and you fill out all these forms, and you don't actually know how they're going to describe you, and it flashed across my desk that they were going to introduce me as a futurist. And I've always been nervous about the term "futurist," because you seem doomed to failure because you can't really predict it. And I was laughing about this with the very smart colleagues I have, and said, "You know, well, if I have to talk about the future, what is it?" And George Homsey, a great guy, said, "Oh, the future is amazing. It is so much stranger than you think. We're going to reprogram the bacteria in your gut, and we're going to make your poo smell like peppermint." (Laughter) So, you may think that's sort of really crazy, but there are some pretty amazing things that are happening that make this possible. So, this isn't my work, but it's work of good friends of mine at MIT. This is called the registry of standard biological parts. This is headed by Drew Endy and Tom Knight and a few other very, very bright individuals. Basically, what they're doing is looking at biology as a programmable system. Literally, think of proteins as subroutines that you can string together to execute a program. Now, this is actually becoming such an interesting idea. This is a state diagram. That's an extremely simple computer. This one is a two-bit counter. So that's essentially the computational equivalent of two light switches. And this is being built by a group of students at Zurich for a design competition in biology. And from the results of the same competition last year, a University of Texas team of students programmed bacteria so that they can detect light and switch on and off. So this is interesting in the sense that you can now do "if-then-for" statements in materials, in structure. This is a pretty interesting trend, because we used to live in a world where everyone's said glibly, "Form follows function," but I think I've sort of grown up in a world — you listened to Neil Gershenfeld yesterday; I was in a lab associated with his — where it's really a world where information defines form and function. I spent six years thinking about that, but to show you the power of art over science — this is actually one of the cartoons I write. These are called "HowToons." I work with a fabulous illustrator called Nick Dragotta. Took me six years at MIT, and about that many pages to describe what I was doing, and it took him one page. And so this is our muse Tucker. He's an interesting little kid — and his sister, Celine — and what he's doing here is observing the self-assembly of his Cheerios in his cereal bowl. And in fact you can program the self-assembly of things, so he starts chocolate-dipping edges, changing the hydrophobicity and the hydrophylicity. In theory, if you program those sufficiently, you should be able to do something pretty interesting and make a very complex structure. In this case, he's done self-replication of a complex 3D structure. And that's what I thought about for a long time, because this is how we currently make things. This is a silicon wafer, and essentially that's just a whole bunch of layers of two-dimensional stuff, sort of layered up. The feature side is — you know, people will say, [unclear] down around about 65 nanometers now. On the right, that's a radiolara. That's a unicellular organism ubiquitous in the oceans. And that has feature sizes down to about 20 nanometers, and it's a complex 3D structure. We could do a lot more with computers and things generally if we knew how to build things this way. The secret to biology is, it builds computation into the way it makes things. So this little thing here, polymerase, is essentially a supercomputer designed for replicating DNA. And the ribosome here is another little computer that helps in the translation of the proteins. I thought about this in the sense that it's great to build in biological materials, but can we do similar things? Can we get self-replicating-type behavior? Can we get complex 3D structure automatically assembling in inorganic systems? Because there are some advantages to inorganic systems, like higher speed semiconductors, etc. So, this is some of my work on how do you do an autonomously self-replicating system. And this is sort of Babbage's revenge. These are little mechanical computers. These are five-state state machines. So, that's about three light switches lined up. In a neutral state, they won't bind at all. Now, if I make a string of these, a bit string, they will be able to replicate. So we start with white, blue, blue, white. That encodes; that will now copy. From one comes two, and then from two comes three. And so you've got this sort of replicating system. It was work actually by Lionel Penrose, father of Roger Penrose, the tiles guy. He did a lot of this work in the '60s, and so a lot of this logic theory lay fallow as we went down the digital computer revolution, but it's now coming back. So now I'm going to show you the hands-free, autonomous self-replication. So we've tracked in the video the input string, which was green, green, yellow, yellow, green. We set them off on this air hockey table. You know, high science uses air hockey tables — (Laughter) — and if you watch this thing long enough you get dizzy, but what you're actually seeing is copies of that original string emerging from the parts bin that you have here. So we've got autonomous replication of bit strings. So, why would you want to replicate bit strings? Well, it turns out biology has this other very interesting meme, that you can take a linear string, which is a convenient thing to copy, and you can fold that into an arbitrarily complex 3D structure. So I was trying to, you know, take the engineer's version: Can we build a mechanical system in inorganic materials that will do the same thing? So what I'm showing you here is that we can make a 2D shape — the B — assemble from a string of components that follow extremely simple rules. And the whole point of going with the extremely simple rules here, and the incredibly simple state machines in the previous design, was that you don't need digital logic to do computation. And that way you can scale things much smaller than microchips. So you can literally use these as the tiny components in the assembly process. So, Neil Gershenfeld showed you this video on Wednesday, I believe, but I'll show you again. This is literally the colored sequence of those tiles. Each different color has a different magnetic polarity, and the sequence is uniquely specifying the structure that is coming out. Now, hopefully, those of you who know anything about graph theory can look at that, and that will satisfy you that that can also do arbitrary 3D structure, and in fact, you know, I can now take a dog, carve it up and then reassemble it so it's a linear string that will fold from a sequence. And now I can actually define that three-dimensional object as a sequence of bits. So, you know, it's a pretty interesting world when you start looking at the world a little bit differently. And the universe is now a compiler. And so I'm thinking about, you know, what are the programs for programming the physical universe? And how do we think about materials and structure, sort of as an information and computation problem? Not just where you attach a micro-controller to the end point, but that the structure and the mechanisms are the logic, are the computers. Having totally absorbed this philosophy, I started looking at a lot of problems a little differently. With the universe as a computer, you can look at this droplet of water as having performed the computations. You set a couple of boundary conditions, like gravity, the surface tension, density, etc., and then you press "execute," and magically, the universe produces you a perfect ball lens. So, this actually applied to the problem of — so there's a half a billion to a billion people in the world don't have access to cheap eyeglasses. So can you make a machine that could make any prescription lens very quickly on site? This is a machine where you literally define a boundary condition. If it's circular, you make a spherical lens. If it's elliptical, you can make an astigmatic lens. You then put a membrane on that and you apply pressure — so that's part of the extra program. And literally with only those two inputs — so, the shape of your boundary condition and the pressure — you can define an infinite number of lenses that cover the range of human refractive error, from minus 12 to plus eight diopters, up to four diopters of cylinder. And then literally, you now pour on a monomer. You know, I'll do a Julia Childs here. This is three minutes of UV light. And you reverse the pressure on your membrane once you've cooked it. Pop it out. I've seen this video, but I still don't know if it's going to end right. (Laughter) So you reverse this. This is a very old movie, so with the new prototypes, actually both surfaces are flexible, but this will show you the point. Now you've finished the lens, you literally pop it out. That's next year's Yves Klein, you know, eyeglasses shape. And you can see that that has a mild prescription of about minus two diopters. And as I rotate it against this side shot, you'll see that that has cylinder, and that was programmed in — literally into the physics of the system. So, this sort of thinking about structure as computation and structure as information leads to other things, like this. This is something that my people at SQUID Labs are working on at the moment, called "electronic rope." So literally, you think about a rope. It has very complex structure in the weave. And under no load, it's one structure. Under a different load, it's a different structure. And you can actually exploit that by putting in a very small number of conducting fibers to actually make it a sensor. So this is now a rope that knows the load on the rope at any particular point in the rope. Just by thinking about the physics of the world, materials as the computer, you can start to do things like this. I'm going to segue a little here. I guess I'm just going to casually tell you the types of things that I think about with this. One thing I'm really interested about this right now is, how, if you're really taking this view of the universe as a computer, how do we make things in a very general sense, and how might we share the way we make things in a general sense the same way you share open source hardware? And a lot of talks here have espoused the benefits of having lots of people look at problems, share the information and work on those things together. So, a convenient thing about being a human is you move in linear time, and unless Lisa Randall changes that, we'll continue to move in linear time. So that means anything you do, or anything you make, you produce a sequence of steps — and I think Lego in the '70s nailed this, and they did it most elegantly. But they can show you how to build things in sequence. So, I'm thinking about, how can we generalize the way we make all sorts of things, so you end up with this sort of guy, right? And I think this applies across a very broad — sort of, a lot of concepts. You know, Cameron Sinclair yesterday said, "How do I get everyone to collaborate on design globally to do housing for humanity?" And if you've seen Amy Smith, she talks about how you get students at MIT to work with communities in Haiti. And I think we have to sort of redefine and rethink how we define structure and materials and assembly things, so that we can really share the information on how you do those things in a more profound way and build on each other's source code for structure. I don't know exactly how to do this yet, but, you know, it's something being actively thought about. So, you know, that leads to questions like, is this a compiler? Is this a sub-routine? Interesting things like that. Maybe I'm getting a little too abstract, but you know, this is the sort of — returning to our comic characters — this is sort of the universe, or a different universe view, that I think is going to be very prevalent in the future — from biotech to materials assembly. It was great to hear Bill Joy. They're starting to invest in materials science, but these are the new things in materials science. How do we put real information and real structure into new ideas, and see the world in a different way? And it's not going to be binary code that defines the computers of the universe — it's sort of an analog computer. But it's definitely an interesting new worldview. I've gone too far. So that sounds like it's it. I've probably got a couple of minutes of questions, or I can show — I think they also said that I do extreme stuff in the introduction, so I may have to explain that. So maybe I'll do that with this short video. So this is actually a 3,000-square-foot kite, which also happens to be a minimal energy surface. So returning to the droplet, again, thinking about the universe in a new way. This is a kite designed by a guy called Dave Kulp. And why do you want a 3,000-square-foot kite? So that's a kite the size of your house. And so you want that to tow boats very fast. So I've been working on this a little, also, with a couple of other guys. But, you know, this is another way to look at the — if you abstract again, this is a structure that is defined by the physics of the universe. You could just hang it as a bed sheet, but again, the computation of all the physics gives you the aerodynamic shape. And so you can actually sort of almost double your boat speed with systems like that. So that's sort of another interesting aspect of the future. (Applause)

Unleash your creativity in a Fab Lab

Neil Gershenfeld

{0: 'Neil Gershenfeld'}

{0: ['physicist', 'personal fab pioneer']}

{0: 'As Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, Neil Gershenfeld explores the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds.'}

2006-02-02

2007-02-19

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['computers', 'culture', 'engineering', 'invention', 'materials', 'science', 'social change', 'technology', 'education', 'code']

{2: 'Simple designs to save a life', 48: 'Everyday inventions', 288: 'One Laptop per Child, two years on', 1570: 'The self-organizing computer course', 872: 'Pointing to the future of UI', 339: 'The web is more than "better TV"'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_gershenfeld_unleash_your_creativity_in_a_fab_lab/

MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld talks about his Fab Lab -- a low-cost lab that lets people build things they need using digital and analog tools. It's a simple idea with powerful results.

This meeting has really been about a digital revolution, but I'd like to argue that it's done; we won. We've had a digital revolution but we don't need to keep having it. And I'd like to look after that, to look what comes after the digital revolution. So, let me start projecting forward. These are some projects I'm involved in today at MIT, looking what comes after computers. This first one, Internet Zero, up here — this is a web server that has the cost and complexity of an RFID tag — about a dollar — that can go in every light bulb and doorknob, and this is getting commercialized very quickly. And what's interesting about it isn't the cost; it's the way it encodes the Internet. It uses a kind of a Morse code for the Internet so you could send it optically; you can communicate acoustically through a power line, through RF. It takes the original principle of the Internet, which is inter-networking computers, and now lets devices inter-network. That we can take the whole idea that gave birth to the Internet and bring it down to the physical world in this Internet Zero, this internet of devices. So this is the next step from there to here, and this is getting commercialized today. A step after that is a project on fungible computers. Fungible goods in economics can be extended and traded. So, half as much grain is half as much useful, but half a baby or half a computer is less useful than a whole baby or a whole computer, and we've been trying to make computers that work that way. So, what you see in the background is a prototype. This was from a thesis of a student, Bill Butow, now at Intel, who wondered why, instead of making bigger and bigger chips, you don't make small chips, put them in a viscous medium, and pour out computing by the pound or by the square inch. And that's what you see here. On the left was postscript being rendered by a conventional computer; on the right is postscript being rendered from the first prototype we made, but there's no frame buffer, IO processor, any of that stuff — it's just this material. Unlike this screen where the dots are placed carefully, this is a raw material. If you add twice as much of it, you have twice as much display. If you shoot a gun through the middle, nothing happens. If you need more resource, you just apply more computer. So, that's the step after this — of computing as a raw material. That's still conventional bits, the step after that is — this is an earlier prototype in the lab; this is high-speed video slowed down. Now, integrating chemistry in computation, where the bits are bubbles. This is showing making bits, this is showing — once again, slowed down so you can see it, bits interacting to do logic and multiplexing and de-multiplexing. So, now we can compute that the output arranges material as well as information. And, ultimately, these are some slides from an early project I did, computing where the bits are stored quantum-mechanically in the nuclei of atoms, so programs rearrange the nuclear structure of molecules. All of these are in the lab pushing further and further and further, not as metaphor but literally integrating bits and atoms, and they lead to the following recognition. We all know we've had a digital revolution, but what is that? Well, Shannon took us, in the '40s, from here to here: from a telephone being a speaker wire that degraded with distance to the Internet. And he proved the first threshold theorem, that shows if you add information and remove it to a signal, you can compute perfectly with an imperfect device. And that's when we got the Internet. Von Neumann, in the '50s, did the same thing for computing; he showed you can have an unreliable computer but restore its state to make it perfect. This was the last great analog computer at MIT: a differential analyzer, and the more you ran it, the worse the answer got. After Von Neumann, we have the Pentium, where the billionth transistor is as reliable as the first one. But all our fabrication is down in this lower left corner. A state-of-the-art airplane factory rotating metal wax at fixed metal, or you maybe melt some plastic. A 10-billion-dollar chip fab uses a process a village artisan would recognize — you spread stuff around and bake it. All the intelligence is external to the system; the materials don't have information. Yesterday you heard about molecular biology, which fundamentally computes to build. It's an information processing system. We've had digital revolutions in communication and computation, but precisely the same idea, precisely the same math Shannon and Von Neuman did, hasn't yet come out to the physical world. So, inspired by that, colleagues in this program — the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT — which is a group of people, like me, who never understood the boundary between physical science and computer science. I would even go further and say computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to either computers or to science — (Laughter) — because the canon — computer science — many of them are great but the canon of computer science prematurely froze a model of computation based on technology that was available in 1950, and nature's a much more powerful computer than that. So, you'll hear, tomorrow, from Saul Griffith. He was one of the first students to emerge from this program. We started to figure out how you can compute to fabricate. This was just a proof of principle he did of tiles that interact magnetically, where you write a code, much like protein folding, that specifies their structure. So, there's no feedback to a tool metrology; the material itself codes for its structure in just the same ways that protein are fabricated. So, you can, for example, do that. You can do other things. That's in 2D. It works in 3D. The video on the upper right — I won't show for time — shows self-replication, templating so something can make something that can make something, and we're doing that now over, maybe, nine orders of magnitude. Those ideas have been used to show the best fidelity and direct rate DNA to make an organism, in functionalizing nanoclusters with peptide tails that code for their assembly — so, much like the magnets, but now on nanometer scales. Laser micro-machining: essentially 3D printers that digitally fabricate functional systems, all the way up to building buildings, not by having blueprints, but having the parts code for the structure of the building. So, these are early examples in the lab of emerging technologies to digitize fabrication. Computers that don't control tools but computers that are tools, where the output of a program rearranges atoms as well as bits. Now, to do that — with your tax dollars, thank you — I bought all these machines. We made a modest proposal to the NSF. We wanted to be able to make anything on any length scale, all in one place, because you can't segregate digital fabrication by a discipline or a length scale. So we put together focused nano beam writers and supersonic water jet cutters and excimer micro-machining systems. But I had a problem. Once I had all these machines, I was spending too much time teaching students to use them. So I started teaching a class, modestly called, "How To Make Almost Anything." And that wasn't meant to be provocative; it was just for a few research students. But the first day of class looked like this. You know, hundreds of people came in begging, all my life I've been waiting for this class; I'll do anything to do it. Then they'd ask, can you teach it at MIT? It seems too useful? And then the next — (Laughter) — surprising thing was they weren't there to do research. They were there because they wanted to make stuff. They had no conventional technical background. At the end of a semester they integrated their skills. I'll show an old video. Kelly was a sculptor, and this is what she did with her semester project. (Video): Kelly: Hi, I'm Kelly and this is my scream buddy. Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you really have to scream, but you can't because you're at work, or you're in a classroom, or you're watching your children, or you're in any number of situations where it's just not permitted? Well, scream buddy is a portable space for screaming. When a user screams into scream buddy, their scream is silenced. It is also recorded for later release where, when and how the user chooses. (Scream) (Laughter) (Applause) So, Einstein would like this. This student made a web browser for parrots — lets parrots surf the Net and talk to other parrots. This student's made an alarm clock you wrestle to prove you're awake; this is one that defends — a dress that defends your personal space. This isn't technology for communication; it's technology to prevent it. This is a device that lets you see your music. This is a student who made a machine that makes machines, and he made it by making Lego bricks that do the computing. Just year after year — and I finally realized the students were showing the killer app of personal fabrication is products for a market of one person. You don't need this for what you can get in Wal-Mart; you need this for what makes you unique. Ken Olsen famously said, nobody needs a computer in the home. But you don't use it for inventory and payroll; DEC is now twice bankrupt. You don't need personal fabrication in the home to buy what you can buy because you can buy it. You need it for what makes you unique, just like personalization. So, with that, in turn, 20 million dollars today does this; 20 years from now we'll make Star Trek replicators that make anything. The students hijacked all the machines I bought to do personal fabrication. Today, when you spend that much of your money, there's a government requirement to do outreach, which often means classes at a local school, a website — stuff that's just not that exciting. So, I made a deal with my NSF program managers that instead of talking about it, I'd give people the tools. This wasn't meant to be provocative or important, but we put together these Fab Labs. It's about 20,000 dollars in equipment that approximate both what the 20 million dollars does and where it's going. A laser cutter to do press-fit assembly with 3D from 2D, a sign cutter to plot in copper to do electromagnetics, a micron scale, numerically-controlled milling machine for precise structures, programming tools for less than a dollar, 100-nanosecond microcontrollers. It lets you work from microns and microseconds on up, and they exploded around the world. This wasn't scheduled, but they went from inner-city Boston to Pobal in India, to Secondi-Takoradi on Ghana's coast to Soshanguve in a township in South Africa, to the far north of Norway, uncovering, or helping uncover, for all the attention to the digital divide, we would find unused computers in all these places. A farmer in a rural village — a kid needs to measure and modify the world, not just get information about it on a screen. That there's really a fabrication and an instrumentation divide bigger than the digital divide. And the way you close it is not IT for the masses but IT development for the masses. So, in place after place we saw this same progression: that we'd open one of these Fab Labs, where we didn't — this is too crazy to think of. We didn't think this up, that we would get pulled to these places; we'd open it. The first step was just empowerment. You can see it in their face, just this joy of, I can do it. This is a girl in inner-city Boston who had just done a high-tech on-demand craft sale in the inner city community center. It goes on from there to serious hands-on technical education informally, out of schools. In Ghana we had set up one of these labs. We designed a network sensor, and kids would show up and refuse to leave the lab. There was a girl who insisted we stay late at night — (Video): Kids: I love the Fab Lab. — her first night in the lab because she was going to make the sensor. So she insisted on fabbing the board, learning how to stuff it, learning how to program it. She didn't really know what she was doing or why she was doing it, but she knew she just had to do it. There was something electric about it. This is late at, you know, 11 o'clock at night and I think I was the only person surprised when what she built worked the first time. And I've shown this to engineers at big companies, and they say they can't do this. Any one thing she's doing, they can do better, but it's distributed over many people and many sites and they can't do in an afternoon what this little girl in rural Ghana is doing. (Video): Girl: My name is Valentina Kofi; I am eight years old. I made a stacking board. And, again, that was just for the joy of it. Then these labs started doing serious problem solving — instrumentation for agriculture in India, steam turbines for energy conversion in Ghana, high-gain antennas in thin client computers. And then, in turn, businesses started to grow, like making these antennas. And finally, the lab started doing invention. We're learning more from them than we're giving them. I was showing my kids in a Fab Lab how to use it. They invented a way to do a construction kit out of a cardboard box — which, as you see up there, that's becoming a business — but their design was better than Saul's design at MIT, so there's now three students at MIT doing their theses on scaling the work of eight-year-old children because they had better designs. Real invention is happening in these labs. And I still kept — so, in the last year I've been spending time with heads of state and generals and tribal chiefs who all want this, and I keep saying, but this isn't the real thing. Wait, like, 20 years and then we'll be done. And I finally got what's been going on. This is Kernigan and Ritchie inventing UNIX on a PDP. PDPs came between mainframes and minicomputers. They were tens of thousands of dollars, hard to use, but they brought computing down to work groups, and everything we do today happened there. These Fab Labs are the cost and complexity of a PDP. The projection of digital fabrication isn't a projection for the future; we are now in the PDP era. We talked in hushed tones about the great discoveries then. It was very chaotic, it wasn't, sort of, clear what was going on. In the same sense we are now, today, in the minicomputer era of digital fabrication. The only problem with that is it breaks everybody's boundaries. In DC, I go to every agency that wants to talk, you know; in the Bay Area, I go to every organization you can think of — they all want to talk about it, but it breaks their organizational boundaries. In fact, it's illegal for them, in many cases, to equip ordinary people to create rather than consume technology. And that problem is so severe that the ultimate invention coming from this community surprised me: it's the social engineering. That the lab in far north of Norway — this is so far north its satellite dishes look at the ground rather than the sky because that's where the satellites are — the lab outgrew the little barn that it was in. It was there because they wanted to find animals in the mountains but it outgrew it, so they built this extraordinary village for the lab. This isn't a university; it's not a company. It's essentially a village for invention; it's a village for the outliers in society, and those have been growing up around these Fab Labs all around the world. So this program has split into an NGO foundation, a Fab Foundation to support the scaling, a micro VC fund. The person who runs it nicely describes it as "machines that make machines need businesses that make businesses:" it's a cross between micro-finance and VC to do fan-out, and then the research partnerships back at MIT for what's making it possible. So I'd like to leave you with two thoughts. There's been a sea change in aid, from top-down mega-projects to bottom-up, grassroots, micro-finance investing in the roots, so that everybody's got that that's what works. But we still look at technology as top-down mega-projects. Computing, communication, energy for the rest of the planet are these top-down mega-projects. If this room full of heroes is just clever enough, you can solve the problems. The message coming from the Fab Labs is that the other five billion people on the planet aren't just technical sinks; they're sources. The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems. I thought that's the projection 20 years hence into the future, but it's where we are today. It breaks every organizational boundary we can think of. The hardest thing at this point is the social engineering and the organizational engineering, but it's here today. And, finally, any talk like this on the future of computing is required to show Moore's law, but my favorite version — this is Gordon Moore's original one from his original paper — and what's happened is, year after year after year, we've scaled and we've scaled and we've scaled and we've scaled, and we've scaled and we've scaled, and we've scaled and we've scaled, and there's this looming bug of what's going to happen at the end of Moore's law; this ultimate bug is coming. But we're coming to appreciate, is the transition from 2D to 3D, from programming bits to programming atoms, turns the ends of Moore's law scaling from the ultimate bug to the ultimate feature. So, we're just at the edge of this digital revolution in fabrication, where the output of computation programs the physical world. So, together, these two projects answer questions I hadn't asked carefully. The class at MIT shows the killer app for personal fabrication in the developed world is technology for a market of one: personal expression in technology that touches a passion unlike anything I've seen in technology for a very long time. And the killer app for the rest of the planet is the instrumentation and the fabrication divide: people locally developing solutions to local problems. Thank you.

In praise of slowness

Carl Honoré

{0: 'Carl Honoré'}

{0: ['writer', 'thinker', 'activist']}

{0: 'Carl Honoré loves words: the way they appear on the page, the music they make when spoken and their power to change the world.'}

2005-07-07

2007-02-28

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['choice', 'culture', 'happiness', 'health', 'parenting', 'personal growth', 'potential', 'psychology', 'work-life balance']

{93: 'The paradox of choice', 263: "What's wrong with what we eat", 201: 'The lost art of letter-writing', 1069: 'How to make work-life balance work', 1580: 'Smart failure for a fast-changing world', 1126: 'On being wrong'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/carl_honore_in_praise_of_slowness/

Journalist Carl Honore believes the Western world's emphasis on speed erodes health, productivity and quality of life. But there's a backlash brewing, as everyday people start putting the brakes on their all-too-modern lives.

What I'd like to start off with is an observation, which is that if I've learned anything over the last year, it's that the supreme irony of publishing a book about slowness is that you have to go around promoting it really fast. I seem to spend most of my time these days zipping from city to city, studio to studio, interview to interview, serving up the book in really tiny bite-size chunks. Because everyone these days wants to know how to slow down, but they want to know how to slow down really quickly. So ... so I did a spot on CNN the other day where I actually spent more time in makeup than I did talking on air. And I think that — that's not really surprising though, is it? Because that's kind of the world that we live in now, a world stuck in fast-forward. A world obsessed with speed, with doing everything faster, with cramming more and more into less and less time. Every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock. To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher, which is in my bio there; I'll just toss it out again — "These days even instant gratification takes too long." (Laughter) And if you think about how we to try to make things better, what do we do? No, we speed them up, don't we? So we used to dial; now we speed dial. We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. And of course, we used to date and now we speed date. And even things that are by their very nature slow — we try and speed them up too. So I was in New York recently, and I walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for a new course, a new evening course. And it was for, you guessed it, speed yoga. So this — the perfect solution for time-starved professionals who want to, you know, salute the sun, but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it. I mean, these are sort of the extreme examples, and they're amusing and good to laugh at. But there's a very serious point, and I think that in the headlong dash of daily life, we often lose sight of the damage that this roadrunner form of living does to us. We're so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives — on our health, our diet, our work, our relationships, the environment and our community. And sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives, instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life, instead of the good life. And I think for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness. You know, a burnout, or eventually the body says, "I can't take it anymore," and throws in the towel. Or maybe a relationship goes up in smoke because we haven't had the time, or the patience, or the tranquility, to be with the other person, to listen to them. And my wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my son, and I found that at the end of day, I would go into his room and I just couldn't slow down — you know, I'd be speed reading "The Cat In The Hat." I'd be — you know, I'd be skipping lines here, paragraphs there, sometimes a whole page, and of course, my little boy knew the book inside out, so we would quarrel. And what should have been the most relaxing, the most intimate, the most tender moment of the day, when a dad sits down to read to his son, became instead this kind of gladiatorial battle of wills, a clash between my speed and his slowness. And this went on for some time, until I caught myself scanning a newspaper article with timesaving tips for fast people. And one of them made reference to a series of books called "The One-Minute Bedtime Story." And I wince saying those words now, but my first reaction at the time was very different. My first reflex was to say, "Hallelujah — what a great idea! This is exactly what I'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more." But thankfully, a light bulb went on over my head, and my next reaction was very different, and I took a step back, and I thought, "Whoa — you know, has it really come to this? Am I really in such a hurry that I'm prepared to fob off my son with a sound byte at the end of the day?" And I put away the newspaper — and I was getting on a plane — and I sat there, and I did something I hadn't done for a long time — which is I did nothing. I just thought, and I thought long and hard. And by the time I got off that plane, I'd decided I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to investigate this whole roadrunner culture, and what it was doing to me and to everyone else. And I had two questions in my head. The first was, how did we get so fast? And the second is, is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down? Now, if you think about how our world got so accelerated, the usual suspects rear their heads. You think of, you know, urbanization, consumerism, the workplace, technology. But I think if you cut through those forces, you get to what might be the deeper driver, the nub of the question, which is how we think about time itself. In other cultures, time is cyclical. It's seen as moving in great, unhurried circles. It's always renewing and refreshing itself. Whereas in the West, time is linear. It's a finite resource; it's always draining away. You either use it, or lose it. "Time is money," as Benjamin Franklin said. And I think what that does to us psychologically is it creates an equation. Time is scarce, so what do we do? Well — well, we speed up, don't we? We try and do more and more with less and less time. We turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line — a finish line, incidentally, that we never reach, but a finish line nonetheless. And I guess that the question is, is it possible to break free from that mindset? And thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I discovered, when I began looking around, that there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better, and that busier is best. Right across the world, people are doing the unthinkable: they're slowing down, and finding that, although conventional wisdom tells you that if you slow down, you're road kill, the opposite turns out to be true: that by slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better. They eat better; they make love better; they exercise better; they work better; they live better. And, in this kind of cauldron of moments and places and acts of deceleration, lie what a lot of people now refer to as the "International Slow Movement." Now if you'll permit me a small act of hypocrisy, I'll just give you a very quick overview of what's going on inside the Slow Movement. If you think of food, many of you will have heard of the Slow Food movement. Started in Italy, but has spread across the world, and now has 100,000 members in 50 countries. And it's driven by a very simple and sensible message, which is that we get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate, cook and consume it at a reasonable pace. I think also the explosion of the organic farming movement, and the renaissance of farmers' markets, are other illustrations of the fact that people are desperate to get away from eating and cooking and cultivating their food on an industrial timetable. They want to get back to slower rhythms. And out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy, but has spread right across Europe and beyond. And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape, so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another. So they might curb traffic, or put in a park bench, or some green space. And in some ways, these changes add up to more than the sum of their parts, because I think when a Slow City becomes officially a Slow City, it's kind of like a philosophical declaration. It's saying to the rest of world, and to the people in that town, that we believe that in the 21st century, slowness has a role to play. In medicine, I think a lot of people are deeply disillusioned with the kind of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine. And millions of them around the world are turning to complementary and alternative forms of medicine, which tend to tap into sort of slower, gentler, more holistic forms of healing. Now, obviously the jury is out on many of these complementary therapies, and I personally doubt that the coffee enema will ever, you know, gain mainstream approval. But other treatments such as acupuncture and massage, and even just relaxation, clearly have some kind of benefit. And blue-chip medical colleges everywhere are starting to study these things to find out how they work, and what we might learn from them. Sex. There's an awful lot of fast sex around, isn't there? I was coming to — well — no pun intended there. I was making my way, let's say, slowly to Oxford, and I went through a news agent, and I saw a magazine, a men's magazine, and it said on the front, "How to bring your partner to orgasm in 30 seconds." So, you know, even sex is on a stopwatch these days. Now, you know, I like a quickie as much as the next person, but I think that there's an awful lot to be gained from slow sex — from slowing down in the bedroom. You know, you tap into that — those deeper, sort of, psychological, emotional, spiritual currents, and you get a better orgasm with the buildup. You can get more bang for your buck, let's say. I mean, the Pointer Sisters said it most eloquently, didn't they, when they sang the praises of "a lover with a slow hand." Now, we all laughed at Sting a few years ago when he went Tantric, but you fast-forward a few years, and now you find couples of all ages flocking to workshops, or maybe just on their own in their own bedrooms, finding ways to put on the brakes and have better sex. And of course, in Italy where — I mean, Italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure — they've launched an official Slow Sex movement. The workplace. Right across much of the world — North America being a notable exception — working hours have been coming down. And Europe is an example of that, and people finding that their quality of life improves as they're working less, and also that their hourly productivity goes up. Now, clearly there are problems with the 35-hour workweek in France — too much, too soon, too rigid. But other countries in Europe, notably the Nordic countries, are showing that it's possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic. And Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland now rank among the top six most competitive nations on Earth, and they work the kind of hours that would make the average American weep with envy. And if you go beyond sort of the country level, down at the micro-company level, more and more companies now are realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or just to unplug — to take a lunch break, or to go sit in a quiet room, to switch off their Blackberrys and laptops — you at the back — mobile phones, during the work day or on the weekend, so that they have time to recharge and for the brain to slide into that kind of creative mode of thought. It's not just, though, these days, adults who overwork, though, is it? It's children, too. I'm 37, and my childhood ended in the mid-'80s, and I look at kids now, and I'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework, more tutoring, more extracurriculars than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago. And some of the most heartrending emails that I get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout, pleading with me to write to their parents, to help them slow down, to help them get off this full-throttle treadmill. But thankfully, there is a backlash there in parenting as well, and you're finding that, you know, towns in the United States are now banding together and banning extracurriculars on a particular day of the month, so that people can, you know, decompress and have some family time, and slow down. Homework is another thing. There are homework bans springing up all over the developed world in schools which had been piling on the homework for years, and now they're discovering that less can be more. So there was a case up in Scotland recently where a fee-paying, high-achieving private school banned homework for everyone under the age of 13, and the high-achieving parents freaked out and said, "What are you — you know, our kids will fall" — the headmaster said, "No, no, your children need to slow down at the end of the day." And just this last month, the exam results came in, and in math, science, marks went up 20 percent on average last year. And I think what's very revealing is that the elite universities, who are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and hothouse them so much, are starting to notice the caliber of students coming to them is falling. These kids have wonderful marks; they have CVs jammed with extracurriculars, to the point that would make your eyes water. But they lack spark; they lack the ability to think creatively and think outside — they don't know how to dream. And so what these Ivy League schools, and Oxford and Cambridge and so on, are starting to send a message to parents and students that they need to put on the brakes a little bit. And in Harvard, for instance, they send out a letter to undergraduates — freshmen — telling them that they'll get more out of life, and more out of Harvard, if they put on the brakes, if they do less, but give time to things, the time that things need, to enjoy them, to savor them. And even if they sometimes do nothing at all. And that letter is called — very revealing, I think — "Slow Down!" — with an exclamation mark on the end. So wherever you look, the message, it seems to me, is the same: that less is very often more, that slower is very often better. But that said, of course, it's not that easy to slow down, is it? I mean, you heard that I got a speeding ticket while I was researching my book on the benefits of slowness, and that's true, but that's not all of it. I was actually en route to a dinner held by Slow Food at the time. And if that's not shaming enough, I got that ticket in Italy. And if any of you have ever driven on an Italian highway, you'll have a pretty good idea of how fast I was going. (Laughter) But why is it so hard to slow down? I think there are various reasons. One is that speed is fun, you know, speed is sexy. It's all that adrenaline rush. It's hard to give it up. I think there's a kind of metaphysical dimension — that speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions. We fill our head with distraction, with busyness, so that we don't have to ask, am I well? Am I happy? Are my children growing up right? Are politicians making good decisions on my behalf? Another reason — although I think, perhaps, the most powerful reason — why we find it hard to slow down is the cultural taboo that we've erected against slowing down. "Slow" is a dirty word in our culture. It's a byword for "lazy," "slacker," for being somebody who gives up. You know, "he's a bit slow." It's actually synonymous with being stupid. I guess what the Slow Movement — the purpose of the Slow Movement, or its main goal, really, is to tackle that taboo, and to say that yes, sometimes slow is not the answer, that there is such a thing as "bad slow." You know, I got stuck on the M25, which is a ring road around London, recently, and spent three-and-a-half hours there. And I can tell you, that's really bad slow. But the new idea, the sort of revolutionary idea, of the Slow Movement, is that there is such a thing as "good slow," too. And good slow is, you know, taking the time to eat a meal with your family, with the TV switched off. Or taking the time to look at a problem from all angles in the office to make the best decision at work. Or even simply just taking the time to slow down and savor your life. Now, one of the things that I found most uplifting about all of this stuff that's happened around the book since it came out, is the reaction to it. And I knew that when my book on slowness came out, it would be welcomed by the New Age brigade, but it's also been taken up, with great gusto, by the corporate world — you know, business press, but also big companies and leadership organizations. Because people at the top of the chain, people like you, I think, are starting to realize that there's too much speed in the system, there's too much busyness, and it's time to find, or get back to that lost art of shifting gears. Another encouraging sign, I think, is that it's not just in the developed world that this idea's been taken up. In the developing world, in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first world status — China, Brazil, Thailand, Poland, and so on — these countries have embraced the idea of the Slow Movement, many people in them, and there's a debate going on in their media, on the streets. Because I think they're looking at the West, and they're saying, "Well, we like that aspect of what you've got, but we're not so sure about that." So all of that said, is it, I guess, is it possible? That's really the main question before us today. Is it possible to slow down? And I'm happy to be able to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes. And I present myself as Exhibit A, a kind of reformed and rehabilitated speed-aholic. I still love speed. You know, I live in London, and I work as a journalist, and I enjoy the buzz and the busyness, and the adrenaline rush that comes from both of those things. I play squash and ice hockey, two very fast sports, and I wouldn't give them up for the world. But I've also, over the last year or so, got in touch with my inner tortoise. (Laughter) And what that means is that I no longer overload myself gratuitously. My default mode is no longer to be a rush-aholic. I no longer hear time's winged chariot drawing near, or at least not as much as I did before. I can actually hear it now, because I see my time is ticking off. And the upshot of all of that is that I actually feel a lot happier, healthier, more productive than I ever have. I feel like I'm living my life rather than actually just racing through it. And perhaps, the most important measure of the success of this is that I feel that my relationships are a lot deeper, richer, stronger. And for me, I guess, the litmus test for whether this would work, and what it would mean, was always going to be bedtime stories, because that's sort of where the journey began. And there too the news is rosy. You know, at the end of the day, I go into my son's room. I don't wear a watch. I switch off my computer, so I can't hear the email pinging into the basket, and I just slow down to his pace and we read. And because children have their own tempo and internal clock, they don't do quality time, where you schedule 10 minutes for them to open up to you. They need you to move at their rhythm. I find that 10 minutes into a story, you know, my son will suddenly say, "You know, something happened in the playground today that really bothered me." And we'll go off and have a conversation on that. And I now find that bedtime stories used to be a box on my to-do list, something that I dreaded, because it was so slow and I had to get through it quickly. It's become my reward at the end of the day, something I really cherish. And I have a kind of Hollywood ending to my talk this afternoon, which goes a little bit like this: a few months ago, I was getting ready to go on another book tour, and I had my bags packed. I was downstairs by the front door, and I was waiting for a taxi, and my son came down the stairs and he'd made a card for me. And he was carrying it. He'd gone and stapled two cards, very like these, together, and put a sticker of his favorite character, Tintin, on the front. And he said to me, or he handed this to me, and I read it, and it said, "To Daddy, love Benjamin." And I thought, "Aw, that's really sweet. Is that a good luck on the book tour card?" And he said, "No, no, no, Daddy — this is a card for being the best story reader in the world." And I thought, "Yeah, you know, this slowing down thing really does work." Thank you very much.

My wish: Let my photographs bear witness

James Nachtwey

{0: 'James Nachtwey'}

{0: ['photojournalist']}

{0: 'Photojournalist James Nachtwey is considered by many to be the greatest war photographer of recent decades. He has covered conflicts and major social issues in more than 30 countries.'}

2007-03-08

2007-04-03

TED2007

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'eu', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['activism', 'culture', 'global issues', 'media', 'photography', 'poverty', 'social change', 'storytelling', 'art', 'war']

{56: 'My wish: Manufactured landscapes and green education', 69: 'Dreams from endangered cultures', 279: 'Turning powerful stats into art', 1651: 'What I saw in the war', 1003: 'The path to ending ethnic conflicts', 395: 'A complicated hero in the war on dictatorship'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_nachtwey_my_wish_let_my_photographs_bear_witness/

Accepting his 2007 TED Prize, war photographer James Nachtwey shows his life's work and asks TED to help him continue telling the story with innovative, exciting uses of news photography in the digital era.

As someone who has spent his entire career trying to be invisible standing in front of an audience is a cross between an out-of-body experience and a deer caught in the headlights, so please forgive me for violating one of the TED commandments by relying on words on paper, and I only hope I'm not struck by lightning bolts before I'm done. I'd like to begin by talking about some of the ideas that motivated me to become a documentary photographer. I was a student in the '60s, a time of social upheaval and questioning, and on a personal level, an awakening sense of idealism. The war in Vietnam was raging; the Civil Rights Movement was under way; and pictures had a powerful influence on me. Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing, and photographers were telling us another. I believed the photographers, and so did millions of other Americans. Their images fueled resistance to the war and to racism. They not only recorded history; they helped change the course of history. Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and, as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience, change became not only possible, but inevitable. I saw that the free flow of information represented by journalism, specifically visual journalism, can bring into focus both the benefits and the cost of political policies. It can give credit to sound decision-making, adding momentum to success. In the face of poor political judgment or political inaction, it becomes a kind of intervention, assessing the damage and asking us to reassess our behavior. It puts a human face on issues which from afar can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact. What happens at ground level, far from the halls of power, happens to ordinary citizens one by one. And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view. It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice. And as a reaction, it stimulates public opinion and gives impetus to public debate, thereby preventing the interested parties from totally controlling the agenda, much as they would like to. Coming of age in those days made real the concept that the free flow of information is absolutely vital for a free and dynamic society to function properly. The press is certainly a business, and in order to survive it must be a successful business, but the right balance must be found between marketing considerations and journalistic responsibility. Society's problems can't be solved until they're identified. On a higher plane, the press is a service industry, and the service it provides is awareness. Every story does not have to sell something. There's also a time to give. That was a tradition I wanted to follow. Seeing the war created such incredibly high stakes for everyone involved and that visual journalism could actually become a factor in conflict resolution — I wanted to be a photographer in order to be a war photographer. But I was driven by an inherent sense that a picture that revealed the true face of war would almost by definition be an anti-war photograph. I'd like to take you on a visual journey through some of the events and issues I've been involved in over the past 25 years. In 1981, I went to Northern Ireland. 10 IRA prisoners were in the process of starving themselves to death in protest against conditions in jail. The reaction on the streets was violent confrontation. I saw that the front lines of contemporary wars are not on isolated battlefields, but right where people live. During the early '80s, I spent a lot of time in Central America, which was engulfed by civil wars that straddled the ideological divide of the Cold War. In Guatemala, the central government — controlled by a oligarchy of European decent — was waging a scorched Earth campaign against an indigenous rebellion, and I saw an image that reflected the history of Latin America: conquest through a combination of the Bible and the sword. An anti-Sandinista guerrilla was mortally wounded as Commander Zero attacked a town in Southern Nicaragua. A destroyed tank belonging to Somoza's national guard was left as a monument in a park in Managua, and was transformed by the energy and spirit of a child. At the same time, a civil war was taking place in El Salvador, and again, the civilian population was caught up in the conflict. I've been covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since 1981. This is a moment from the beginning of the second intifada, in 2000, when it was still stones and Molotovs against an army. In 2001, the uprising escalated into an armed conflict, and one of the major incidents was the destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank town of Jenin. Without the political will to find common ground, the continual friction of tactic and counter-tactic only creates suspicion and hatred and vengeance, and perpetuates the cycle of violence. In the '90s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia fractured along ethnic fault lines, and civil war broke out between Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. This is a scene of house-to-house fighting in Mostar, neighbor against neighbor. A bedroom, the place where people share intimacy, where life itself is conceived, became a battlefield. A mosque in northern Bosnia was destroyed by Serbian artillery and was used as a makeshift morgue. Dead Serbian soldiers were collected after a battle and used as barter for the return of prisoners or Bosnian soldiers killed in action. This was once a park. The Bosnian soldier who guided me told me that all of his friends were there now. At the same time in South Africa, after Nelson Mandela had been released from prison, the black population commenced the final phase of liberation from apartheid. One of the things I had to learn as a journalist was what to do with my anger. I had to use it, channel its energy, turn it into something that would clarify my vision, instead of clouding it. In Transkei, I witnessed a rite of passage into manhood, of the Xhosa tribe. Teenage boys lived in isolation, their bodies covered with white clay. After several weeks, they washed off the white and took on the full responsibilities of men. It was a very old ritual that seemed symbolic of the political struggle that was changing the face of South Africa. Children in Soweto playing on a trampoline. Elsewhere in Africa there was famine. In Somalia, the central government collapsed and clan warfare broke out. Farmers were driven off their land, and crops and livestock were destroyed or stolen. Starvation was being used as a weapon of mass destruction — primitive but extremely effective. Hundreds of thousands of people were exterminated, slowly and painfully. The international community responded with massive humanitarian relief, and hundreds of thousands of more lives were saved. American troops were sent to protect the relief shipments, but they were eventually drawn into the conflict, and after the tragic battle in Mogadishu, they were withdrawn. In southern Sudan, another civil war saw similar use of starvation as a means of genocide. Again, international NGOs, united under the umbrella of the U.N., staged a massive relief operation and thousands of lives were saved. I'm a witness, and I want my testimony to be honest and uncensored. I also want it to be powerful and eloquent, and to do as much justice as possible to the experience of the people I'm photographing. This man was in an NGO feeding center, being helped as much as he could be helped. He literally had nothing. He was a virtual skeleton, yet he could still summon the courage and the will to move. He had not given up, and if he didn't give up, how could anyone in the outside world ever dream of losing hope? In 1994, after three months of covering the South African election, I saw the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, and it was the most uplifting thing I've ever seen. It exemplified the best that humanity has to offer. The next day I left for Rwanda, and it was like taking the express elevator to hell. This man had just been liberated from a Hutu death camp. He allowed me to photograph him for quite a long time, and he even turned his face toward the light, as if he wanted me to see him better. I think he knew what the scars on his face would say to the rest of the world. This time, maybe confused or discouraged by the military disaster in Somalia, the international community remained silent, and somewhere around 800,000 people were slaughtered by their own countrymen — sometimes their own neighbors — using farm implements as weapons. Perhaps because a lesson had been learned by the weak response to the war in Bosnia and the failure in Rwanda, when Serbia attacked Kosovo, international action was taken much more decisively. NATO forces went in, and the Serbian army withdrew. Ethnic Albanians had been murdered, their farms destroyed and a huge number of people forcibly deported. They were received in refugee camps set up by NGOs in Albania and Macedonia. The imprint of a man who had been burned inside his own home. The image reminded me of a cave painting, and echoed how primitive we still are in so many ways. Between 1995 and '96, I covered the first two wars in Chechnya from inside Grozny. This is a Chechen rebel on the front line against the Russian army. The Russians bombarded Grozny constantly for weeks, killing mainly the civilians who were still trapped inside. I found a boy from the local orphanage wandering around the front line. My work has evolved from being concerned mainly with war to a focus on critical social issues as well. After the fall of Ceausescu, I went to Romania and discovered a kind of gulag of children, where thousands of orphans were being kept in medieval conditions. Ceausescu had imposed a quota on the number of children to be produced by each family, thereby making women's bodies an instrument of state economic policy. Children who couldn't be supported by their families were raised in government orphanages. Children with birth defects were labeled incurables, and confined for life to inhuman conditions. As reports began to surface, again international aid went in. Going deeper into the legacy of the Eastern European regimes, I worked for several months on a story about the effects of industrial pollution, where there had been no regard for the environment or the health of either workers or the general population. An aluminum factory in Czechoslovakia was filled with carcinogenic smoke and dust, and four out of five workers came down with cancer. After the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, I began to explore conditions of poverty in a country that was on its way towards modernization. I spent a good deal of time with a man who lived with his family on a railway embankment and had lost an arm and a leg in a train accident. When the story was published, unsolicited donations poured in. A trust fund was established, and the family now lives in a house in the countryside and all their basic necessities are taken care of. It was a story that wasn't trying to sell anything. Journalism had provided a channel for people's natural sense of generosity, and the readers responded. I met a band of homeless children who'd come to Jakarta from the countryside, and ended up living in a train station. By the age of 12 or 14, they'd become beggars and drug addicts. The rural poor had become the urban poor, and in the process, they'd become invisible. These heroin addicts in detox in Pakistan reminded me of figures in a play by Beckett: isolated, waiting in the dark, but drawn to the light. Agent Orange was a defoliant used during the Vietnam War to deny cover to the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army. The active ingredient was dioxin, an extremely toxic chemical that was sprayed in vast quantities, and whose effects passed through the genes to the next generation. In 2000, I began documenting global health issues, concentrating first on AIDS in Africa. I tried to tell the story through the work of caregivers. I thought it was important to emphasize that people were being helped, whether by international NGOs or by local grassroots organizations. So many children have been orphaned by the epidemic that grandmothers have taken the place of parents, and a lot of children had been born with HIV. A hospital in Zambia. I began documenting the close connection between HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. This is an MSF hospital in Cambodia. My pictures can play a supporting role to the work of NGOs by shedding light on the critical social problems they're trying to deal with. I went to Congo with MSF, and contributed to a book and an exhibition that focused attention on a forgotten war in which millions of people have died, and exposure to disease without treatment is used as a weapon. A malnourished child being measured as part of the supplemental feeding program. In the fall of 2004 I went to Darfur. This time I was on assignment for a magazine, but again worked closely with MSF. The international community still hasn't found a way to create the pressure necessary to stop this genocide. An MSF hospital in a camp for displaced people. I've been working on a long project on crime and punishment in America. This is a scene from New Orleans. A prisoner on a chain gang in Alabama was punished by being handcuffed to a post in the midday sun. This experience raised a lot of questions, among them questions about race and equality and for whom in our country opportunities and options are available. In the yard of a chain gang in Alabama. I didn't see either of the planes hit, and when I glanced out my window, I saw the first tower burning, and I thought it might have been an accident. A few minutes later when I looked again and saw the second tower burning, I knew we were at war. In the midst of the wreckage at Ground Zero, I had a realization. I'd been photographing in the Islamic world since 1981 — not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia and Europe. At the time I was photographing in these different places, I thought I was covering separate stories, but on 9/11 history crystallized, and I understood I'd actually been covering a single story for more than 20 years, and the attack on New York was its latest manifestation. The central commercial district of Kabul, Afghanistan at the end of the civil war, shortly before the city fell to the Taliban. Land mine victims being helped at the Red Cross rehab center being run by Alberto Cairo. A boy who lost a leg to a leftover mine. I'd witnessed immense suffering in the Islamic world from political oppression, civil war, foreign invasions, poverty, famine. I understood that in its suffering, the Islamic world had been crying out. Why weren't we listening? A Taliban fighter shot during a battle as the Northern Alliance entered the city of Kunduz. When war with Iraq was imminent, I realized the American troops would be very well covered, so I decided to cover the invasion from inside Baghdad. A marketplace was hit by a mortar shell that killed several members of a single family. A day after American forces entered Baghdad, a company of Marines began rounding up bank robbers and were cheered on by the crowds — a hopeful moment that was short lived. For the first time in years, Shi'ites were allowed to make the pilgrimage to Karbala to observe Ashura, and I was amazed by the sheer number of people and how fervently they practiced their religion. A group of men march through the streets cutting themselves with knives. It was obvious that the Shi'ites were a force to be reckoned with, and we would do well to understand them and learn how to deal with them. Last year I spent several months documenting our wounded troops, from the battlefield in Iraq all the way home. This is a helicopter medic giving CPR to a soldier who had been shot in the head. Military medicine has become so efficient that the percentage of troops who survive after being wounded is much higher in this war than in any other war in our history. The signature weapon of the war is the IED, and the signature wound is severe leg damage. After enduring extreme pain and trauma, the wounded face a grueling physical and psychological struggle in rehab. The spirit they displayed was absolutely remarkable. I tried to imagine myself in their place, and I was totally humbled by their courage and determination in the face of such catastrophic loss. Good people had been put in a very bad situation for questionable results. One day in rehab someone, started talking about surfing and all these guys who'd never surfed before said, "Hey, let's go." And they went surfing. Photographers go to the extreme edges of human experience to show people what's going on. Sometimes they put their lives on the line, because they believe your opinions and your influence matter. They aim their pictures at your best instincts, generosity, a sense of right and wrong, the ability and the willingness to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable. My TED wish: there's a vital story that needs to be told, and I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era. Thank you very much. (Applause)

My wish: Build the Encyclopedia of Life

E.O. Wilson

{0: 'E.O. Wilson'}

{0: ['biologist']}

{0: 'Biologist E.O. Wilson explores the world of ants and other tiny creatures, and writes movingly about the way all creatures great and small are interdependent.'}

2007-03-08

2007-04-03

TED2007

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['TED Prize', 'ants', 'biodiversity', 'biology', 'global issues', 'insects', 'nature', 'science', 'technology', 'ecology']

{340: 'How humans and animals can live together', 40: 'The story of life in photographs', 299: 'A hero of the Congo forest', 2833: 'Meet the microscopic life in your home -- and on your face', 1131: 'Are we ready for neo-evolution?', 509: 'How bacteria "talk"'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/e_o_wilson_my_wish_build_the_encyclopedia_of_life/

As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of all creatures that we learn more about our biosphere -- and build a networked encyclopedia of all the world's knowledge about life.

I have all my life wondered what "mind-boggling" meant. After two days here, I declare myself boggled, and enormously impressed, and feel that you are one of the great hopes — not just for American achievement in science and technology, but for the whole world. I've come, however, on a special mission on behalf of my constituency, which are the 10-to-the-18th-power — that's a million trillion — insects and other small creatures, and to make a plea for them. If we were to wipe out insects alone, just that group alone, on this planet — which we are trying hard to do — the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. And within a few months. Now, how did I come to this particular position of advocacy? As a little boy, and through my teenage years, I became increasingly fascinated by the diversity of life. I had a butterfly period, a snake period, a bird period, a fish period, a cave period and finally and definitively, an ant period. By my college years, I was a devoted myrmecologist, a specialist on the biology of ants, but my attention and research continued to make journeys across the great variety of life on Earth in general — including all that it means to us as a species, how little we understand it and how pressing a danger that our activities have created for it. Out of that broader study has emerged a concern and an ambition, crystallized in the wish that I'm about to make to you. My choice is the culmination of a lifetime commitment that began with growing up on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, on the Florida peninsula. As far back as I can remember, I was enchanted by the natural beauty of that region and the almost tropical exuberance of the plants and animals that grow there. One day when I was only seven years old and fishing, I pulled a "pinfish," they're called, with sharp dorsal spines, up too hard and fast, and I blinded myself in one eye. I later discovered I was also hard of hearing, possibly congenitally, in the upper registers. So in planning to be a professional naturalist — I never considered anything else in my entire life — I found that I was lousy at bird watching and couldn't track frog calls either. So I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world. In so doing, I reached a frontier of biology so strange, so rich, that it seemed as though it exists on another planet. In fact, we live on a mostly unexplored planet. The great majority of organisms on Earth remain unknown to science. In the last 30 years, thanks to explorations in remote parts of the world and advances in technology, biologists have, for example, added a full one-third of the known frog and other amphibian species, to bring the current total to 5,400, and more continue to pour in. Two new kinds of whales have been discovered, along with two new antelopes, dozens of monkey species and a new kind of elephant — and even a distinct kind of gorilla. At the extreme opposite end of the size scale, the class of marine bacteria, the Prochlorococci — that will be on the final exam — although discovered only in 1988, are now recognized as likely the most abundant organisms on Earth, and moreover, responsible for a large part of the photosynthesis that occurs in the ocean. These bacteria were not uncovered sooner because they are also among the smallest of all Earth's organisms — so minute that they cannot be seen with conventional optical microscopy. Yet life in the sea may depend on these tiny creatures. These examples are just the first glimpse of our ignorance of life on this planet. Consider the fungi — including mushrooms, rusts, molds and many disease-causing organisms. 60,000 species are known to science, but more than 1.5 million have been estimated to exist. Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms. About 16,000 species of nematode worms have been discovered and diagnosed by scientists; there could be hundreds of thousands of them, even millions, still unknown. This vast domain of hidden biodiversity is increased still further by the dark matter of the biological world of bacteria, which within just the last several years still were known from only about 6,000 species of bacteria worldwide. But that number of bacteria species can be found in one gram of soil, just a little handful of soil, in the 10 billion bacteria that would be there. It's been estimated that a single ton of soil — fertile soil — contains approximately four million species of bacteria, all unknown. So the question is: what are they all doing? The fact is, we don't know. We are living on a planet with a lot of activities, with reference to our living environment, done by faith and guess alone. Our lives depend upon these creatures. To take an example close to home: there are over 500 species of bacteria now known — friendly bacteria — living symbiotically in your mouth and throat probably necessary to your health for holding off pathogenic bacteria. At this point I think we have a little impressionistic film that was made especially for this occasion. And I'd like to show it. Assisted in this by Billie Holiday. (Video) And that may be just the beginning! The viruses, those quasi-organisms among which are the prophages, the gene weavers that promote the continued evolution in the lives of the bacteria, are a virtually unknown frontier of modern biology, a world unto themselves. What constitutes a viral species is still unresolved, although they're obviously of enormous importance to us. But this much we can say: the variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined. Nowadays, in addressing microbial biodiversity, scientists are like explorers in a rowboat launched onto the Pacific Ocean. But that is changing rapidly with the aid of new genomic technology. Already it is possible to sequence the entire genetic code of a bacterium in under four hours. Soon we will be in a position to go forth in the field with sequencers on our backs — to hunt bacteria in tiny crevices of the habitat's surface in the way you go watching for birds with binoculars. What will we find as we map the living world, as, finally, we get this underway seriously? As we move past the relatively gigantic mammals, birds, frogs and plants to the more elusive insects and other small invertebrates and then beyond to the countless millions of organisms in the invisible living world enveloped and living within humanity? Already what were thought to be bacteria for generations have been found to compose, instead, two great domains of microorganisms: true bacteria and one-celled organisms the archaea, which are closer than other bacteria to the eukaryota, the group that we belong to. Some serious biologists, and I count myself among them, have begun to wonder that among the enormous and still unknown diversity of microorganisms, one might — just might — find aliens among them. True aliens, stocks that arrived from outer space. They've had billions of years to do it, but especially during the earliest period of biological evolution on this planet. We do know that some bacterial species that have earthly origin are capable of almost unimaginable extremes of temperature and other harsh changes in environment, including hard radiation strong enough and maintained long enough to crack the Pyrex vessels around the growing population of bacteria. There may be a temptation to treat the biosphere holistically and the species that compose it as a great flux of entities hardly worth distinguishing one from the other. But each of these species, even the tiniest Prochlorococci, are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine. We will destroy these ecosystems and the species composing them at the peril of our own existence — and unfortunately we are destroying them with ingenuity and ceaseless energy. My own epiphany as a conservationist came in 1953, while a Harvard graduate student, searching for rare ants found in the mountain forests of Cuba, ants that shine in the sunlight — metallic green or metallic blue, according to species, and one species, I discovered, metallic gold. I found my magical ants, but only after a tough climb into the mountains where the last of the native Cuban forests hung on, and were then — and still are — being cut back. I realized then that these species and a large part of the other unique, marvelous animals and plants on that island — and this is true of practically every part of the world — which took millions of years to evolve, are in the process of disappearing forever. And so it is everywhere one looks. The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere by a combination of forces that can be summarized by the acronym "HIPPO," the animal hippo. H is for habitat destruction, including climate change forced by greenhouse gases. I is for the invasive species like the fire ants, the zebra mussels, broom grasses and pathogenic bacteria and viruses that are flooding every country, and at an exponential rate — that's the I. The P, the first one in "HIPPO," is for pollution. The second is for continued population, human population expansion. And the final letter is O, for over-harvesting — driving species into extinction by excessive hunting and fishing. The HIPPO juggernaut we have created, if unabated, is destined — according to the best estimates of ongoing biodiversity research — to reduce half of Earth's still surviving animal and plant species to extinction or critical endangerment by the end of the century. Human-forced climate change alone — again, if unabated — could eliminate a quarter of surviving species during the next five decades. What will we and all future generations lose if much of the living environment is thus degraded? Huge potential sources of scientific information yet to be gathered, much of our environmental stability and new kinds of pharmaceuticals and new products of unimaginable strength and value — all thrown away. The loss will inflict a heavy price in wealth, security and yes, spirituality for all time to come, because previous cataclysms of this kind — the last one, that ended the age of dinosaurs — took, normally, five to 10 million years to repair. Sadly, our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered. For example, even in the United States, the 200,000 species known currently actually has been found to be only partial in coverage; it is mostly unknown to us in basic biology. Only about 15 percent of the known species have been studied well enough to evaluate their status. Of the 15 percent evaluated, 20 percent are classified as "in peril," that is, in danger of extinction. That's in the United States. We are, in short, flying blind into our environmental future. We urgently need to change this. We need to have the biosphere properly explored so that we can understand and competently manage it. We need to settle down before we wreck the planet. And we need that knowledge. This should be a big science project equivalent to the Human Genome Project. It should be thought of as a biological moonshot with a timetable. So this brings me to my wish for TEDsters, and to anyone else around the world who hears this talk. I wish we will work together to help create the key tools that we need to inspire preservation of Earth's biodiversity. And let us call it the "Encyclopedia of Life." What is the "Encyclopedia of Life?" A concept that has already taken hold and is beginning to spread and be looked at seriously? It is an encyclopedia that lives on the Internet and is contributed to by thousands of scientists around the world. Amateurs can do it also. It has an indefinitely expandable page for each species. It makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, on demand, anywhere in the world. I've written about this idea before, and I know there are people in this room who have expended significant effort on it in the past. But what excites me is that since I first put forward this particular idea in that form, science has advanced. Technology has moved forward. Today, the practicalities of making such an encyclopedia, regardless of the magnitude of the information put into it, are within reach. Indeed, in the past year, a group of influential scientific institutions have begun mobilizing to realize this dream. I wish you would help them. Working together, we can make this real. The encyclopedia will quickly pay for itself in practical applications. It will address transcendent qualities in the human consciousness, and sense of human need. It will transform the science of biology in ways of obvious benefit to humanity. And most of all, it can inspire a new generation of biologists to continue the quest that started, for me personally, 60 years ago: to search for life, to understand it and finally, above all, to preserve it. That is my wish. Thank you.

My wish: Rebuilding Rwanda

Bill Clinton

{0: 'Bill Clinton'}

{0: ['activist']}

{0: 'Through his William J. Clinton Foundation, former US President Bill Clinton has become a vital and innovative force for world change. He works in four critical areas: health, economic empowerment, citizen service, and reconciliation.'}

2007-03-08

2007-04-03

TED2007

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'ta', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Africa', 'TED Prize', 'business', 'culture', 'economics', 'global issues', 'health care', 'technology']

{59: 'My wish: Three actions for Africa', 127: 'Want to help Africa? Do business here', 268: 'A hospital tour in Nigeria', 140: 'New insights on poverty', 249: 'World-class health care', 644: 'A third way to think about aid'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_clinton_my_wish_rebuilding_rwanda/

Accepting the 2007 TED Prize, Bill Clinton asks for help in bringing health care to Rwanda -- and the rest of the world.

I thought in getting up to my TED wish I would try to begin by putting in perspective what I try to do and how it fits with what they try to do. We live in a world that everyone knows is interdependent, but insufficient in three major ways. It is, first of all, profoundly unequal: half the world's people still living on less than two dollars a day; a billion people with no access to clean water; two and a half billion no access to sanitation; a billion going to bed hungry every night; one in four deaths every year from AIDS, TB, malaria and the variety of infections associated with dirty water — 80 percent of them under five years of age. Even in wealthy countries it is common now to see inequality growing. In the United States, since 2001 we've had five years of economic growth, five years of productivity growth in the workplace, but median wages are stagnant and the percentage of working families dropping below the poverty line is up by four percent. The percentage of working families without health care up by four percent. So this interdependent world which has been pretty good to most of us — which is why we're all here in Northern California doing what we do for a living, enjoying this evening — is profoundly unequal. It is also unstable. Unstable because of the threats of terror, weapons of mass destruction, the spread of global disease and a sense that we are vulnerable to it in a way that we weren't not so many years ago. And perhaps most important of all, it is unsustainable because of climate change, resource depletion and species destruction. When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities — locally, nationally and globally — that share the characteristics of all successful communities: a broadly shared, accessible set of opportunities, a shared sense of responsibility for the success of the common enterprise and a genuine sense of belonging. All easier said than done. When the terrorist incidents occurred in the United Kingdom a couple of years ago, I think even though they didn't claim as many lives as we lost in the United States on 9/11, I think the thing that troubled the British most was that the perpetrators were not invaders, but homegrown citizens whose religious and political identities were more important to them than the people they grew up with, went to school with, worked with, shared weekends with, shared meals with. In other words, they thought their differences were more important than their common humanity. It is the central psychological plague of humankind in the 21st century. Into this mix, people like us, who are not in public office, have more power to do good than at any time in history, because more than half the world's people live under governments they voted in and can vote out. And even non-democratic governments are more sensitive to public opinion. Because primarily of the power of the Internet, people of modest means can band together and amass vast sums of money that can change the world for some public good if they all agree. When the tsunami hit South Asia, the United States contributed 1.2 billion dollars. 30 percent of our households gave. Half of them gave over the Internet. The median contribution was somewhere around 57 dollars. And thirdly, because of the rise of non-governmental organizations. They, businesses, other citizens' groups, have enormous power to affect the lives of our fellow human beings. When I became president in 1993, there were none of these organizations in Russia. There are now a couple of hundred thousand. None in India. There are now at least a half a million active. None in China. There are now 250,000 registered with the government, probably twice again that many who are not registered for political reasons. When I organized my foundation, and I thought about the world as it is and the world that I hope to leave to the next generation, and I tried to be realistic about what I had cared about all my life that I could still have an impact on. I wanted to focus on activities that would help to alleviate poverty, fight disease, combat climate change, bridge the religious, racial and other divides that torment the world, but to do it in a way that would either use whatever particular skills we could put together in our group to change the way some public good function was performed so that it would sweep across the world more. You saw one reference to that in what we were able to do with AIDS drugs. And I want to say that the head of our AIDS effort, and the person who also is primarily active in the wish I'll make tonight, Ira Magaziner, is here with me and I want to thank him for everything he's done. He's over there. (Applause) When I got out of office and was asked to work, first in the Caribbean, to try to help deal with the AIDS crisis, generic drugs were available for about 500 dollars a person a year. If you bought them in vast bulks, you could get them at a little under 400 dollars. The first country we went to work in, the Bahamas, was paying 3,500 dollars for these drugs. The market was so terribly disorganized that they were buying this medicine through two agents who were gigging them sevenfold. So the very first week we were working, we got the price down to 500 dollars. And all of a sudden, they could save seven times as many lives for the same amount of money. Then we went to work with the manufacturers of AIDS medicines, one of whom was cited in the film, and negotiated a whole different change in business strategy, because even at 500 dollars, these drugs were being sold on a high-margin, low-volume, uncertain-payment basis. So we worked on improving the productivity of the operations and the supply chain, and went to a low-margin, high-volume, absolutely certain-payment business. I joked that the main contribution we made to the battle against AIDS was to get the manufacturers to change from a jewelry store to a grocery store strategy. But the price went to 140 dollars from 500. And pretty soon, the average price was 192 dollars. Now we can get it for about 100 dollars. Children's medicine was 600 dollars, because nobody could afford to buy any of it. We negotiated it down to 190. Then, the French imposed their brilliantly conceived airline tax to create a something called UNITAID, got a bunch of other countries to help. That children's medicine is now 60 dollars a person a year. The only thing that is keeping us from basically saving the lives of everybody who needs the medicine to stay alive are the absence of systems necessary to diagnose, treat and care for people and deliver this medicine. We started a childhood obesity initiative with the Heart Association in America. We tried to do the same thing by negotiating industry-right deals with the soft drink and the snack food industry to cut the caloric and other dangerous content of food going to our children in the schools. We just reorganized the markets. And it occurred to me that in this whole non-governmental world, somebody needs to be thinking about organizing public goods markets. And that is now what we're trying to do, and working with this large cities group to fight climate change, to negotiate huge, big, volume deals that will enable cities which generate 75 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, to drastically and quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is good economics. And this whole discussion as if it's some sort of economic burden, is a mystery to me. I think it's a bird's nest on the ground. When Al Gore won his well-deserved Oscar for the "Inconvenient Truth" movie, I was thrilled, but I had urged him to make a second movie quickly. For those of you who saw "An Inconvenient Truth," the most important slide in the Gore lecture is the last one, which shows here's where greenhouse gases are going if we don't do anything, here's where they could go. And then there are six different categories of things we can do to change the trajectory. We need a movie on those six categories. And all of you need to have it embedded in your brains and to organize yourselves around it. So we're trying to do that. So organizing these markets is one thing we try to do. Now we have taken on a second thing, and this gets to my wish. It has been my experience in working in developing countries that while the headlines may all be — the pessimistic headlines may say, well, we can't do this, that or the other thing because of corruption — I think incapacity is a far bigger problem in poor countries than corruption, and feeds corruption. We now have the money, given these low prices, to distribute AIDS drugs all over the world to people we cannot presently reach. Today these low prices are available in the 25 countries where we work, and in a total of 62 countries, and about 550,000 people are getting the benefits of them. But the money is there to reach others. The systems are not there to reach the people. So what we have been trying to do, working first in Rwanda and then in Malawi and other places — but I want to talk about Rwanda tonight — is to develop a model for rural health care in a very poor area that can be used to deal with AIDS, TB, malaria, other infectious diseases, maternal and child health, and a whole range of health issues poor people are grappling with in the developing world, that can first be scaled for the whole nation of Rwanda, and then will be a model that could literally be implemented in any other poor country in the world. And the test is: one, will it do the job? Will it provide high quality care? And two, will it do it at a price that will enable the country to sustain a health care system without foreign donors after five to 10 years? Because the longer I deal with these problems, the more convinced I am that we have to — whether it's economics, health, education, whatever — we have to build systems. And the absence of systems that function break the connection which got you all in this seat tonight. You think about whatever your life has been, however many obstacles you have faced in your life, at critical junctures you always knew there was a predictable connection between the effort you exerted and the result you achieved. In a world with no systems, with chaos, everything becomes a guerilla struggle, and this predictability is not there. And it becomes almost impossible to save lives, educate kids, develop economies, whatever. The person, in my view, who has done the best job of this in the health care area, of building a system in a very poor area, is Dr. Paul Farmer, who, many of you know, has worked for now 20 years with his group, Partners in Health, primarily in Haiti where he started, but they've also worked in Russia, in Peru and other places around the world. As poor as Haiti is, in the area where Farmer's clinic is active — and they serve a catchment area far greater than the medical professionals they have would indicate they could serve — since 1988, they have not lost one person to tuberculosis, not one. And they've achieved a lot of other amazing health results. So when we decided to work in Rwanda on trying to dramatically increase the income of the country and fight the AIDS problem, we wanted to build a healthcare network, because it had been totally destroyed during the genocide in 1994, and the per capita income was still under a dollar a day. So I rang up, asked Paul Farmer if he would help. Because it seemed to me if we could prove there was a model in Haiti and a model in Rwanda that we could then take all over the country, number one, it would be a wonderful thing for a country that has suffered as much as any on Earth in the last 15 years, and number two, we would have something that could then be adapted to any other poor country anywhere in the world. And so we have set about doing that. Now, we started working together 18 months ago. And we're working in an area called Southern Kayonza, which is one of the poorest areas in Rwanda, with a group that originally includes about 400,000 people. We're essentially implementing what Paul Farmer did in Haiti: he develops and trains paid community health workers who are able to identify health problems, ensure that people who have AIDS or TB are properly diagnosed and take their medicine regularly, who work on bringing about health education, clean water and sanitation, providing nutritional supplements and moving people up the chain of health care if they have problems of the severity that require it. The procedures that make this work have been perfected, as I said, by Paul Farmer and his team in their work in rural Haiti over the last 20 years. Recently we did an evaluation of the first 18 months of our efforts in Rwanda. And the results were so good that the Rwandan government has now agreed to adopt the model for the entire country, and has strongly supported and put the full resources of the government behind it. I'll tell you a little bit about our team because it's indicative of what we do. We have about 500 people around the world working in our AIDS program, some of them for nothing — just for transportation, room and board. And then we have others working in these other related programs. Our business plan in Rwanda was put together under the leadership of Diana Noble, who is an unusually gifted woman, but not unusual in the type of people who have been willing to do this kind of work. She was the youngest partner at Schroder Ventures in London in her 20s. She was CEO of a successful e-venture — she started and built Reed Elsevier Ventures — and at 45 she decided she wanted to do something different with her life. So she now works full-time on this for very little pay. She and her team of former business people have created a business plan that will enable us to scale this health system up for the whole country. And it would be worthy of the kind of private equity work she used to do when she was making a lot more money for it. When we came to this rural area, 45 percent of the children under the age of five had stunted growth due to malnutrition. 23 percent of them died before they reached the age of five. Mortality at birth was over two-and-a-half percent. Over 15 percent of the deaths among adults and children occurred because of intestinal parasites and diarrhea from dirty water and inadequate sanitation — all entirely preventable and treatable. Over 13 percent of the deaths were from respiratory illnesses — again, all preventable and treatable. And not a single soul in this area was being treated for AIDS or tuberculosis. Within the first 18 months, the following things happened: we went from zero to about 2,000 people being treated for AIDS. That's 80 percent of the people who need treatment in this area. Listen to this: less than four-tenths of one percent of those being treated stopped taking their medicine or otherwise defaulted on treatment. That's lower than the figure in the United States. Less than three-tenths of one percent had to transfer to the more expensive second-line drugs. 400,000 pregnant women were brought into counseling and will give birth for the first time within an organized healthcare system. That's about 43 percent of all the pregnancies. About 40 percent of all the people — I said 400,000. I meant 40,000. About 40 percent of all the people who need TB treatment are now getting it — in just 18 months, up from zero when we started. 43 percent of the children in need of an infant feeding program to prevent malnutrition and early death are now getting the food supplements they need to stay alive and to grow. We've started the first malaria treatment programs they've ever had there. Patients admitted to a hospital that was destroyed during the genocide that we have renovated along with four other clinics, complete with solar power generators, good lab technology. We now are treating 325 people a month, despite the fact that almost 100 percent of the AIDS patients are now treated at home. And the most important thing is because we've implemented Paul Farmer's model, using community health workers, we estimate that this system could be put into place for all of Rwanda for between five and six percent of GDP, and that the government could sustain that without depending on foreign aid after five or six years. And for those of you who understand healthcare economics you know that all wealthy countries spend between nine and 11 percent of GDP on health care, except for the United States, we spend 16 — but that's a story for another day. (Laughter) We're now working with Partners in Health and the Ministry of Health in Rwanda and our Foundation folks to scale this system up. We're also beginning to do this in Malawi and Lesotho. And we have similar projects in Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya and Ethiopia with other partners trying to achieve the same thing: to save as many lives as quickly as we can, but to do it in a systematic way that can be implemented nationwide and then with a model that can be implemented in any country in the world. We need initial upfront investment to train doctors, nurses, health administration and community health workers throughout the country, to set up the information technology, the solar energy, the water and sanitation, the transportation infrastructure. But over a five- to 10-year period, we will take down the need for outside assistance and eventually it will be phased out. My wish is that TED assist us in our work and help us to build a high-quality rural health system in a poor country, Rwanda, that can be a model for Africa, and indeed, for any poor country anywhere in the world. My belief is that this will help us to build a more integrated world with more partners and fewer terrorists, with more productive citizens and fewer haters, a place we'd all want our kids and our grandchildren to grow up in. It has been an honor for me, particularly, to work in Rwanda where we also have a major economic development project in partnership with Sir Tom Hunter, the Scottish philanthropist, where last year we, using the same thing with AIDS drugs, cut the cost of fertilizer and the interest rates on microcredit loans by 30 percent and achieved three- to four-hundred percent increases in crop yields with the farmers. These people have been through a lot and none of us, most of all me, helped them when they were on the verge of destroying each other. We're undoing that now, and they are so over it and so into their future. We're doing this in an environmentally responsible way. I'm doing my best to convince them not to run the electric grid to the 35 percent of the people that have no access, but to do it with clean energy. To have responsible reforestation projects, the Rwandans, interestingly enough, have been quite good, Mr. Wilson, in preserving their topsoil. There's a couple of guys from southern farming families — the first thing I did when I went out to this place was to get down on my hands and knees and dig in the dirt and see what they'd done with it. We have a chance here to prove that a country that almost slaughtered itself out of existence can practice reconciliation, reorganize itself, focus on tomorrow and provide comprehensive, quality health care with minimal outside help. I am grateful for this prize, and I will use it to that end. We could use some more help to do this, but think of what it would mean if we could have a world-class health system in Rwanda — in a country with a less-than-one-dollar-a-day-per-capita income, one that could save hundreds of millions of lives over the next decade if applied to every similarly situated country on Earth. It's worth a try and I believe it would succeed. Thank you and God bless you. (Applause)

To invent is to give

Dean Kamen

{0: 'Dean Kamen'}

{0: ['inventor']}

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

2002-02-02

2007-04-05

TED2002

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'cars', 'industrial design', 'innovation', 'invention', 'robots', 'science', 'social change', 'sustainability', 'technology', 'transportation']

{2: 'Simple designs to save a life', 54: 'My wish: A call for open-source architecture', 90: 'Unleash your creativity in a Fab Lab', 1174: 'A future beyond traffic gridlock', 1886: 'Why buses represent democracy in action', 1704: 'A skateboard, with a boost'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_to_invent_is_to_give/

Inventor Dean Kamen lays out his argument for the Segway and offers a peek into his next big ideas (portable energy and water purification for developing countries).

As you pointed out, every time you come here, you learn something. This morning, the world's experts from I guess three or four different companies on building seats, I think concluded that ultimately, the solution is, people shouldn't sit down. I could have told them that. (Laughter) Yesterday, the automotive guys gave us some new insights. They pointed out that, I believe it was between 30 and 50 years from today, they will be steering cars by wire, without all that mechanical stuff. (Laughter) That's reassuring. (Applause) They then pointed out that there'd be, sort of, the other controls by wire, to get rid of all that mechanical stuff. That's pretty good, but why not get rid of the wires? Then you don't need anything to control the car, except thinking about it. I would love to talk about the technology, and sometime, in what's past the 15 minutes, I'll be happy to talk to all the techno-geeks around here about what's in here. But if I had one thing to say about this, before we get to first, it would be that from the time we started building this, the big idea wasn't the technology. It really was a big idea in technology when we started applying it in the iBOT for the disabled community. The big idea here is, I think, a new piece of a solution to a fairly big problem in transportation. And maybe to put that in perspective: there's so much data on this, I'll be happy to give it to you in different forms. You never know what strikes the fancy of whom, but everybody is perfectly willing to believe the car changed the world. And Henry Ford, just about 100 years ago, started cranking out Model Ts. What I don't think most people think about is the context of how technology is applied. For instance, in that time, 91 percent of America lived either on farms or in small towns. So, the car — the horseless carriage that replaced the horse and carriage — was a big deal; it went twice as fast as a horse and carriage. It was half as long. And it was an environmental improvement, because, for instance, in 1903 they outlawed horses and buggies in downtown Manhattan, because you can imagine what the roads look like when you have a million horses, and a million of them urinating and doing other things, and the typhoid and other problems created were almost unimaginable. So the car was the clean environmental alternative to a horse and buggy. It also was a way for people to get from their farm to a farm, or their farm to a town, or from a town to a city. It all made sense, with 91 percent of the people living there. By the 1950s, we started connecting all the towns together with what a lot of people claim is the eighth wonder of the world, the highway system. And it is certainly a wonder. And by the way, as I take shots at old technologies, I want to assure everybody, and particularly the automotive industry — who's been very supportive of us — that I don't think this in any way competes with airplanes, or cars. But think about where the world is today. 50 percent of the global population now lives in cities. That's 3.2 billion people. We've solved all the transportation problems that have changed the world to get it to where we are today. 500 years ago, sailing ships started getting reliable enough; we found a new continent. 150 years ago, locomotives got efficient enough, steam power, that we turned the continent into a country. Over the last hundred years, we started building cars, and then over the 50 years we've connected every city to every other city in an extraordinarily efficient way, and we have a very high standard of living as a consequence of that. But during that entire process, more and more people have been born, and more and more people are moving to cities. China alone is going to move four to six hundred million people into cities in the next decade and a half. And so, nobody, I think, would argue that airplanes, in the last 50 years, have turned the continent and the country now into a neighborhood. And if you just look at how technology has been applied, we've solved all the long-range, high-speed, high-volume, large-weight problems of moving things around. Nobody would want to give them up. And I certainly wouldn't want to give up my airplane, or my helicopter, or my Humvee, or my Porsche. I love them all. I don't keep any of them in my living room. The fact is, the last mile is the problem, and half the world now lives in dense cities. And people spend, depending on who they are, between 90 and 95 percent of their energy getting around on foot. I think there's — I don't know what data would impress you, but how about, 43 percent of the refined fuel produced in the world is consumed by cars in metropolitan areas in the United States. Three million people die every year in cities due to bad air, and almost all particulate pollution on this planet is produced by transportation devices, particularly sitting in cities. And again, I say that not to attack any industry, I think — I really do — I love my airplane, and cars on highways moving 60 miles an hour are extraordinarily efficient, both from an engineering point of view, an energy consumption point of view, and a utility point of view. And we all love our cars, and I do. The problem is, you get into the city and you want to go four blocks, it's neither fun nor efficient nor productive. It's not sustainable. If — in China, in the year 1998, 417 million people used bicycles; 1.7 million people used cars. If five percent of that population became, quote, middle class, and wanted to go the way we've gone in the last hundred years at the same time that 50 percent of their population are moving into cities of the size and density of Manhattan, every six weeks — it isn't sustainable environmentally; it isn't sustainable economically — there just ain't enough oil — and it's not sustainable politically. I mean, what are we fighting over right now? We can make it complicated, but what's the world fighting over right now? So it seemed to me that somebody had to work on that last mile, and it was dumb luck. We were working on iBOTs, but once we made this, we instantly decided it could be a great alternative to jet skis. You don't need the water. Or snowmobiles. You don't need the snow. Or skiing. It's just fun, and people love to move around doing fun things. And every one of those industries, by the way — just golf carts alone is a multi-billion-dollar industry. But rather than go license this off, which is what we normally do, it seemed to me that if we put all our effort not into the technology, but into an understanding of a world that's solved all its other problems, but has somehow come to accept that cities — which, right back from ancient Greece on, were meant to walk around, cities that were architected and built for people — now have a footprint that, while we've solved every other transportation problem — and it's like Moore's law. I mean, look at the time it took to cross a continent in a Conestoga wagon, then on a railroad, then an airplane. Every other form of transportation's been improved. In 5,000 years, we've gone backwards in getting around cities. They've gotten bigger; they're spread out. The most expensive real estate on this planet in every city — Wilshire Boulevard, or Fifth Avenue, or Tokyo, or Paris — the most expensive real estate is their downtowns. 65 percent of the landmass of our cities are parked cars. The 20 largest cities in the world. So you wonder, what if cities could give to their pedestrians what we take for granted as we now go between cities? What if you could make them fun, attractive, clean, environmentally friendly? What if it would make it a little bit more palatable to have access via this, as that last link to mass transit, to get out to your cars so we can all live in the suburbs and use our cars the way we want, and then have our cities energized again? We thought it would be really neat to do that, and one of the problems we really were worried about is: how do we get legal on the sidewalk? Because technically I've got motors; I've got wheels — I'm a motor vehicle. I don't look like a motor vehicle. I have the same footprint as a pedestrian; I have the same unique capability to deal with other pedestrians in a crowded space. I took this down to Ground Zero, and knocked my way through crowds for an hour. I'm a pedestrian. But the law typically lags technology by a generation or two, and if we get told we don't belong on the sidewalk, we have two choices. We're a recreational vehicle that doesn't really matter, and I don't spend my time doing that kind of stuff. Or maybe we should be out in the street in front of a Greyhound bus or a vehicle. We've been so concerned about that, we went to the Postmaster General of the United States, as the first person we ever showed on the outside, and said, "Put your people on it. Everybody trusts their postman. And they belong on the sidewalks, and they'll use it seriously." He agreed. We went to a number of police departments that want their police officers back in the neighborhood on the beat, carrying 70 pounds of stuff. They love it. And I can't believe a policeman is going to give themselves a ticket. (Laughter) So we've been working really, really hard, but we knew that the technology would not be as hard to develop as an attitude about what's important, and how to apply the technology. We went out and we found some visionary people with enough money to let us design and build these things, and in hopefully enough time to get them accepted. So, I'm happy, really, I am happy to talk about this technology as much as you want. And yes, it's really fun, and yes, you should all go out and try it. But if I could ask you to do one thing, it's not to think about it as a piece of technology, but just imagine that, although we all understand somehow that it's reasonable that we use our 4,000-pound machine, which can go 60 miles an hour, that can bring you everywhere you want to go, and somehow it's also what we used for the last mile, and it's broken, and it doesn't work. One of the more exciting things that occurred to us about why it might get accepted, happened out here in California. A few weeks ago, after we launched it, we were here with a news crew on Venice Beach, zipping up and back, and he's marveling at the technology, and meanwhile bicycles are zipping by, and skateboarders are zipping by, and a little old lady — I mean, if you looked in the dictionary, a little old lady — came by me — and now that I'm on this, I'm the height of a normal adult now — and she just stops, and the camera is there, and she looks up at me and says, "Can I try that?" And what was I — you know, how are you going to say anything? And so I said, "Sure." So I get off, and she gets on, and with a little bit of the usual, ah, then she turns around, and she goes about 20 feet, and she turns back around, and she's all smiles. And she comes back to me and she stops, and she says, "Finally, they made something for us." And the camera is looking down at her. I'm thinking, "Wow, that was great — (Laughter) — please lady, don't say another word." (Laughter) And the camera is down at her, and this guy has to put the microphone in her face, said, "What do you mean by that?" And I figured, "It's all over now," and she looks up and she says, "Well," she's still watching these guys go; she says, "I can't ride a bike," no, she says, "I can't use a skateboard, and I've never used roller blades," she knew them by name; she says, "And it's been 50 years since I rode a bicycle." Then she looks up, she's looking up, and she says, "And I'm 81 years old, and I don't drive a car anymore. I still have to get to the store, and I can't carry a lot of things." And it suddenly occurred to me, that among my many fears, were not just that the bureaucracy and the regulators and the legislators might not get it — it was that, fundamentally, you believe there's pressure among the people not to invade the most precious little bit of space left, the sidewalks in these cities. When you look at the 36 inches of legal requirement for sidewalk, then the eight foot for the parked car, then the three lanes, and then the other eight feet — it's — that little piece is all that's there. But she looks up and says this, and it occurs to me, well, kids aren't going to mind these things, and they don't vote, and business people and then young adults aren't going to mind these things — they're pretty cool — so I guess subliminally I was worried that it's the older population that's going to worry. So, having seen this, and having worried about it for eight years, the first thing I do is pick up my phone and ask our marketing and regulatory guys, call AARP, get an appointment right away. We've got to show them this thing. And they took it to Washington; they showed them; and they're going to be involved now, watching how these things get absorbed in a number of cities, like Atlanta, where we're doing trials to see if it really can, in fact, help re-energize their downtown. (Applause) The bottom line is, whether you believe the United Nations, or any of the other think tanks — in the next 20 years, all human population growth on this planet will be in cities. In Asia alone, it will be over a billion people. They learned to start with cell phones. They didn't have to take the 100-year trip we took. They start at the top of the technology food chain. We've got to start building cities and human environments where a 150-pound person can go a couple of miles in a dense, rich, green-space environment, without being in a 4,000-pound machine to do it. Cars were not meant for parallel parking; they're wonderful machines to go between cities, but just think about it: we've solved all the long-range, high-speed problems. The Greeks went from the theater of Dionysus to the Parthenon in their sandals. You do it in your sneakers. Not much has changed. If this thing goes only three times as fast as walking — three times — a 30-minute walk becomes 10 minutes. Your choice, when living in a city, if it's now 10 minutes — because at 30 minutes you want an alternative, whether it's a bus, a train — we've got to build an infrastructure — a light rail — or you're going to keep parking those cars. But if you could put a pin in most cities, and imagine how far you could, if you had the time, walk in one half-hour, it's the city. If you could make it fun, and make it eight or 10 minutes, you can't find your car, un-park your car, move your car, re-park your car and go somewhere; you can't get to a cab or a subway. We could change the way people allocate their resources, the way this planet uses its energy, make it more fun. And we're hoping to some extent history will say we were right. That's Segway. This is a Stirling cycle engine; this had been confused by a lot of things we're doing. This little beast, right now, is producing a few hundred watts of electricity. Yes, it could be attached to this, and yes, on a kilogram of propane, you could drive from New York to Boston if you so choose. Perhaps more interesting about this little engine is it'll burn any fuel, because some of you might be skeptical about the capability of this to have an impact, where most of the world you can't simply plug into your 120-volt outlet. We've been working on this, actually, as an alternative energy source, starting way back with Johnson & Johnson, to run an iBOT, because the best batteries you could get — 10 watt-hours per kilogram in lead, 20 watt-hours per kilogram nickel-cadmium, 40 watt-hours per kilogram in nickel-metal hydride, 60 watt-hours per kilogram in lithium, 8,750 watt-hours of energy in every kilogram of propane or gasoline — which is why nobody drives electric cars. But, in any event, if you can burn it with the same efficiency — because it's external combustion — as your kitchen stove, if you can burn any fuel, it turns out to be pretty neat. It makes just enough electricity to, for instance, do this, which at night is enough electricity, in the rest of the world, as Mr. Holly — Dr. Holly — pointed out, can run computers and a light bulb. But more interestingly, the thermodynamics of this say, you're never going to get more than 20 percent efficiency. It doesn't matter much — it says if you get 200 watts of electricity, you'll get 700 or 800 watts of heat. If you wanted to boil water and re-condense it at a rate of 10 gallons an hour, it takes about 25, a little over 25.3 kilowatt — 25,000 watts of continuous power — to do it. That's so much energy, you couldn't afford to desalinate or clean water in this country that way. Certainly, in the rest of the world, your choice is to devastate the place, turning everything that will burn into heat, or drink the water that's available. The number one cause of death on this planet among humans is bad water. Depending on whose numbers you believe, it's between 60 and 85,000 people per day. We don't need sophisticated heart transplants around the world. We need water. And women shouldn't have to spend four hours a day looking for it, or watching their kids die. We figured out how to put a vapor-compression distiller on this thing, with a counter-flow heat exchanger to take the waste heat, then using a little bit of the electricity control that process, and for 450 watts, which is a little more than half of its waste heat, it will make 10 gallons an hour of distilled water from anything that comes into it to cool it. So if we put this box on here in a few years, could we have a solution to transportation, electricity, and communication, and maybe drinkable water in a sustainable package that weighs 60 pounds? I don't know, but we'll try it. I better shut up. (Applause)

The shrimp with a kick!

Sheila Patek

{0: 'Sheila Patek'}

{0: ['biologist', 'biomechanics researcher']}

{0: "Biologist Sheila Patek is addicted to speed -- animal speed. She's measured the fastest animal movements in the world, made by snail-smashing mantis shrimp and the snapping mandibles of trap-jaw ants."}

2004-02-25

2007-04-05

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['biology', 'biomechanics', 'oceans', 'online video', 'science', 'technology']

{126: 'Swim with the giant sunfish', 76: 'The gentle genius of bonobos', 145: 'The emergent genius of ant colonies', 280: 'Robots inspired by cockroach ingenuity', 1959: 'The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance', 195: 'The sticky wonder of gecko feet'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/sheila_patek_the_shrimp_with_a_kick/

Biologist Sheila Patek talks about her work measuring the feeding strike of the mantis shrimp, one of the fastest movements in the animal world, using video cameras recording at 20,000 frames per second.

If you'd like to learn how to play the lobster, we have some here. And that's not a joke, we really do. So come up afterwards and I'll show you how to play a lobster. So, actually, I started working on what's called the mantis shrimp a few years ago because they make sound. This is a recording I made of a mantis shrimp that's found off the coast of California. And while that's an absolutely fascinating sound, it actually turns out to be a very difficult project. And while I was struggling to figure out how and why mantis shrimp, or stomatopods, make sound, I started to think about their appendages. And mantis shrimp are called "mantis shrimp" after the praying mantises, which also have a fast feeding appendage. And I started to think, well, maybe it will be interesting, while listening to their sounds, to figure out how these animals generate very fast feeding strikes. And so today I'll talk about the extreme stomatopod strike, work that I've done in collaboration with Wyatt Korff and Roy Caldwell. So, mantis shrimp come in two varieties: there are spearers and smashers. And this is a spearing mantis shrimp, or stomatopod. And he lives in the sand, and he catches things that go by overhead. So, a quick strike like that. And if we slow it down a bit, this is the mantis shrimp — the same species — recorded at 1,000 frames a second, played back at 15 frames per second. And you can see it's just a really spectacular extension of the limbs, exploding upward to actually just catch a dead piece of shrimp that I had offered it. Now, the other type of mantis shrimp is the smasher stomatopod, and these guys open up snails for a living. And so this guy gets the snail all set up and gives it a good whack. (Laughter) So, I'll play it one more time. He wiggles it in place, tugs it with his nose, and smash. And a few smashes later, the snail is broken open, and he's got a good dinner. So, the smasher raptorial appendage can stab with a point at the end, or it can smash with the heel. And today I'll talk about the smashing type of strike. And so the first question that came to mind was, well, how fast does this limb move? Because it's moving pretty darn fast on that video. And I immediately came upon a problem. Every single high-speed video system in the biology department at Berkeley wasn't fast enough to catch this movement. We simply couldn't capture it on video. And so this had me stymied for quite a long period of time. And then a BBC crew came cruising through the biology department, looking for a story to do about new technologies in biology. And so we struck up a deal. I said, "Well, if you guys rent the high-speed video system that could capture these movements, you guys can film us collecting the data." And believe it or not, they went for it. (Laughter) So we got this incredible video system. It's very new technology — it just came out about a year ago — that allows you to film at extremely high speeds in low light. And low light is a critical issue with filming animals, because if it's too high, you fry them. (Laughter) So this is a mantis shrimp. There are the eyes up here, and there's that raptorial appendage, and there's the heel. And that thing's going to swing around and smash the snail. And the snail's wired to a stick, so he's a little bit easier to set up the shot. And — yeah. (Laughter) I hope there aren't any snail rights activists around here. (Laughter) So this was filmed at 5,000 frames per second, and I'm playing it back at 15. And so this is slowed down 333 times. And as you'll notice, it's still pretty gosh darn fast slowed down 333 times. It's an incredibly powerful movement. The whole limb extends out. The body flexes backwards — just a spectacular movement. And so what we did is, we took a look at these videos, and we measured how fast the limb was moving to get back to that original question. And we were in for our first surprise. So what we calculated was that the limbs were moving at the peak speed ranging from 10 meters per second all the way up to 23 meters per second. And for those of you who prefer miles per hour, that's over 45 miles per hour in water. And this is really darn fast. In fact, it's so fast we were able to add a new point on the extreme animal movement spectrum. And mantis shrimp are officially the fastest measured feeding strike of any animal system. So our first surprise. (Applause) So that was really cool and very unexpected. So, you might be wondering, well, how do they do it? And actually, this work was done in the 1960s by a famous biologist named Malcolm Burrows. And what he showed in mantis shrimp is that they use what's called a "catch mechanism," or "click mechanism." And what this basically consists of is a large muscle that takes a good long time to contract, and a latch that prevents anything from moving. So the muscle contracts, and nothing happens. And once the muscle's contracted completely, everything's stored up — the latch flies upward, and you've got the movement. And that's basically what's called a "power amplification system." It takes a long time for the muscle to contract, and a very short time for the limb to fly out. And so I thought that this was sort of the end of the story. This was how mantis shrimps make these very fast strikes. But then I took a trip to the National Museum of Natural History. And if any of you ever have a chance, backstage of the National Museum of Natural History is one of the world's best collections of preserved mantis shrimp. And what — (Laughter) this is serious business for me. (Laughter) So, this — what I saw, on every single mantis shrimp limb, whether it's a spearer or a smasher, is a beautiful saddle-shaped structure right on the top surface of the limb. And you can see it right here. It just looks like a saddle you'd put on a horse. It's a very beautiful structure. And it's surrounded by membranous areas. And those membranous areas suggested to me that maybe this is some kind of dynamically flexible structure. And this really sort of had me scratching my head for a while. And then we did a series of calculations, and what we were able to show is that these mantis shrimp have to have a spring. There needs to be some kind of spring-loaded mechanism in order to generate the amount of force that we observe, and the speed that we observe, and the output of the system. So we thought, OK, this must be a spring — the saddle could very well be a spring. And we went back to those high-speed videos again, and we could actually visualize the saddle compressing and extending. And I'll just do that one more time. And then if you take a look at the video — it's a little bit hard to see — it's outlined in yellow. The saddle is outlined in yellow. You can actually see it extending over the course of the strike, and actually hyperextending. So, we've had very solid evidence showing that that saddle-shaped structure actually compresses and extends, and does, in fact, function as a spring. The saddle-shaped structure is also known as a "hyperbolic paraboloid surface," or an "anticlastic surface." And this is very well known to engineers and architects, because it's a very strong surface in compression. It has curves in two directions, one curve upward and opposite transverse curve down the other, so any kind of perturbation spreads the forces over the surface of this type of shape. So it's very well known to engineers, not as well known to biologists. It's also known to quite a few people who make jewelry, because it requires very little material to build this type of surface, and it's very strong. So if you're going to build a thin gold structure, it's very nice to have it in a shape that's strong. Now, it's also known to architects. One of the most famous architects is Eduardo Catalano, who popularized this structure. And what's shown here is a saddle-shaped roof that he built that's 87 and a half feet spanwise. It's two and a half inches thick, and supported at two points. And one of the reasons why he designed roofs this way is because it's — he found it fascinating that you could build such a strong structure that's made of so few materials and can be supported by so few points. And all of these are the same principles that apply to the saddle-shaped spring in stomatopods. In biological systems it's important not to have a whole lot of extra material requirements for building it. So, very interesting parallels between the biological and the engineering worlds. And interestingly, this turns out — the stomatopod saddle turns out to be the first described biological hyperbolic paraboloid spring. That's a bit long, but it is sort of interesting. So the next and final question was, well, how much force does a mantis shrimp produce if they're able to break open snails? And so I wired up what's called a load cell. A load cell measures forces, and this is actually a piezoelectronic load cell that has a little crystal in it. And when this crystal is squeezed, the electrical properties change and it — which — in proportion to the forces that go in. So these animals are wonderfully aggressive, and are really hungry all the time. And so all I had to do was actually put a little shrimp paste on the front of the load cell, and they'd smash away at it. And so this is just a regular video of the animal just smashing the heck out of this load cell. And we were able to get some force measurements out. And again, we were in for a surprise. I purchased a 100-pound load cell, thinking, no animal could produce more than 100 pounds at this size of an animal. And what do you know? They immediately overloaded the load cell. So these are actually some old data where I had to find the smallest animals in the lab, and we were able to measure forces of well over 100 pounds generated by an animal about this big. And actually, just last week I got a 300-pound load cell up and running, and I've clocked these animals generating well over 200 pounds of force. And again, I think this will be a world record. I have to do a little bit more background reading, but I think this will be the largest amount of force produced by an animal of a given — per body mass. So, really incredible forces. And again, that brings us back to the importance of that spring in storing up and releasing so much energy in this system. But that was not the end of the story. Now, things — I'm making this sound very easy, this is actually a lot of work. And I got all these force measurements, and then I went and looked at the force output of the system. And this is just very simple — time is on the X-axis and the force is on the Y-axis. And you can see two peaks. And that was what really got me puzzled. The first peak, obviously, is the limb hitting the load cell. But there's a really large second peak half a millisecond later, and I didn't know what that was. So now, you'd expect a second peak for other reasons, but not half a millisecond later. Again, going back to those high-speed videos, there's a pretty good hint of what might be going on. Here's that same orientation that we saw earlier. There's that raptorial appendage — there's the heel, and it's going to swing around and hit the load cell. And what I'd like you to do in this shot is keep your eye on this, on the surface of the load cell, as the limb comes flying through. And I hope what you are able to see is actually a flash of light. Audience: Wow. Sheila Patek: And so if we just take that one frame, what you can actually see there at the end of that yellow arrow is a vapor bubble. And what that is, is cavitation. And cavitation is an extremely potent fluid dynamic phenomenon which occurs when you have areas of water moving at extremely different speeds. And when this happens, it can cause areas of very low pressure, which results in the water literally vaporizing. And when that vapor bubble collapses, it emits sound, light and heat, and it's a very destructive process. And so here it is in the stomatopod. And again, this is a situation where engineers are very familiar with this phenomenon, because it destroys boat propellers. People have been struggling for years to try and design a very fast rotating boat propeller that doesn't cavitate and literally wear away the metal and put holes in it, just like these pictures show. So this is a potent force in fluid systems, and just to sort of take it one step further, I'm going to show you the mantis shrimp approaching the snail. This is taken at 20,000 frames per second, and I have to give full credit to the BBC cameraman, Tim Green, for setting this shot up, because I could never have done this in a million years — one of the benefits of working with professional cameramen. You can see it coming in, and an incredible flash of light, and all this cavitation spreading over the surface of the snail. So really, just an amazing image, slowed down extremely, to extremely slow speeds. And again, we can see it in slightly different form there, with the bubble forming and collapsing between those two surfaces. In fact, you might have even seen some cavitation going up the edge of the limb. So to solve this quandary of the two force peaks: what I think was going on is: that first impact is actually the limb hitting the load cell, and the second impact is actually the collapse of the cavitation bubble. And these animals may very well be making use of not only the force and the energy stored with that specialized spring, but the extremes of the fluid dynamics. And they might actually be making use of fluid dynamics as a second force for breaking the snail. So, really fascinating double whammy, so to speak, from these animals. So, one question I often get after this talk — so I figured I'd answer it now — is, well, what happens to the animal? Because obviously, if it's breaking snails, the poor limb must be disintegrating. And indeed it does. That's the smashing part of the heel on both these images, and it gets worn away. In fact, I've seen them wear away their heel all the way to the flesh. But one of the convenient things about being an arthropod is that you have to molt. And every three months or so these animals molt, and they build a new limb and it's no problem. Very, very convenient solution to that particular problem. So, I'd like to end on sort of a wacky note. (Laughter) Maybe this is all wacky to folks like you, I don't know. (Laughter) So, the saddles — that saddle-shaped spring — has actually been well known to biologists for a long time, not as a spring but as a visual signal. And there's actually a spectacular colored dot in the center of the saddles of many species of stomatopods. And this is quite interesting, to find evolutionary origins of visual signals on what's really, in all species, their spring. And I think one explanation for this could be going back to the molting phenomenon. So these animals go into a molting period where they're unable to strike — their bodies become very soft. And they're literally unable to strike or they will self-destruct. This is for real. And what they do is, up until that time period when they can't strike, they become really obnoxious and awful, and they strike everything in sight; it doesn't matter who or what. And the second they get into that time point when they can't strike any more, they just signal. They wave their legs around. And it's one of the classic examples in animal behavior of bluffing. It's a well-established fact of these animals that they actually bluff. They can't actually strike, but they pretend to. And so I'm very curious about whether those colored dots in the center of the saddles are conveying some kind of information about their ability to strike, or their strike force, and something about the time period in the molting cycle. So sort of an interesting strange fact to find a visual structure right in the middle of their spring. So to conclude, I mostly want to acknowledge my two collaborators, Wyatt Korff and Roy Caldwell, who worked closely with me on this. And also the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, which gave me three years of funding to just do science all the time, and for that I'm very grateful. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Great cars are great art

Chris Bangle

{0: 'Chris Bangle'}

{0: ['car designer']}

{0: 'Car design is a ubiquitous but often overlooked art form. As chief of design for the BMW Group, Chris Bangle has overseen cars that have been seen the world over, including BMW 7 Series and the Z4 roadster.'}

2002-02-02

2007-04-05

TED2002

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'cars', 'design', 'industrial design', 'invention', 'technology', 'transportation', 'art']

{4: 'The real future of space exploration', 266: 'Designing objects that tell stories', 27: 'Organic design, inspired by nature', 1506: 'The future race car -- 150mph, and no driver', 1724: 'If cars could talk, accidents might be avoidable', 1109: "Google's driverless car"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_bangle_great_cars_are_great_art/

American designer Chris Bangle explains his philosophy that car design is an art form in its own right, with an entertaining -- and ultimately moving -- account of the BMW Group's Deep Blue project, intended to create the SUV of the future.

What I want to talk about is, as background, is the idea that cars are art. This is actually quite meaningful to me, because car designers tend to be a little bit low on the totem pole — we don't do coffee table books with just one lamp inside of it — and cars are thought so much as a product that it's a little bit difficult to get into the aesthetic side under the same sort of terminology that one would discuss art. And so cars, as art, brings it into an emotional plane — if you accept that — that you have to deal with on the same level you would with art with a capital A. Now at this point you're going to see a picture of Michelangelo. This is completely different than automobiles. Automobiles are self-moving things, right? Elevators are automobiles. And they're not very emotional; they solve a purpose; and certainly automobiles have been around for 100 years and have made our lives functionally a lot better in many ways; they've also been a real pain in the ass, because automobiles are really the thing we have to solve. We have to solve the pollution, we have to solve the congestion — but that's not what interests me in this speech. What interests me in this speech is cars. Automobiles may be what you use, but cars are what we are, in many ways. And as long as we can solve the problems of automobiles, and I believe we can, with fuel cells or hydrogen, like BMW is really hip on, and lots of other things, then I think we can look past that and try and understand why this hook is in many of us — of this car-y-ness — and what that means, what we can learn from it. That's what I want to get to. Cars are not a suit of clothes; cars are an avatar. Cars are an expansion of yourself: they take your thoughts, your ideas, your emotions, and they multiply it — your anger, whatever. It's an avatar. It's a super-waldo that you happen to be inside of, and if you feel sexy, the car is sexy. And if you're full of road rage, you've got a "Chevy: Like a Rock," right? Cars are a sculpture — did you know this? That every car you see out there is sculpted by hand. Many people think, "Well, it's computers, and it's done by machines and stuff like that." Well, they reproduce it, but the originals are all done by hand. It's done by men and women who believe a lot in their craft. And they put that same kind of tension into the sculpting of a car that you do in a great sculpture that you would go and look at in a museum. That tension between the need to express, the need to discover, then you put something new into it, and at the same time you have bounds of craftsmanship. Rules that say, this is how you handle surfaces; this is what control is all about; this is how you show you're a master of your craft. And that tension, that discovery, that push for something new — and at the same time, that sense of obligation to the regards of craftsmanship — that's as strong in cars as it is in anything. We work in clay, which hasn't changed much since Michelangelo started screwing around with it, and there's a very interesting analogy to that too. Real quickly — Michelangelo once said he's there to "discover the figure within," OK? There we go, the automobile. That was 100 years right there — did you catch that? Between that one there, and that one there, it changed a lot didn't it? OK, it's not marketing; there's a very interesting car concept here, but the marketing part is not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about this. Why it means you have to wash a car, what is it, that sensuality you have to touch about it? That's the sculpture that goes into it. That sensuality. And it's done by men and women working just like this, making cars. Now this little quote about sculpture from Henry Moore, I believe that that "pressure within" that Moore's talking about — at least when it comes to cars — comes right back to this idea of the mean. It's that will to live, that need to survive, to express itself, that comes in a car, and takes over people like me. And we tell other people, "Do this, do this, do this," until this thing comes alive. We are completely infected. And beauty can be the result of this infectiousness; it's quite wonderful. This sculpture is, of course, at the heart of all of it, and it's really what puts the craftsmanship into our cars. And it's not a whole lot different, really, when they're working like this, or when somebody works like this. It's that same kind of commitment, that same kind of beauty. Now, now I get to the point. I want to talk about cars as art. Art, in the Platonic sense, is truth; it's beauty, and love. Now this is really where designers in car business diverge from the engineers. We don't really have a problem talking about love. We don't have a problem talking about truth or beauty in that sense. That's what we're searching for — when we're working our craft, we are really trying to find that truth out there. We're not trying to find vanity and beauty. We're trying to find the beauty in the truth. However, engineers tend to look at things a little bit more Newtonian, instead of this quantum approach. We're dealing with irrationalisms, and we're dealing with paradoxes that we admit exist, and the engineers tend to look things a little bit more like two and two is four, and if you get 4.0 it's better, and 4.000 is even better. And that sometimes leads to bit of a divergence in why we're doing what we're doing. We've pretty much accepted the fact, though, that we are the women in the organization at BMW — BMW is a very manly type business, — men, men, men; it's engineers. And we're kind of the female side to that. That's OK, that's cool. You go off and be manly. We're going to be a little bit more female. Because what we're interested in is finding form that's more than just a function. We're interested in finding beauty that's more than just an aesthetic; it's really a truth. And I think this idea of soul, as being at the heart of great cars, is very applicable. You all know it. You know a car when you've seen it, with soul. You know how strong this is. Well, this experience of love, and the experience of design, to me, are interchangeable. And now I'm coming to my story. I discovered something about love and design through a project called Deep Blue. And first of all, you have to go with me for a second, and say, you know, you could take the word "love" out of a lot of things in our society, put the word "design" in, and it still works, like this quote here, you know. It kind of works, you know? You can understand that. It works in truisms. "All is fair in design and war." Certainly we live in a competitive society. I think this one here, there's a pop song that really describes Philippe Starck for me, you know, this is like you know, this is like puppy love, you know, this is cool right? Toothbrush, cool. It really only gets serious when you look at something like this. OK? (Laughter) This is one substitution that I believe all of us, in design management, are guilty of. And this idea that there is more to love, more to design, when it gets down to your neighbor, your other, it can be physical like this, and maybe in the future it will be. But right now it's in dealing with our own people, our own teams who are doing the creating. So, to my story. The idea of people-work is what we work with here, and I have to make a bond with my designers when we're creating BMWs. We have to have a shared intimacy, a shared vision — that means we have to work as one family; we have to understand ourselves that way. There's good times; there's interesting times; and there's some stress times too. You want to do cars, you've got to go outside. You've got to do cars in the rain; you've got to do cars in the snow. That's, by the way, is a presentation we made to our board of directors. We haul their butts out in the snow, too. You want to know cars outside? Well, you've got to stand outside to do this. And because these are artists, they have very artistic temperaments. All right? Now one thing about art is, art is discovery, and art is discovering yourself through your art. Right? And one thing about cars is we're all a little bit like Pygmalion, we are completely in love with our own creations. This is one of my favorite paintings, it really describes our relationship with cars. This is sick beyond belief. (Laughter) But because of this, the intimacy with which we work together as a team takes on a new dimension, a new meaning. We have a shared center; we have a shared focus — that car stays at the middle of all our relationships. And it's my job, in the competitive process, to narrow this down. I heard today about Joseph's death genes that have to go in and kill cell reproduction. You know, that's what I have to do sometimes. We start out with 10 cars; we narrow it down to five cars, down to three cars, down to two cars, down to one car, and I'm in the middle of that killing, basically. Someone's love, someone's baby. This is very difficult, and you have to have a bond with your team that permits you to do this, because their life is wrapped up in that too. They've got that gene infected in them as well, and they want that to live, more than anything else. Well, this project, Deep Blue, put me in contact with my team in a way that I never expected, and I want to pass it on to you, because I want you to reflect on this, perhaps in your own relationships. We wanted to a do a car which was a complete leap of faith for BMW. We wanted to do a team which was so removed from the way we'd done it, that I only had a phone number that connected me to them. So, what we did was: instead of having a staff of artists that are just your wrist, we decided to free up a team of creative designers and engineers to find out what's the successor to the SUV phenomenon in America. This is 1996 we did this project. And so we sent them off with this team name, Deep Blue. Now many people know Deep Blue from IBM — we actually stole it from them because we figured if anybody read our faxes they'd think we're talking about computers. It turned out it was quite clever because Deep Blue, in a company like BMW, has a hook — "Deep Blue," wow, cool name. So people get wrapped up in it. And we took a team of designers, and we sent them off to America. And we gave them a budget, what we thought was a set of deliverables, a timetable, and nothing else. Like I said, I just had a phone number that connected me to them. And a group of engineers worked in Germany, and the idea was they would work separately on this problem of what's the successor to the SUV. They would come together, compare notes. Then they would work apart, come together, and they would produce together a monumental set of diverse opinions that didn't pollute each other's ideas — but at the same time came together and resolved the problems. Hopefully, really understand the customer at its heart, where the customer is, live with them in America. So — sent the team off, and actually something different happened. They went other places. (Laughter) They disappeared, quite honestly, and all I got was postcards. Now, I got some postcards of these guys in Las Vegas, and I got some postcards of these guys in the Grand Canyon, and I got these postcards of Niagara Falls, and pretty soon they're in New York, and I don't know where else. And I'm telling myself, "This is going to be a great car, they're doing research that I've never even thought about before." Right? And they decided that instead of, like, having a studio, and six or seven apartments, it was cheaper to rent Elizabeth Taylor's ex-house in Malibu. And — at least they told me it was her house, I guess it was at one time, she had a party there or something. But anyway, this was the house, and they all lived there. Now this is 24/7 living, half-a-dozen people who'd left their — some had left their wives behind and families behind, and they literally lived in this house for the entire six months the project was in America, but the first three months were the most intensive. And one of the young women in the project, she was a fantastic lady, she actually built her room in the bathroom. The bathroom was so big, she built the bed over the bathtub — it's quite fascinating. On the other hand, I didn't know anything about this. OK? Nothing. This is all going on, and all I'm getting is postcards of these guys in Las Vegas, or whatever, saying, "Don't worry Chris, this is really going to be good." OK? So my concept of what a design studio was probably — I wasn't up to speed on where these guys were. However, the engineers back in Munich had taken on this kind of Newtonian solution, and they were trying to find how many cup holders can dance on the head of a pin, and, you know, these really serious questions that are confronting the modern consumer. And one was hoping that these two teams would get together, and this collusion of incredible creativity, under these incredible surroundings, and these incredibly stressed-out engineers, would create some incredible solutions. Well, what I didn't know was, and what we found out was — these guys, they can't even like talk to each other under those conditions. You get a divergence of Newtonian and quantum thinking at that point, you have a split in your dialog that is so deep, and so far, that they cannot bring this together at all. And so we had our first meeting, after three months, in Tiburon, which is just up the road from here — you know Tiburon? And the idea was after the first three months of this independent research they would present it all to Dr. Goschel — who is now my boss, and at that time he was co-mentor on the project — and they would present their results. We would see where we were going, we would see the first indication of what could be the successive phenomenon to the SUV in America. And so I had these ideas in my head, that this is going to be great. I mean, I'm going to see so much work, it's so intense — I know probably Las Vegas meant a lot about it, and I'm not really sure where the Grand Canyon came in either — but somehow all this is going to come together, and I'm going to see some really great product. So we went to Tiburon, after three months, and the team had gotten together the week before, many days ahead of time. The engineers flew over, and designers got together with them, and they put their presentation together. Well, it turns out that the engineers hadn't done anything. And they hadn't done anything because — kind of, like in car business, engineers are there to solve problems, and we were asking them to create a problem. And the engineers were waiting for the designers to say, "This is the problem that we've created, now help us solve it." And they couldn't talk about it. So what happened was, the engineers showed up with nothing. And the engineers told the designers, "If you go in with all your stuff, we'll walk out, we'll walk right out of the project." So I didn't know any of this, and we got a presentation that had an agenda, looked like this. There was a whole lot of dialog. We spent four hours being told all about vocabulary that needs to be built between engineers and designers. And here I'm expecting at any moment, "OK, they're going to turn the page, and I'm going to see the cars, I'm going to see the sketches, I'm going to see maybe some idea of where it's going." Dialog kept on going, with mental maps of words, and pretty soon it was becoming obvious that instead of being dazzled with brilliance, I was seriously being baffled with bullshit. And if you can imagine what this is like, to have these months of postcard indication of how great this team is working, and they're out there spending all this money, and they're learning, and they're doing all this stuff. I went fucking ballistic, right? I went nuts. You can probably remember Tiburon, it used to look like this. After four hours of this, I stood up, and I took this team apart. I screamed at them, I yelled at them, "What the hell are you doing? You're letting me down, you're my designers, you're supposed to be the creative ones, what the hell is going on around here?" It was probably one of my better tirades, I have some good ones, but this was probably one of my better ones. And I went into these people; how could they take BMW's money, how could they have a holiday for three months and produce nothing, nothing? Because of course they didn't tell us that they had three station wagons full of drawings, model concepts, pictures — everything I wanted, they'd locked up in the cars, because they had shown solidarity with the engineers — and they'd decided not to show me anything, in order to give the chance for problem solving a chance to start, because they hadn't realized, of course, that they couldn't do problem creating. So we went to lunch — (Laughter) And I've got to tell you, this was one seriously quiet lunch. The engineers all sat at one end of the table, the designers and I sat at the other end of the table, really quiet. And I was just fucking furious, furious. OK? Probably because they had all the fun and I didn't, you know. That's what you get furious about right? And somebody asked me about Catherine, my wife, you know, did she fly out with me or something? I said, "No," and it triggered a set of thoughts about my wife. And I recalled that when Catherine and I were married, the priest gave a very nice sermon, and he said something very important. He said, "Love is not selfish," he said, "Love does not mean counting how many times I say, 'I love you.' It doesn't mean you had sex this many times this month, and it's two times less than last month, so that means you don't love me as much. Love is not selfish." And I thought about this, and I thought, "You know, I'm not showing love here. I'm seriously not showing love. I'm in the air, I'm in the air without trust. This cannot be. This cannot be that I'm expecting a certain number of sketches, and to me that's my quantification method for qualifying a team. This cannot be." So I told them this story. I said, "Guys, I'm thinking about something here, this isn't right. I can't have a relationship with you guys based on a premise that is a quantifiable one. Based on a dictate premise that says, 'I'm a boss, you do what I say, without trust.'" I said "This can't be." Actually, we all broke down into tears, to be quite honest about it, because they still could not tell me how much frustration they had built up inside of them, not being able to show me what I wanted, and merely having to ask me to trust them that it would come. And I think we felt much closer that day, we cut a lot of strings that didn't need to be there, and we forged the concept for what real team and creativity is all about. We put the car back at the center of our thoughts, and we put love, I think, truly back into the center of the process. By the way, that team went on to create six different concepts for the next model of what would be the proposal for the next generation after SUVs in America. One of those was the idea of a crossover coupes — you see it downstairs, the X Coupe — they had a lot of fun with that. It was the rendition of our motorcycle, the GS, as Carl Magnusson says, "brute-iful," as the idea of what could be a motorcycle, if you add two more wheels. And so, in conclusion, my lesson that I wanted to pass on to you, was this one here. I'm also going to steal a little quote out of "Little Prince." There's a lot to be said about trust and love, if you know that those two words are synonymous for design. I had a very, very meaningful relationship with my team that day, and it's stayed that way ever since. And I hope that you too find that there's more to design, and more towards the art of the design, than doing it yourself. It's true that the trust and the love, that makes it worthwhile. Thanks so much. (Applause)

Software (as) art

Golan Levin

{0: 'Golan Levin'}

{0: ['experimental audio-visual artist']}

{0: 'Half performance artist, half software engineer, Golan Levin manipulates the computer to create improvised soundscapes with dazzling corresponding visuals. He is at the forefront of defining new parameters for art.'}

2004-02-27

2007-04-05

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['art', 'entertainment', 'invention', 'music', 'performance', 'software', 'technology']

{144: "The Web's secret stories", 241: 'A new kind of music video', 32: 'Art with wire, sugar, chocolate and string', 1571: 'How art, technology and design inform creative leaders', 606: 'Art that looks back at you', 1244: 'The day I turned down Tim Berners-Lee'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/golan_levin_software_as_art/

Engineer and artist Golan Levin pushes the boundaries of what's possible with audiovisuals and technology. In an amazing TED display, he shows two programs he wrote to perform his original compositions.

Imagine spending seven years at MIT and research laboratories, only to find out that you're a performance artist. (Laughter) I'm also a software engineer, and I make lots of different kinds of art with the computer. And I think the main thing that I'm interested in is trying to find a way of making the computer into a personal mode of expression. And many of you out there are the heads of Macromedia and Microsoft, and in a way those are my bane: I think there's a great homogenizing force that software imposes on people and limits the way they think about what's possible on the computer. Of course, it's also a great liberating force that makes possible, you know, publishing and so forth, and standards, and so on. But, in a way, the computer makes possible much more than what most people think, and my art has just been about trying to find a personal way of using the computer, and so I end up writing software to do that. Chris has asked me to do a short performance, and so I'm going to take just this time — maybe 10 minutes — to do that, and hopefully at the end have just a moment to show you a couple of my other projects in video form. Thank you. (Applause) We've got about a minute left. I'd just like to show a clip from a most recent project. I did a performance with two singers who specialize in making strange noises with their mouths. And this just came off last September at ARS Electronica; we repeated it in England. And the idea is to visualize their speech and song behind them with a large screen. We used a computer vision tracking system in order to know where they were. And since we know where their heads are, and we have a wireless mic on them that we're processing the sound from, we're able to create visualizations which are linked very tightly to what they're doing with their speech. This will take about 30 seconds or so. He's making a, kind of, cheek-flapping sound. Well, suffice it to say it's not all like that, but that's part of it. Thanks very much. There's always lots more. I'm overtime, so I just wanted to say you can, if you're in New York, you can check out my work at the Whitney Biennial next week, and also at Bitforms Gallery in Chelsea. And with that, I think I should give up the stage, so, thank you so much.

How we discovered DNA

James Watson

{0: 'James Watson'}

{0: ['biologist', 'nobel laureate']}

{0: "Nobel laureate James Watson took part in one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century: the discovery of the structure of DNA. More than 50 years later, he continues to investigate biology's deepest secrets. "}

2005-02-02

2007-04-05

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['DNA', 'culture', 'genetics', 'history', 'invention', 'science', 'storytelling', 'technology']

{83: 'My wish: Build the Encyclopedia of Life', 194: 'Beauty, truth and ... physics?', 147: 'Visualizing the wonder of a living cell', 1322: 'Animations of unseeable biology', 331: 'DNA folding, in detail', 39689: 'Can we cure genetic diseases by rewriting DNA?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_watson_how_we_discovered_dna/

Nobel laureate James Watson opens TED2005 with the frank and funny story of how he and his research partner, Francis Crick, discovered the structure of DNA.

Well, I thought there would be a podium, so I'm a bit scared. (Laughter) Chris asked me to tell again how we found the structure of DNA. And since, you know, I follow his orders, I'll do it. But it slightly bores me. (Laughter) And, you know, I wrote a book. So I'll say something — (Laughter) — I'll say a little about, you know, how the discovery was made, and why Francis and I found it. And then, I hope maybe I have at least five minutes to say what makes me tick now. In back of me is a picture of me when I was 17. I was at the University of Chicago, in my third year, and I was in my third year because the University of Chicago let you in after two years of high school. So you — it was fun to get away from high school — (Laughter) — because I was very small, and I was no good in sports, or anything like that. But I should say that my background — my father was, you know, raised to be an Episcopalian and Republican, but after one year of college, he became an atheist and a Democrat. (Laughter) And my mother was Irish Catholic, and — but she didn't take religion too seriously. And by the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. I guess, you know, he was the big hero. And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution. And at the University of Chicago I was a zoology major, and thought I would end up, you know, if I was bright enough, maybe getting a Ph.D. from Cornell in ornithology. Then, in the Chicago paper, there was a review of a book called "What is Life?" by the great physicist, Schrodinger. And that, of course, had been a question I wanted to know. You know, Darwin explained life after it got started, but what was the essence of life? And Schrodinger said the essence was information present in our chromosomes, and it had to be present on a molecule. I'd never really thought of molecules before. You know chromosomes, but this was a molecule, and somehow all the information was probably present in some digital form. And there was the big question of, how did you copy the information? So that was the book. And so, from that moment on, I wanted to be a geneticist — understand the gene and, through that, understand life. So I had, you know, a hero at a distance. It wasn't a baseball player; it was Linus Pauling. And so I applied to Caltech and they turned me down. (Laughter) So I went to Indiana, which was actually as good as Caltech in genetics, and besides, they had a really good basketball team. (Laughter) So I had a really quite happy life at Indiana. And it was at Indiana I got the impression that, you know, the gene was likely to be DNA. And so when I got my Ph.D., I should go and search for DNA. So I first went to Copenhagen because I thought, well, maybe I could become a biochemist, but I discovered biochemistry was very boring. It wasn't going anywhere toward, you know, saying what the gene was; it was just nuclear science. And oh, that's the book, little book. You can read it in about two hours. And — but then I went to a meeting in Italy. And there was an unexpected speaker who wasn't on the program, and he talked about DNA. And this was Maurice Wilkins. He was trained as a physicist, and after the war he wanted to do biophysics, and he picked DNA because DNA had been determined at the Rockefeller Institute to possibly be the genetic molecules on the chromosomes. Most people believed it was proteins. But Wilkins, you know, thought DNA was the best bet, and he showed this x-ray photograph. Sort of crystalline. So DNA had a structure, even though it owed it to probably different molecules carrying different sets of instructions. So there was something universal about the DNA molecule. So I wanted to work with him, but he didn't want a former birdwatcher, and I ended up in Cambridge, England. So I went to Cambridge, because it was really the best place in the world then for x-ray crystallography. And x-ray crystallography is now a subject in, you know, chemistry departments. I mean, in those days it was the domain of the physicists. So the best place for x-ray crystallography was at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. And there I met Francis Crick. I went there without knowing him. He was 35. I was 23. And within a day, we had decided that maybe we could take a shortcut to finding the structure of DNA. Not solve it like, you know, in rigorous fashion, but build a model, an electro-model, using some coordinates of, you know, length, all that sort of stuff from x-ray photographs. But just ask what the molecule — how should it fold up? And the reason for doing so, at the center of this photograph, is Linus Pauling. About six months before, he proposed the alpha helical structure for proteins. And in doing so, he banished the man out on the right, Sir Lawrence Bragg, who was the Cavendish professor. This is a photograph several years later, when Bragg had cause to smile. He certainly wasn't smiling when I got there, because he was somewhat humiliated by Pauling getting the alpha helix, and the Cambridge people failing because they weren't chemists. And certainly, neither Crick or I were chemists, so we tried to build a model. And he knew, Francis knew Wilkins. So Wilkins said he thought it was the helix. X-ray diagram, he thought was comparable with the helix. So we built a three-stranded model. The people from London came up. Wilkins and this collaborator, or possible collaborator, Rosalind Franklin, came up and sort of laughed at our model. They said it was lousy, and it was. So we were told to build no more models; we were incompetent. (Laughter) And so we didn't build any models, and Francis sort of continued to work on proteins. And basically, I did nothing. And — except read. You know, basically, reading is a good thing; you get facts. And we kept telling the people in London that Linus Pauling's going to move on to DNA. If DNA is that important, Linus will know it. He'll build a model, and then we're going to be scooped. And, in fact, he'd written the people in London: Could he see their x-ray photograph? And they had the wisdom to say "no." So he didn't have it. But there was ones in the literature. Actually, Linus didn't look at them that carefully. But about, oh, 15 months after I got to Cambridge, a rumor began to appear from Linus Pauling's son, who was in Cambridge, that his father was now working on DNA. And so, one day Peter came in and he said he was Peter Pauling, and he gave me a copy of his father's manuscripts. And boy, I was scared because I thought, you know, we may be scooped. I have nothing to do, no qualifications for anything. (Laughter) And so there was the paper, and he proposed a three-stranded structure. And I read it, and it was just — it was crap. (Laughter) So this was, you know, unexpected from the world's — (Laughter) — and so, it was held together by hydrogen bonds between phosphate groups. Well, if the peak pH that cells have is around seven, those hydrogen bonds couldn't exist. We rushed over to the chemistry department and said, "Could Pauling be right?" And Alex Hust said, "No." So we were happy. (Laughter) And, you know, we were still in the game, but we were frightened that somebody at Caltech would tell Linus that he was wrong. And so Bragg said, "Build models." And a month after we got the Pauling manuscript — I should say I took the manuscript to London, and showed the people. Well, I said, Linus was wrong and that we're still in the game and that they should immediately start building models. But Wilkins said "no." Rosalind Franklin was leaving in about two months, and after she left he would start building models. And so I came back with that news to Cambridge, and Bragg said, "Build models." Well, of course, I wanted to build models. And there's a picture of Rosalind. She really, you know, in one sense she was a chemist, but really she would have been trained — she didn't know any organic chemistry or quantum chemistry. She was a crystallographer. And I think part of the reason she didn't want to build models was, she wasn't a chemist, whereas Pauling was a chemist. And so Crick and I, you know, started building models, and I'd learned a little chemistry, but not enough. Well, we got the answer on the 28th February '53. And it was because of a rule, which, to me, is a very good rule: Never be the brightest person in a room, and we weren't. We weren't the best chemists in the room. I went in and showed them a pairing I'd done, and Jerry Donohue — he was a chemist — he said, it's wrong. You've got — the hydrogen atoms are in the wrong place. I just put them down like they were in the books. He said they were wrong. So the next day, you know, after I thought, "Well, he might be right." So I changed the locations, and then we found the base pairing, and Francis immediately said the chains run in absolute directions. And we knew we were right. So it was a pretty, you know, it all happened in about two hours. From nothing to thing. And we knew it was big because, you know, if you just put A next to T and G next to C, you have a copying mechanism. So we saw how genetic information is carried. It's the order of the four bases. So in a sense, it is a sort of digital-type information. And you copy it by going from strand-separating. So, you know, if it didn't work this way, you might as well believe it, because you didn't have any other scheme. (Laughter) But that's not the way most scientists think. Most scientists are really rather dull. They said, we won't think about it until we know it's right. But, you know, we thought, well, it's at least 95 percent right or 99 percent right. So think about it. The next five years, there were essentially something like five references to our work in "Nature" — none. And so we were left by ourselves, and trying to do the last part of the trio: how do you — what does this genetic information do? It was pretty obvious that it provided the information to an RNA molecule, and then how do you go from RNA to protein? For about three years we just — I tried to solve the structure of RNA. It didn't yield. It didn't give good x-ray photographs. I was decidedly unhappy; a girl didn't marry me. It was really, you know, sort of a shitty time. (Laughter) So there's a picture of Francis and I before I met the girl, so I'm still looking happy. (Laughter) But there is what we did when we didn't know where to go forward: we formed a club and called it the RNA Tie Club. George Gamow, also a great physicist, he designed the tie. He was one of the members. The question was: How do you go from a four-letter code to the 20-letter code of proteins? Feynman was a member, and Teller, and friends of Gamow. But that's the only — no, we were only photographed twice. And on both occasions, you know, one of us was missing the tie. There's Francis up on the upper right, and Alex Rich — the M.D.-turned-crystallographer — is next to me. This was taken in Cambridge in September of 1955. And I'm smiling, sort of forced, I think, because the girl I had, boy, she was gone. (Laughter) And so I didn't really get happy until 1960, because then we found out, basically, you know, that there are three forms of RNA. And we knew, basically, DNA provides the information for RNA. RNA provides the information for protein. And that let Marshall Nirenberg, you know, take RNA — synthetic RNA — put it in a system making protein. He made polyphenylalanine, polyphenylalanine. So that's the first cracking of the genetic code, and it was all over by 1966. So there, that's what Chris wanted me to do, it was — so what happened since then? Well, at that time — I should go back. When we found the structure of DNA, I gave my first talk at Cold Spring Harbor. The physicist, Leo Szilard, he looked at me and said, "Are you going to patent this?" And — but he knew patent law, and that we couldn't patent it, because you couldn't. No use for it. (Laughter) And so DNA didn't become a useful molecule, and the lawyers didn't enter into the equation until 1973, 20 years later, when Boyer and Cohen in San Francisco and Stanford came up with their method of recombinant DNA, and Stanford patented it and made a lot of money. At least they patented something which, you know, could do useful things. And then, they learned how to read the letters for the code. And, boom, we've, you know, had a biotech industry. And, but we were still a long ways from, you know, answering a question which sort of dominated my childhood, which is: How do you nature-nurture? And so I'll go on. I'm already out of time, but this is Michael Wigler, a very, very clever mathematician turned physicist. And he developed a technique which essentially will let us look at sample DNA and, eventually, a million spots along it. There's a chip there, a conventional one. Then there's one made by a photolithography by a company in Madison called NimbleGen, which is way ahead of Affymetrix. And we use their technique. And what you can do is sort of compare DNA of normal segs versus cancer. And you can see on the top that cancers which are bad show insertions or deletions. So the DNA is really badly mucked up, whereas if you have a chance of surviving, the DNA isn't so mucked up. So we think that this will eventually lead to what we call "DNA biopsies." Before you get treated for cancer, you should really look at this technique, and get a feeling of the face of the enemy. It's not a — it's only a partial look, but it's a — I think it's going to be very, very useful. So, we started with breast cancer because there's lots of money for it, no government money. And now I have a sort of vested interest: I want to do it for prostate cancer. So, you know, you aren't treated if it's not dangerous. But Wigler, besides looking at cancer cells, looked at normal cells, and made a really sort of surprising observation. Which is, all of us have about 10 places in our genome where we've lost a gene or gained another one. So we're sort of all imperfect. And the question is well, if we're around here, you know, these little losses or gains might not be too bad. But if these deletions or amplifications occurred in the wrong gene, maybe we'll feel sick. So the first disease he looked at is autism. And the reason we looked at autism is we had the money to do it. Looking at an individual is about 3,000 dollars. And the parent of a child with Asperger's disease, the high-intelligence autism, had sent his thing to a conventional company; they didn't do it. Couldn't do it by conventional genetics, but just scanning it we began to find genes for autism. And you can see here, there are a lot of them. So a lot of autistic kids are autistic because they just lost a big piece of DNA. I mean, big piece at the molecular level. We saw one autistic kid, about five million bases just missing from one of his chromosomes. We haven't yet looked at the parents, but the parents probably don't have that loss, or they wouldn't be parents. Now, so, our autism study is just beginning. We got three million dollars. I think it will cost at least 10 to 20 before you'd be in a position to help parents who've had an autistic child, or think they may have an autistic child, and can we spot the difference? So this same technique should probably look at all. It's a wonderful way to find genes. And so, I'll conclude by saying we've looked at 20 people with schizophrenia. And we thought we'd probably have to look at several hundred before we got the picture. But as you can see, there's seven out of 20 had a change which was very high. And yet, in the controls there were three. So what's the meaning of the controls? Were they crazy also, and we didn't know it? Or, you know, were they normal? I would guess they're normal. And what we think in schizophrenia is there are genes of predisposure, and whether this is one that predisposes — and then there's only a sub-segment of the population that's capable of being schizophrenic. Now, we don't have really any evidence of it, but I think, to give you a hypothesis, the best guess is that if you're left-handed, you're prone to schizophrenia. 30 percent of schizophrenic people are left-handed, and schizophrenia has a very funny genetics, which means 60 percent of the people are genetically left-handed, but only half of it showed. I don't have the time to say. Now, some people who think they're right-handed are genetically left-handed. OK. I'm just saying that, if you think, oh, I don't carry a left-handed gene so therefore my, you know, children won't be at risk of schizophrenia. You might. OK? (Laughter) So it's, to me, an extraordinarily exciting time. We ought to be able to find the gene for bipolar; there's a relationship. And if I had enough money, we'd find them all this year. I thank you.

Design is in the details

Paul Bennett

{0: 'Paul Bennett'}

{0: ['designer; creative director', 'ideo']}

{0: 'As a creative director at Ideo, Paul Bennett reminds us that design need not invoke grand gestures or sweeping statements to be successful, but instead can focus on the little things in life, the obvious, the overlooked.'}

2005-07-14

2007-04-05

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'design', 'industrial design', 'product design']

{392: 'Tales of creativity and play', 266: 'Designing objects that tell stories', 172: 'Designing for simplicity', 646: 'Designers -- think big!', 207: 'Treat design as art', 122: 'Human-centered design'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bennett_design_is_in_the_details/

Showing a series of inspiring, unusual and playful products, British branding and design guru Paul Bennett explains that design doesn't have to be about grand gestures, but can solve small, universal and overlooked problems.

Hello. Actually, that's "hello" in Bauer Bodoni for the typographically hysterical amongst us. One of the threads that seems to have come through loud and clear in the last couple of days is this need to reconcile what the Big wants — the "Big" being the organization, the system, the country — and what the "Small" wants — the individual, the person. And how do you bring those two things together? Charlie Ledbetter, yesterday, I thought, talked very articulately about this need to bring consumers, to bring people into the process of creating things. And that's what I want to talk about today. So, bringing together the Small to help facilitate and create the Big, I think, is something that we believe in — something I believe in, and something that we kind of bring to life through what we do at Ideo. I call this first chapter — for the Brits in the room — the "Blinding Glimpse of the Bleeding Obvious." Often, the good ideas are so staring-at-you-right-in-the-face that you kind of miss them. And I think, a lot of times, what we do is just, sort of, hold the mirror up to our clients, and sort of go, "Duh! You know, look what's really going on." And rather than talk about it in the theory, I think I'm just going to show you an example. We were asked by a large healthcare system in Minnesota to describe to them what their patient experience was. And I think they were expecting — they'd worked with lots of consultants before — I think they were expecting some kind of hideous org chart with thousands of bubbles and systemic this, that and the other, and all kinds of mappy stuff. Or even worse, some kind of ghastly death-by-Powerpoint thing with WowCharts and all kinds of, you know, God knows, whatever. The first thing we actually shared with them was this. I'll play this until your eyeballs completely dissolve. This is 59 seconds into the film. This is a minute 59. 3:19. I think something happens. I think a head may appear in a second. 5:10. 5:58. 6:20. We showed them the whole cut, and they were all completely, what is this? And the point is when you lie in a hospital bed all day, all you do is look at the roof, and it's a really shitty experience. And just putting yourself in the position of the patient — this is Christian, who works with us at Ideo. He just lay in the hospital bed, and, kind of, stared at the polystyrene ceiling tiles for a really long time. That's what it's like to be a patient in the hospital. And they were sort, you know, blinding glimpse of bleeding obvious. Oh, my goodness. So, looking at the situation from the point of view of the person out — as opposed to the traditional position of the organization in — was, for these guys, quite a revelation. And so, that was a really catalytic thing for them. So they snapped into action. They said, OK, it's not about systemic change. It's not about huge, ridiculous things that we need to do. It's about tiny things that can make a huge amount of difference. So we started with them prototyping some really little things that we could do to have a huge amount of impact. The first thing we did was we took a little bicycle mirror and we Band-Aided it here, onto a gurney, a hospital trolley, so that when you were wheeled around by a nurse or by a doctor, you could actually have a conversation with them. You could, kind of, see them in your rear-view mirror, so it created a tiny human interaction. Very small example of something that they could do. Interestingly, the nurses themselves, sort of, snapped into action — said, OK, we embrace this. What can we do? The first thing they do is they decorated the ceiling. Which I thought was really — I showed this to my mother recently. I think my mother now thinks that I'm some sort of interior decorator. It's what I do for a living, sort of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. Not particularly the world's best design solution for those of us who are real, sort of, hard-core designers, but nonetheless, a fabulous empathic solution for people. Things that they started doing themselves — like changing the floor going into the patient's room so that it signified, "This is my room. This is my personal space" — was a really interesting sort of design solution to the problem. So you went from public space to private space. And another idea, again, that came from one of the nurses — which I love — was they took traditional, sort of, corporate white boards, then they put them on one wall of the patient's room, and they put this sticker there. So that what you could actually do was go into the room and write messages to the person who was sick in that room, which was lovely. So, tiny, tiny, tiny solutions that made a huge amount of impact. I thought that was a really, really nice example. So this is not particularly a new idea, kind of, seeing opportunities in things that are around you and snapping and turning them into a solution. It's a history of invention based around this. I'm going to read this because I want to get these names right. Joan Ganz Cooney saw her daughter — came down on a Saturday morning, saw her daughter watching the test card, waiting for programs to come on one morning and from that came Sesame Street. Malcolm McLean was moving from one country to another and was wondering why it took these guys so long to get the boxes onto the ship. And he invented the shipping container. George de Mestral — this is not bugs all over a Birkenstock — was walking his dog in a field and got covered in burrs, sort of little prickly things, and from that came Velcro. And finally, for the Brits, Percy Shaw — this is a big British invention — saw the cat's eyes at the side of the road, when he was driving home one night and from that came the Catseye. So there's a whole series of just using your eyes, seeing things for the first time, seeing things afresh and using them as an opportunity to create new possibilities. Second one, without sounding overly Zen, and this is a quote from the Buddha: "Finding yourself in the margins, looking to the edges of things, is often a really interesting place to start." Blinkered vision tends to produce, I think, blinkered solutions. So, looking wide, using your peripheral vision, is a really interesting place to look for opportunity. Again, another medical example here. We were asked by a device producer — we did the Palm Pilot and the Treo. We did a lot of sexy tech at Ideo — they'd seen this and they wanted a sexy piece of technology for medical diagnostics. This was a device that a nurse uses when they're doing a spinal procedure in hospital. They'll ask the nurses to input data. And they had this vision of the nurse, kind of, clicking away on this aluminum device and it all being incredibly, sort of, gadget-lustish. When we actually went and watched this procedure taking place — and I'll explain this in a second — it became very obvious that there was a human dimension to this that they really weren't recognizing. When you're having a four-inch needle inserted into your spine — which was the procedure that this device's data was about; it was for pain management — you're shit scared; you're freaking out. And so the first thing that pretty much every nurse did, was hold the patient's hand to comfort them. Human gesture — which made the fabulous two-handed data input completely impossible. So, the thing that we designed, much less sexy but much more human and practical, was this. So, it's not a Palm Pilot by any stretch of the imagination, but it has a thumb-scroll so you can do everything with one hand. So, again, going back to this — the idea that a tiny human gesture dictated the design of this product. And I think that's really, really important. So, again, this idea of workarounds. We use this phrase "workarounds" a lot, sort of, looking around us. I was actually looking around the TED and just watching all of these kind of things happen while I've been here. This idea of the way that people cobble together solutions in our life — and the things we kind of do in our environment that are somewhat subconscious but have huge potential — is something that we look at a lot. We wrote a book recently, I think you might have received it, called "Thoughtless Acts?" It's been all about these kind of thoughtless things that people do, which have huge intention and huge opportunity. Why do we all follow the line in the street? This is a picture in a Japanese subway. People consciously follow things even though, why, we don't know. Why do we line up the square milk carton with the square fence? Because we kind of have to — we're just compelled to. We don't know why, but we do. Why do we wrap the teabag string around the cup handle? Again, we're sort of using the world around us to create our own design solutions. And we're always saying to our clients: "You should look at this stuff. This stuff is really important. This stuff is really vital." This is people designing their own experiences. You can draw from this. We sort of assume that because there's a pole in the street, that it's okay to use it, so we park our shopping cart there. It's there for our use, on some level. So, again, we sort of co-opt our environment to do all these different things. We co-opt other experiences — we take one item and transfer it to another. And this is my favorite one. My mother used to say to me, "Just because your sister jumps in the lake doesn't mean you have to." But, of course, we all do. We all follow each other every day. So somebody assumes that because somebody else has done something, that's permission for them to do the same thing. And there's almost this sort of semaphore around us all the time. I mean, shopping bag equals "parking meter out of order." And we all, kind of, know how to read these signals now. We all talk to one another in this highly visual way without realizing what we're doing. Third section is this idea of not knowing, of consciously putting yourself backwards. I talk about unthinking situations all the time. Sort of having beginner's mind, scraping your mind clean and looking at things afresh. A friend of mine was a designer at IKEA, and he was asked by his boss to help design a storage system for children. This is the Billy bookcase — it's IKEA's biggest selling product. Hammer it together. Hammer it together with a shoe, if you're me, because they're impossible to assemble. But big selling bookcase. How do we replicate this for children? The reality is when you actually watch children, children don't think about things like storage in linear terms. Children assume permission in a very different way. Children live on things. They live under things. They live around things, and so their spatial awareness relationship, and their thinking around storage is totally different. So the first thing you have to do — this is Graham, the designer — is, sort of, put yourself in their shoes. And so, here he is sitting under the table. So, what came out of this? This is the storage system that he designed. So what is this? I hear you all ask. No, I don't. (Laughter) It's this, and I think this is a particularly lovely solution. So, you know, it's a totally different way of looking at the situation. It's a completely empathic solution — apart from the fact that teddy's probably not loving it. (Laughter) But a really nice way of re-framing the ordinary, and I think that's one of the things. And putting yourself in the position of the person, and I think that's one of the threads that I've heard again from this conference is how do we put ourselves in other peoples' shoes and really feel what they feel? And then use that information to fuel solutions? And I think that's what this is very much about. Last section: green armband. We've all got them. It's about this really. I mean, it's about picking battles big enough to matter but small enough to win. Again, that's one of the themes that I think has come through loud and clear in this conference is: Where do we start? How do we start? What do we do to start? So, again, we were asked to design a water pump for a company called ApproTEC, in Kenya. They're now called KickStart. And, again, as designers, we wanted to make this thing incredibly beautiful and spend a lot of time thinking of the form. And that was completely irrelevant. When you put yourself in the position of these people, things like the fact that this has to be able to fold up and fit on a bicycle, become much more relevant than the form of it. The way it's produced, it has to be produced with indigenous manufacturing methods and indigenous materials. So it had to be looked at completely from the point of view of the user. We had to completely transfer ourselves over to their world. So what seems like a very clunky product is, in fact, incredibly useful. It's powered a bit like a Stairmaster — you pump up and down on it. Children can use it. Adults can use it. Everybody uses it. It's turning these guys — again, one of the themes — it's turning them into entrepreneurs. These guys are using this very successfully. And for us, it's been great because it's won loads of design awards. So we actually managed to reconcile the needs of the design company, the needs of the individuals in the company, to feel good about a product we were actually designing, and the needs of the individuals we were designing it for. There it is, pumping water from 30 feet. So as a final gesture we handed out these bracelets to all of you this morning. We've made a donation on everybody's behalf here to kick start, no pun intended, their next project. Because, again, I think, sort of, putting our money where our mouth is, here. We feel that this is an important gesture. So we've handed out bracelets. Small is the new big. I hope you'll all wear them. So that's it. Thank you. (Applause)

A philosophical quest for our biggest problems

Nick Bostrom

{0: 'Nick Bostrom'}

{0: ['philosopher']}

{0: 'Nick Bostrom works on big questions: What should we do, as individuals and as a species, to optimize our long-term prospects?'}

2005-07-14

2007-04-05

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'mk', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'so', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['biotech', 'culture', 'future', 'global issues', 'happiness', 'philosophy', 'technology']

{42: 'Is this our final century?', 19: 'How technology evolves', 68: 'Progress is not a zero-sum game', 39: 'A roadmap to end aging', 515: 'To upgrade is human', 801: 'Science can answer moral questions'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_a_philosophical_quest_for_our_biggest_problems/

Oxford philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom examines the future of humankind and asks whether we might alter the fundamental nature of humanity to solve our most intrinsic problems.

I want to talk today about — I've been asked to take the long view, and I'm going to tell you what I think are the three biggest problems for humanity from this long point of view. Some of these have already been touched upon by other speakers, which is encouraging. It seems that there's not just one person who thinks that these problems are important. The first is — death is a big problem. If you look at the statistics, the odds are not very favorable to us. So far, most people who have lived have also died. Roughly 90 percent of everybody who has been alive has died by now. So the annual death rate adds up to 150,000 — sorry, the daily death rate — 150,000 people per day, which is a huge number by any standard. The annual death rate, then, becomes 56 million. If we just look at the single, biggest cause of death — aging — it accounts for roughly two-thirds of all human people who die. That adds up to an annual death toll of greater than the population of Canada. Sometimes, we don't see a problem because either it's too familiar or it's too big. Can't see it because it's too big. I think death might be both too familiar and too big for most people to see it as a problem. Once you think about it, you see this is not statistical points; these are — let's see, how far have I talked? I've talked for three minutes. So that would be, roughly, 324 people have died since I've begun speaking. People like — it's roughly the population in this room has just died. Now, the human cost of that is obvious, once you start to think about it — the suffering, the loss — it's also, economically, enormously wasteful. I just look at the information, and knowledge, and experience that is lost due to natural causes of death in general, and aging, in particular. Suppose we approximated one person with one book? Now, of course, this is an underestimation. A person's lifetime of learning and experience is a lot more than you could put into a single book. But let's suppose we did this. 52 million people die of natural causes each year corresponds, then, to 52 million volumes destroyed. Library of Congress holds 18 million volumes. We are upset about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It's one of the great cultural tragedies that we remember, even today. But this is the equivalent of three Libraries of Congress — burnt down, forever lost — each year. So that's the first big problem. And I wish Godspeed to Aubrey de Grey, and other people like him, to try to do something about this as soon as possible. Existential risk — the second big problem. Existential risk is a threat to human survival, or to the long-term potential of our species. Now, why do I say that this is a big problem? Well, let's first look at the probability — and this is very, very difficult to estimate — but there have been only four studies on this in recent years, which is surprising. You would think that it would be of some interest to try to find out more about this given that the stakes are so big, but it's a very neglected area. But there have been four studies — one by John Lesley, wrote a book on this. He estimated a probability that we will fail to survive the current century: 50 percent. Similarly, the Astronomer Royal, whom we heard speak yesterday, also has a 50 percent probability estimate. Another author doesn't give any numerical estimate, but says the probability is significant that it will fail. I wrote a long paper on this. I said assigning a less than 20 percent probability would be a mistake in light of the current evidence we have. Now, the exact figures here, we should take with a big grain of salt, but there seems to be a consensus that the risk is substantial. Everybody who has looked at this and studied it agrees. Now, if we think about what just reducing the probability of human extinction by just one percentage point — not very much — so that's equivalent to 60 million lives saved, if we just count the currently living people, the current generation. Now one percent of six billion people is equivalent to 60 million. So that's a large number. If we were to take into account future generations that will never come into existence if we blow ourselves up, then the figure becomes astronomical. If we could eventually colonize a chunk of the universe — the Virgo supercluster — maybe it will take us 100 million years to get there, but if we go extinct we never will. Then, even a one percentage point reduction in the extinction risk could be equivalent to this astronomical number — 10 to the power of 32. So if you take into account future generations as much as our own, every other moral imperative of philanthropic cost just becomes irrelevant. The only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk because even the tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other benefit you could hope to achieve. And even if you just look at the current people, and ignore the potential that would be lost if we went extinct, it should still have a high priority. Now, let me spend the rest of my time on the third big problem, because it's more subtle and perhaps difficult to grasp. Think about some time in your life — some people might never have experienced it — but some people, there are just those moments that you have experienced where life was fantastic. It might have been at the moment of some great, creative inspiration you might have had when you just entered this flow stage. Or when you understood something you had never done before. Or perhaps in the ecstasy of romantic love. Or an aesthetic experience — a sunset or a great piece of art. Every once in a while we have these moments, and we realize just how good life can be when it's at its best. And you wonder, why can't it be like that all the time? You just want to cling onto this. And then, of course, it drifts back into ordinary life and the memory fades. And it's really difficult to recall, in a normal frame of mind, just how good life can be at its best. Or how bad it can be at its worst. The third big problem is that life isn't usually as wonderful as it could be. I think that's a big, big problem. It's easy to say what we don't want. Here are a number of things that we don't want — illness, involuntary death, unnecessary suffering, cruelty, stunted growth, memory loss, ignorance, absence of creativity. Suppose we fixed these things — we did something about all of these. We were very successful. We got rid of all of these things. We might end up with something like this, which is — I mean, it's a heck of a lot better than that. But is this really the best we can dream of? Is this the best we can do? Or is it possible to find something a little bit more inspiring to work towards? And if we think about this, I think it's very clear that there are ways in which we could change things, not just by eliminating negatives, but adding positives. On my wish list, at least, would be: much longer, healthier lives, greater subjective well-being, enhanced cognitive capacities, more knowledge and understanding, unlimited opportunity for personal growth beyond our current biological limits, better relationships, an unbounded potential for spiritual, moral and intellectual development. If we want to achieve this, what, in the world, would have to change? And this is the answer — we would have to change. Not just the world around us, but we, ourselves. Not just the way we think about the world, but the way we are — our very biology. Human nature would have to change. Now, when we think about changing human nature, the first thing that comes to mind are these human modification technologies — growth hormone therapy, cosmetic surgery, stimulants like Ritalin, Adderall, anti-depressants, anabolic steroids, artificial hearts. It's a pretty pathetic list. They do great things for a few people who suffer from some specific condition, but for most people, they don't really transform what it is to be human. And they also all seem a little bit — most people have this instinct that, well, sure, there needs to be anti-depressants for the really depressed people. But there's a kind of queasiness that these are unnatural in some way. It's worth recalling that there are a lot of other modification technologies and enhancement technologies that we use. We have skin enhancements, clothing. As far as I can see, all of you are users of this enhancement technology in this room, so that's a great thing. Mood modifiers have been used from time immemorial — caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, immune system enhancement, vision enhancement, anesthetics — we take that very much for granted, but just think about how great progress that is — like, having an operation before anesthetics was not fun. Contraceptives, cosmetics and brain reprogramming techniques — that sounds ominous, but the distinction between what is a technology — a gadget would be the archetype — and other ways of changing and rewriting human nature is quite subtle. So if you think about what it means to learn arithmetic or to learn to read, you're actually, literally rewriting your own brain. You're changing the microstructure of your brain as you go along. So in a broad sense, we don't need to think about technology as only little gadgets, like these things here, but even institutions and techniques, psychological methods and so forth. Forms of organization can have a profound impact on human nature. Looking ahead, there is a range of technologies that are almost certain to be developed sooner or later. We are very ignorant about what the time scale for these things are, but they all are consistent with everything we know about physical laws, laws of chemistry, etc. It's possible to assume, setting aside a possibility of catastrophe, that sooner or later we will develop all of these. And even just a couple of these would be enough to transform the human condition. So let's look at some of the dimensions of human nature that seem to leave room for improvement. Health span is a big and urgent thing, because if you're not alive, then all the other things will be to little avail. Intellectual capacity — let's take that box, which falls into a lot of different sub-categories: memory, concentration, mental energy, intelligence, empathy. These are really great things. Part of the reason why we value these traits is that they make us better at competing with other people — they're positional goods. But part of the reason — and that's the reason why we have ethical ground for pursuing these — is that they're also intrinsically valuable. It's just better to be able to understand more of the world around you and the people that you are communicating with, and to remember what you have learned. Modalities and special faculties. Now, the human mind is not a single unitary information processor, but it has a lot of different, special, evolved modules that do specific things for us. If you think about what we normally take as giving life a lot of its meaning — music, humor, eroticism, spirituality, aesthetics, nurturing and caring, gossip, chatting with people — all of these, very likely, are enabled by a special circuitry that we humans have, but that you could have another intelligent life form that lacks these. We're just lucky that we have the requisite neural machinery to process music and to appreciate it and enjoy it. All of these would enable, in principle — be amenable to enhancement. Some people have a better musical ability and ability to appreciate music than others have. It's also interesting to think about what other things are — so if these all enabled great values, why should we think that evolution has happened to provide us with all the modalities we would need to engage with other values that there might be? Imagine a species that just didn't have this neural machinery for processing music. And they would just stare at us with bafflement when we spend time listening to a beautiful performance, like the one we just heard — because of people making stupid movements, and they would be really irritated and wouldn't see what we were up to. But maybe they have another faculty, something else that would seem equally irrational to us, but they actually tap into some great possible value there. But we are just literally deaf to that kind of value. So we could think of adding on different, new sensory capacities and mental faculties. Bodily functionality and morphology and affective self-control. Greater subjective well-being. Be able to switch between relaxation and activity — being able to go slow when you need to do that, and to speed up. Able to switch back and forth more easily would be a neat thing to be able to do — easier to achieve the flow state, when you're totally immersed in something you are doing. Conscientiousness and sympathy. The ability to — it's another interesting application that would have large social ramification, perhaps. If you could actually choose to preserve your romantic attachments to one person, undiminished through time, so that wouldn't have to — love would never have to fade if you didn't want it to. That's probably not all that difficult. It might just be a simple hormone or something that could do this. It's been done in voles. You can engineer a prairie vole to become monogamous when it's naturally polygamous. It's just a single gene. Might be more complicated in humans, but perhaps not that much. This is the last picture that I want to — now we've got to use the laser pointer. A possible mode of being here would be a way of life — a way of being, experiencing, thinking, seeing, interacting with the world. Down here in this little corner, here, we have the little sub-space of this larger space that is accessible to human beings — beings with our biological capacities. It's a part of the space that's accessible to animals; since we are animals, we are a subset of that. And then you can imagine some enhancements of human capacities. There would be different modes of being you could experience if you were able to stay alive for, say, 200 years. Then you could live sorts of lives and accumulate wisdoms that are just not possible for humans as we currently are. So then, you move off to this larger sphere of "human +," and you could continue that process and eventually explore a lot of this larger space of possible modes of being. Now, why is that a good thing to do? Well, we know already that in this little human circle there, there are these enormously wonderful and worthwhile modes of being — human life at its best is wonderful. We have no reason to believe that within this much, much larger space there would not also be extremely worthwhile modes of being, perhaps ones that would be way beyond our wildest ability even to imagine or dream about. And so, to fix this third problem, I think we need — slowly, carefully, with ethical wisdom and constraint — develop the means that enable us to go out in this larger space and explore it and find the great values that might hide there. Thanks.

Happiness by design

Stefan Sagmeister

{0: 'Stefan Sagmeister'}

{0: ['graphic designer']}

{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.'}

2004-02-02

2007-04-05

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'eu', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['art', 'design', 'happiness', 'typography', 'graphic design']

{356: "Things I've learned in my life so far", 182: 'The illustrated woman', 172: 'Designing for simplicity', 1607: 'Want to be happier? Stay in the moment', 570: 'Happiness and its surprises', 1159: '7 rules for making more happiness'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_happiness_by_design/

Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister takes the audience on a whimsical journey through moments of his life that made him happy -- and notes how many of these moments have to do with good design.

About 15 years ago, I went to visit a friend in Hong Kong. And at the time I was very superstitious. So, upon landing — this was still at the old Hong Kong airport that's Kai Tak, when it was smack in the middle of the city — I thought, "If I see something good, I'm going to have a great time here in my two weeks. And if I see something negative, I'm going to be miserable, indeed." So the plane landed in between the buildings and got to a full stop in front of this little billboard. (Laughter) And I actually went to see some of the design companies in Hong Kong in my stay there. And it turned out that — I just went to see, you know, what they are doing in Hong Kong. But I actually walked away with a great job offer. And I flew back to Austria, packed my bags, and, another week later, I was again on my way to Hong Kong still superstitions and thinking, "Well, if that 'Winner' billboard is still up, I'm going to have a good time working here. (Laughter) But if it's gone, it's going to be really miserable and stressful." So it turned out that not only was the billboard still up but they had put this one right next to it. (Laughter) On the other hand, it also taught me where superstition gets me because I really had a terrible time in Hong Kong. (Laughter) However, I did have a number of real moments of happiness in my life — of, you know, I think what the conference brochure refers to as "moments that take your breath away." And since I'm a big list maker, I actually listed them all. (Laughter) Now, you don't have to go through the trouble of reading them and I won't read them for you. I know that it's incredibly boring to hear about other people's happinesses. (Laughter) What I did do, though is, I actually looked at them from a design standpoint and just eliminated all the ones that had nothing to do with design. And, very surprisingly, over half of them had, actually, something to do with design. So there are, of course, two different possibilities. There's one from a consumer's point of view — where I was happy while experiencing design. And I'll just give you one example. I had gotten my first Walkman. This is 1983. My brother had this great Yamaha motorcycle that he was willing to borrow to me freely. And The Police's "Synchronicity" cassette had just been released and there was no helmet law in my hometown of Bregenz. So you could drive up into the mountains freely blasting The Police on the new Sony Walkman. (Laughter) And I remember it as a true moment of happiness. You know, of course, they are related to this combination of at least two of them being, you know, design objects. And, you know, there's a scale of happiness when you talk about in design but the motorcycle incident would definitely be, you know, situated somewhere here — right in there between Delight and Bliss. Now, there is the other part, from a designer's standpoint — if you're happy while actually doing it. And one way to see how happy designers are when they're designing could be to look at the authors' photos on the back of their monographs? (Laughter) So, according to this, the Australians and the Japanese as well as the Mexicans are very happy. (Laughter) While, somewhat, the Spaniards ... and, I think, particularly, the Swiss (Laughter), don't seem to be doing all that well. (Laughter) Last November, a museum opened in Tokyo called The Mori Museum, in a skyscraper, up on the 56th floor. And their inaugural exhibit was called "Happiness." And I went, very eagerly, to see it, because — well, also, with an eye on this conference. And they interestingly sectioned the exhibit off into four different areas. Under "Arcadia," they showed things like this, from the Edo period — a hundred ways to write "happiness" in different forms. Or they had this apple by Yoko Ono — that, of course, later on was, you know, made into the label for The Beatles. Under "Nirvana" they showed this Constable painting. And there was a little — an interesting theory about abstraction. This is a blue field — it's actually an Yves Klein painting. And the theory was that if you abstract an image, you really, you know open as much room for the un-representable — and, therefore, you know, are able to involve the viewer more. Then, under "Desire," they showed these Shunsho paintings — also from the Edo period — ink on silk. And, lastly, under "Harmony," they had this 13th-century mandala from Tibet. Now, what I took away from the exhibit was that maybe with the exception of the mandala most of the pieces in there were actually about the visualization of happiness and not about happiness. And I felt a little bit cheated, because the visualization — that's a really easy thing to do. And, you know, my studio — we've done it all the time. This is, you know, a book. A happy dog — and you take it out, it's an aggressive dog. It's a happy David Byrne and an angry David Byrne. Or a jazz poster with a happy face and a more aggressive face. You know, that's not a big deal to accomplish. It has gotten to the point where, you know, within advertising or within the movie industry, "happy" has gotten such a bad reputation that if you actually want to do something with the subject and still appear authentic, you almost would have to, you know, do it from a cynical point of view. This is, you know, the movie poster. Or we, a couple of weeks ago, designed a box set for The Talking Heads where the happiness visualized on the cover definitely has, very much, a dark side to it. Much, much more difficult is this, where the designs actually can evoke happiness — and I'm going to just show you three that actually did this for me. This is a campaign done by a young artist in New York, who calls himself "True." Everybody who has ridden the New York subway system will be familiar with these signs? True printed his own version of these signs. Met every Wednesday at a subway stop with 20 of his friends. They divided up the different subway lines and added their own version. (Laughter) So this is one. (Laughter) Now, the way this works in the system is that nobody ever looks at these signs. So you're (Laughter) you're really bored in the subway, and you kind of stare at something. And it takes you a while until it actually — you realize that this says something different than what it normally says. (Laughter) I mean, that's, at least, how it made me happy. (Laughter) Now, True is a real humanitarian. He didn't want any of his friends to be arrested, so he supplied everybody with this fake volunteer card. (Laughter) And also gave this fake letter from the MTA to everybody — sort of like pretending that it's an art project financed by The Metropolitan Transit Authority. (Laughter) Another New York project. This is at P.S. 1 — a sculpture that's basically a square room by James Turrell, that has a retractable ceiling. Opens up at dusk and dawn every day. You don't see the horizon. You're just in there, watching the incredible, subtle changes of color in the sky. And the room is truly something to be seen. People's demeanor changes when they go in there. And, for sure, I haven't looked at the sky in the same way after spending an hour in there. There are, of course, more than those three projects that I'm showing here. I would definitely say that observing Vik Muniz' "Cloud" a couple of years ago in Manhattan for sure made me happy, as well. But my last project is, again, from a young designer in New York. He's from Korea originally. And he took it upon himself to print 55,000 speech bubbles — empty speech bubbles stickers, large ones and small ones. And he goes around New York and just puts them, empty as they are, on posters. (Laughter) And other people go and fill them in. (Laughter) This one says, "Please let me die in peace." (Laughter) I think that was — the most surprising to myself was that the writing was actually so good. This is on a musician poster, that says: "I am concerned that my CD will not sell more than 200,000 units and that, as a result, my recoupable advance from my label will be taken from me, after which, my contract will be cancelled, and I'll be back doing Journey covers on Bleecker Street." (Laughter) I think the reason this works so well is because everybody involved wins. Jee gets to have his project; the public gets a sweeter environment; and different public gets a place to express itself; and the advertisers finally get somebody to look at their ads. (Laughter) Well, there was a question, of course, that was on my mind for a while: You know, can I do more of the things that I like doing in design and less of the ones that I don't like to be doing? Which brought me back to my list making — you know, just to see what I actually like about my job. You know, one is: just working without pressure. Then: working concentrated, without being frazzled. Or, as Nancy said before, like really immerse oneself into it. Try not to get stuck doing the same thing — or try not get stuck behind the computer all day. This is, you know, related to it: getting out of the studio. Then, of course, trying to, you know, work on things where the content is actually important for me. And being able to enjoy the end results. And then I found another list in one of my diaries that actually contained all the things that I thought I learned in my life so far. And, just about at that time, an Austrian magazine called and asked if we would want to do six spreads — design six spreads that work like dividing pages between the different chapters in the magazine? And the whole thing just fell together. So I just picked one of the things that I thought I learned — in this case, "Everything I do always comes back to me" — and we made these spreads right out of this. So it was: "Everything I do always comes back to me." A couple of weeks ago, a (Laughter) French company asked us to design five billboards for them. Again, we could supply the content for it. So I just picked another one. And this was two weeks ago. We flew to Arizona — the designer who works with me, and myself — and photographed this one. So it's: "Trying to look good limits my life." And then we did one more of these. This is, again, for a magazine, dividing pages. This is: "Having" — this is the same thing; it's just, you know, photographed from the side. This is from the front. Then it's: "guts." Again, it's the same thing — "guts" is just the same room, reworked. Then it's: "always works out." Then it's "for," with the light on. (Laughter) And it's "me." Thank you so much. (Applause)

The life code that will reshape the future

Juan Enriquez

{0: 'Juan Enriquez'}

{0: ['author', 'academic', 'futurist']}

{0: 'Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about the profound changes that genomics and brain research will bring about in business, technology, politics and society.'}

2003-02-02

2007-04-05

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['DNA', 'biotech', 'business', 'culture', 'genetics', 'invention', 'science', 'technology']

{227: 'On the verge of creating synthetic life', 35: 'How we discovered DNA', 331: 'DNA folding, in detail', 6: "Sampling the ocean's DNA", 437: 'Genomics 101', 863: 'Watch me unveil "synthetic life"'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_the_life_code_that_will_reshape_the_future/

Scientific discoveries, futurist Juan Enriquez notes, demand a shift in code, and our ability to thrive depends on our mastery of that code. Here, he applies this notion to the field of genomics.

I'm supposed to scare you, because it's about fear, right? And you should be really afraid, but not for the reasons why you think you should be. You should be really afraid that — if we stick up the first slide on this thing — there we go — that you're missing out. Because if you spend this week thinking about Iraq and thinking about Bush and thinking about the stock market, you're going to miss one of the greatest adventures that we've ever been on. And this is what this adventure's really about. This is crystallized DNA. Every life form on this planet — every insect, every bacteria, every plant, every animal, every human, every politician — (Laughter) is coded in that stuff. And if you want to take a single crystal of DNA, it looks like that. And we're just beginning to understand this stuff. And this is the single most exciting adventure that we have ever been on. It's the single greatest mapping project we've ever been on. If you think that the mapping of America's made a difference, or landing on the moon, or this other stuff, it's the map of ourselves and the map of every plant and every insect and every bacteria that really makes a difference. And it's beginning to tell us a lot about evolution. (Laughter) It turns out that what this stuff is — and Richard Dawkins has written about this — is, this is really a river out of Eden. So, the 3.2 billion base pairs inside each of your cells is really a history of where you've been for the past billion years. And we could start dating things, and we could start changing medicine and archeology. It turns out that if you take the human species about 700 years ago, white Europeans diverged from black Africans in a very significant way. White Europeans were subject to the plague. And when they were subject to the plague, most people didn't survive, but those who survived had a mutation on the CCR5 receptor. And that mutation was passed on to their kids because they're the ones that survived, so there was a great deal of population pressure. In Africa, because you didn't have these cities, you didn't have that CCR5 population pressure mutation. We can date it to 700 years ago. That is one of the reasons why AIDS is raging across Africa as fast as it is, and not as fast across Europe. And we're beginning to find these little things for malaria, for sickle cell, for cancers. And in the measure that we map ourselves, this is the single greatest adventure that we'll ever be on. And this Friday, I want you to pull out a really good bottle of wine, and I want you to toast these two people. Because this Friday, 50 years ago, Watson and Crick found the structure of DNA, and that is almost as important a date as the 12th of February when we first mapped ourselves, but anyway, we'll get to that. I thought we'd talk about the new zoo. So, all you guys have heard about DNA, all the stuff that DNA does, but some of the stuff we're discovering is kind of nifty because this turns out to be the single most abundant species on the planet. If you think you're successful or cockroaches are successful, it turns out that there's ten trillion trillion Pleurococcus sitting out there. And we didn't know that Pleurococcus was out there, which is part of the reason why this whole species-mapping project is so important. Because we're just beginning to learn where we came from and what we are. And we're finding amoebas like this. This is the amoeba dubia. And the amoeba dubia doesn't look like much, except that each of you has about 3.2 billion letters, which is what makes you you, as far as gene code inside each of your cells, and this little amoeba which, you know, sits in water in hundreds and millions and billions, turns out to have 620 billion base pairs of gene code inside. So, this little thingamajig has a genome that's 200 times the size of yours. And if you're thinking of efficient information storage mechanisms, it may not turn out to be chips. It may turn out to be something that looks a little like that amoeba. And, again, we're learning from life and how life works. This funky little thing: people didn't used to think that it was worth taking samples out of nuclear reactors because it was dangerous and, of course, nothing lived there. And then finally somebody picked up a microscope and looked at the water that was sitting next to the cores. And sitting next to that water in the cores was this little Deinococcus radiodurans, doing a backstroke, having its chromosomes blown apart every day, six, seven times, restitching them, living in about 200 times the radiation that would kill you. And by now you should be getting a hint as to how diverse and how important and how interesting this journey into life is, and how many different life forms there are, and how there can be different life forms living in very different places, maybe even outside of this planet. Because if you can live in radiation that looks like this, that brings up a whole series of interesting questions. This little thingamajig: we didn't know this thingamajig existed. We should have known that this existed because this is the only bacteria that you can see to the naked eye. So, this thing is 0.75 millimeters. It lives in a deep trench off the coast of Namibia. And what you're looking at with this namibiensis is the biggest bacteria we've ever seen. So, it's about the size of a little period on a sentence. Again, we didn't know this thing was there three years ago. We're just beginning this journey of life in the new zoo. This is a really odd one. This is Ferroplasma. The reason why Ferroplasma is interesting is because it eats iron, lives inside the equivalent of battery acid, and excretes sulfuric acid. So, when you think of odd life forms, when you think of what it takes to live, it turns out this is a very efficient life form, and they call it an archaea. Archaea means "the ancient ones." And the reason why they're ancient is because this thing came up when this planet was covered by things like sulfuric acid in batteries, and it was eating iron when the earth was part of a melted core. So, it's not just dogs and cats and whales and dolphins that you should be aware of and interested in on this little journey. Your fear should be that you are not, that you're paying attention to stuff which is temporal. I mean, George Bush — he's going to be gone, alright? Life isn't. Whether the humans survive or don't survive, these things are going to be living on this planet or other planets. And it's just beginning to understand this code of DNA that's really the most exciting intellectual adventure that we've ever been on. And you can do strange things with this stuff. This is a baby gaur. Conservation group gets together, tries to figure out how to breed an animal that's almost extinct. They can't do it naturally, so what they do with this thing is they take a spoon, take some cells out of an adult gaur's mouth, code, take the cells from that and insert it into a fertilized cow's egg, reprogram cow's egg — different gene code. When you do that, the cow gives birth to a gaur. We are now experimenting with bongos, pandas, elands, Sumatran tigers, and the Australians — bless their hearts — are playing with these things. Now, the last of these things died in September 1936. These are Tasmanian tigers. The last known one died at the Hobart Zoo. But it turns out that as we learn more about gene code and how to reprogram species, we may be able to close the gene gaps in deteriorate DNA. And when we learn how to close the gene gaps, then we can put a full string of DNA together. And if we do that, and insert this into a fertilized wolf's egg, we may give birth to an animal that hasn't walked the earth since 1936. And then you can start going back further, and you can start thinking about dodos, and you can think about other species. And in other places, like Maryland, they're trying to figure out what the primordial ancestor is. Because each of us contains our entire gene code of where we've been for the past billion years, because we've evolved from that stuff, you can take that tree of life and collapse it back, and in the measure that you learn to reprogram, maybe we'll give birth to something that is very close to the first primordial ooze. And it's all coming out of things that look like this. These are companies that didn't exist five years ago. Huge gene sequencing facilities the size of football fields. Some are public. Some are private. It takes about 5 billion dollars to sequence a human being the first time. Takes about 3 million dollars the second time. We will have a 1,000-dollar genome within the next five to eight years. That means each of you will contain on a CD your entire gene code. And it will be really boring. It will read like this. (Laughter) The really neat thing about this stuff is that's life. And Laurie's going to talk about this one a little bit. Because if you happen to find this one inside your body, you're in big trouble, because that's the source code for Ebola. That's one of the deadliest diseases known to humans. But plants work the same way and insects work the same way, and this apple works the same way. This apple is the same thing as this floppy disk. Because this thing codes ones and zeros, and this thing codes A, T, C, Gs, and it sits up there, absorbing energy on a tree, and one fine day it has enough energy to say, execute, and it goes [thump]. Right? (Laughter) And when it does that, pushes a .EXE, what it does is, it executes the first line of code, which reads just like that, AATCAGGGACCC, and that means: make a root. Next line of code: make a stem. Next line of code, TACGGGG: make a flower that's white, that blooms in the spring, that smells like this. In the measure that you have the code and the measure that you read it — and, by the way, the first plant was read two years ago; the first human was read two years ago; the first insect was read two years ago. The first thing that we ever read was in 1995: a little bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae. In the measure that you have the source code, as all of you know, you can change the source code, and you can reprogram life forms so that this little thingy becomes a vaccine, or this little thingy starts producing biomaterials, which is why DuPont is now growing a form of polyester that feels like silk in corn. This changes all rules. This is life, but we're reprogramming it. This is what you look like. This is one of your chromosomes. And what you can do now is, you can outlay exactly what your chromosome is, and what the gene code on that chromosome is right here, and what those genes code for, and what animals they code against, and then you can tie it to the literature. And in the measure that you can do that, you can go home today, and get on the Internet, and access the world's biggest public library, which is a library of life. And you can do some pretty strange things because in the same way as you can reprogram this apple, if you go to Cliff Tabin's lab at the Harvard Medical School, he's reprogramming chicken embryos to grow more wings. Why would Cliff be doing that? He doesn't have a restaurant. (Laughter) The reason why he's reprogramming that animal to have more wings is because when you used to play with lizards as a little child, and you picked up the lizard, sometimes the tail fell off, but it regrew. Not so in human beings: you cut off an arm, you cut off a leg — it doesn't regrow. But because each of your cells contains your entire gene code, each cell can be reprogrammed, if we don't stop stem cell research and if we don't stop genomic research, to express different body functions. And in the measure that we learn how chickens grow wings, and what the program is for those cells to differentiate, one of the things we're going to be able to do is to stop undifferentiated cells, which you know as cancer, and one of the things we're going to learn how to do is how to reprogram cells like stem cells in such a way that they express bone, stomach, skin, pancreas. And you are likely to be wandering around — and your children — on regrown body parts in a reasonable period of time, in some places in the world where they don't stop the research. How's this stuff work? If each of you differs from the person next to you by one in a thousand, but only three percent codes, which means it's only one in a thousand times three percent, very small differences in expression and punctuation can make a significant difference. Take a simple declarative sentence. (Laughter) Right? That's perfectly clear. So, men read that sentence, and they look at that sentence, and they read this. Okay? Now, women look at that sentence and they say, uh-uh, wrong. This is the way it should be seen. (Laughter) That's what your genes are doing. That's why you differ from this person over here by one in a thousand. Right? But, you know, he's reasonably good looking, but... I won't go there. You can do this stuff even without changing the punctuation. You can look at this, right? And they look at the world a little differently. They look at the same world and they say... (Laughter) That's how the same gene code — that's why you have 30,000 genes, mice have 30,000 genes, husbands have 30,000 genes. Mice and men are the same. Wives know that, but anyway. You can make very small changes in gene code and get really different outcomes, even with the same string of letters. That's what your genes are doing every day. That's why sometimes a person's genes don't have to change a lot to get cancer. These little chippies, these things are the size of a credit card. They will test any one of you for 60,000 genetic conditions. That brings up questions of privacy and insurability and all kinds of stuff, but it also allows us to start going after diseases, because if you run a person who has leukemia through something like this, it turns out that three diseases with completely similar clinical syndromes are completely different diseases. Because in ALL leukemia, that set of genes over there over-expresses. In MLL, it's the middle set of genes, and in AML, it's the bottom set of genes. And if one of those particular things is expressing in your body, then you take Gleevec and you're cured. If it is not expressing in your body, if you don't have one of those types — a particular one of those types — don't take Gleevec. It won't do anything for you. Same thing with Receptin if you've got breast cancer. Don't have an HER-2 receptor? Don't take Receptin. Changes the nature of medicine. Changes the predictions of medicine. Changes the way medicine works. The greatest repository of knowledge when most of us went to college was this thing, and it turns out that this is not so important any more. The U.S. Library of Congress, in terms of its printed volume of data, contains less data than is coming out of a good genomics company every month on a compound basis. Let me say that again: A single genomics company generates more data in a month, on a compound basis, than is in the printed collections of the Library of Congress. This is what's been powering the U.S. economy. It's Moore's Law. So, all of you know that the price of computers halves every 18 months and the power doubles, right? Except that when you lay that side by side with the speed with which gene data's being deposited in GenBank, Moore's Law is right here: it's the blue line. This is on a log scale, and that's what superexponential growth means. This is going to push computers to have to grow faster than they've been growing, because so far, there haven't been applications that have been required that need to go faster than Moore's Law. This stuff does. And here's an interesting map. This is a map which was finished at the Harvard Business School. One of the really interesting questions is, if all this data's free, who's using it? This is the greatest public library in the world. Well, it turns out that there's about 27 trillion bits moving inside from the United States to the United States; about 4.6 trillion is going over to those European countries; about 5.5's going to Japan; there's almost no communication between Japan, and nobody else is literate in this stuff. It's free. No one's reading it. They're focusing on the war; they're focusing on Bush; they're not interested in life. So, this is what a new map of the world looks like. That is the genomically literate world. And that is a problem. In fact, it's not a genomically literate world. You can break this out by states. And you can watch states rise and fall depending on their ability to speak a language of life, and you can watch New York fall off a cliff, and you can watch New Jersey fall off a cliff, and you can watch the rise of the new empires of intelligence. And you can break it out by counties, because it's specific counties. And if you want to get more specific, it's actually specific zip codes. (Laughter) So, you want to know where life is happening? Well, in Southern California it's happening in 92121. And that's it. And that's the triangle between Salk, Scripps, UCSD, and it's called Torrey Pines Road. That means you don't need to be a big nation to be successful; it means you don't need a lot of people to be successful; and it means you can move most of the wealth of a country in about three or four carefully picked 747s. Same thing in Massachusetts. Looks more spread out but — oh, by the way, the ones that are the same color are contiguous. What's the net effect of this? In an agricultural society, the difference between the richest and the poorest, the most productive and the least productive, was five to one. Why? Because in agriculture, if you had 10 kids and you grow up a little bit earlier and you work a little bit harder, you could produce about five times more wealth, on average, than your neighbor. In a knowledge society, that number is now 427 to 1. It really matters if you're literate, not just in reading and writing in English and French and German, but in Microsoft and Linux and Apple. And very soon it's going to matter if you're literate in life code. So, if there is something you should fear, it's that you're not keeping your eye on the ball. Because it really matters who speaks life. That's why nations rise and fall. And it turns out that if you went back to the 1870s, the most productive nation on earth was Australia, per person. And New Zealand was way up there. And then the U.S. came in about 1950, and then Switzerland about 1973, and then the U.S. got back on top — beat up their chocolates and cuckoo clocks. And today, of course, you all know that the most productive nation on earth is Luxembourg, producing about one third more wealth per person per year than America. Tiny landlocked state. No oil. No diamonds. No natural resources. Just smart people moving bits. Different rules. Here's differential productivity rates. Here's how many people it takes to produce a single U.S. patent. So, about 3,000 Americans, 6,000 Koreans, 14,000 Brits, 790,000 Argentines. You want to know why Argentina's crashing? It's got nothing to do with inflation. It's got nothing to do with privatization. You can take a Harvard-educated Ivy League economist, stick him in charge of Argentina. He still crashes the country because he doesn't understand how the rules have changed. Oh, yeah, and it takes about 5.6 million Indians. Well, watch what happens to India. India and China used to be 40 percent of the global economy just at the Industrial Revolution, and they are now about 4.8 percent. Two billion people. One third of the global population producing 5 percent of the wealth because they didn't get this change, because they kept treating their people like serfs instead of like shareholders of a common project. They didn't keep the people who were educated. They didn't foment the businesses. They didn't do the IPOs. Silicon Valley did. And that's why they say that Silicon Valley has been powered by ICs. Not integrated circuits: Indians and Chinese. (Laughter) Here's what's happening in the world. It turns out that if you'd gone to the U.N. in 1950, when it was founded, there were 50 countries in this world. It turns out there's now about 192. Country after country is splitting, seceding, succeeding, failing — and it's all getting very fragmented. And this has not stopped. In the 1990s, these are sovereign states that did not exist before 1990. And this doesn't include fusions or name changes or changes in flags. We're generating about 3.12 states per year. People are taking control of their own states, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. And the really interesting thing is, you and your kids are empowered to build great empires, and you don't need a lot to do it. (Music) And, given that the music is over, I was going to talk about how you can use this to generate a lot of wealth, and how code works. Moderator: Two minutes. (Laughter) Juan Enriquez: No, I'm going to stop there and we'll do it next year because I don't want to take any of Laurie's time. But thank you very much.

Biomimicry's surprising lessons from nature's engineers

Janine Benyus

{0: 'Janine Benyus'}

{0: ['science writer', 'innovation consultant', 'conservationist']}

{0: "A self-proclaimed nature nerd, Janine Benyus' concept of biomimicry has galvanized scientists, architects, designers and engineers into exploring new ways in which nature's successes can inspire humanity. "}

2005-02-24

2007-04-05

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'tr', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['DNA', 'animals', 'biology', 'biomimicry', 'design', 'environment', 'evolution', 'fish', 'science', 'technology']

{280: 'Robots inspired by cockroach ingenuity', 198: 'The fractals at the heart of African designs', 258: '6 ways mushrooms can save the world', 614: 'Biomimicry in action', 1072: "Using nature's genius in architecture", 1561: 'Energy from floating algae pods'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_s_surprising_lessons_from_nature_s_engineers/

In this inspiring talk about recent developments in biomimicry, Janine Benyus provides heartening examples of ways in which nature is already influencing the products and systems we build.

It is a thrill to be here at a conference that's devoted to "Inspired by Nature" — you can imagine. And I'm also thrilled to be in the foreplay section. Did you notice this section is foreplay? Because I get to talk about one of my favorite critters, which is the Western Grebe. You haven't lived until you've seen these guys do their courtship dance. I was on Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park, which is a long, skinny lake with sort of mountains upside down in it, and my partner and I have a rowing shell. And so we were rowing, and one of these Western Grebes came along. And what they do for their courtship dance is, they go together, the two of them, the two mates, and they begin to run underwater. They paddle faster, and faster, and faster, until they're going so fast that they literally lift up out of the water, and they're standing upright, sort of paddling the top of the water. And one of these Grebes came along while we were rowing. And so we're in a skull, and we're moving really, really quickly. And this Grebe, I think, sort of, mistaked us for a prospect, and started to run along the water next to us, in a courtship dance — for miles. It would stop, and then start, and then stop, and then start. Now that is foreplay. (Laughter) I came this close to changing species at that moment. Obviously, life can teach us something in the entertainment section. Life has a lot to teach us. But what I'd like to talk about today is what life might teach us in technology and in design. What's happened since the book came out — the book was mainly about research in biomimicry — and what's happened since then is architects, designers, engineers — people who make our world — have started to call and say, we want a biologist to sit at the design table to help us, in real time, become inspired. Or — and this is the fun part for me — we want you to take us out into the natural world. We'll come with a design challenge and we find the champion adapters in the natural world, who might inspire us. So this is a picture from a Galapagos trip that we took with some wastewater treatment engineers; they purify wastewater. And some of them were very resistant, actually, to being there. What they said to us at first was, you know, we already do biomimicry. We use bacteria to clean our water. And we said, well, that's not exactly being inspired by nature. That's bioprocessing, you know; that's bio-assisted technology: using an organism to do your wastewater treatment is an old, old technology called "domestication." This is learning something, learning an idea, from an organism and then applying it. And so they still weren't getting it. So we went for a walk on the beach and I said, well, give me one of your big problems. Give me a design challenge, sustainability speed bump, that's keeping you from being sustainable. And they said scaling, which is the build-up of minerals inside of pipes. And they said, you know what happens is, mineral — just like at your house — mineral builds up. And then the aperture closes, and we have to flush the pipes with toxins, or we have to dig them up. So if we had some way to stop this scaling — and so I picked up some shells on the beach. And I asked them, what is scaling? What's inside your pipes? And they said, calcium carbonate. And I said, that's what this is; this is calcium carbonate. And they didn't know that. They didn't know that what a seashell is, it's templated by proteins, and then ions from the seawater crystallize in place to create a shell. So the same sort of a process, without the proteins, is happening on the inside of their pipes. They didn't know. This is not for lack of information; it's a lack of integration. You know, it's a silo, people in silos. They didn't know that the same thing was happening. So one of them thought about it and said, OK, well, if this is just crystallization that happens automatically out of seawater — self-assembly — then why aren't shells infinite in size? What stops the scaling? Why don't they just keep on going? And I said, well, in the same way that they exude a protein and it starts the crystallization — and then they all sort of leaned in — they let go of a protein that stops the crystallization. It literally adheres to the growing face of the crystal. And, in fact, there is a product called TPA that's mimicked that protein — that stop-protein — and it's an environmentally friendly way to stop scaling in pipes. That changed everything. From then on, you could not get these engineers back in the boat. The first day they would take a hike, and it was, click, click, click, click. Five minutes later they were back in the boat. We're done. You know, I've seen that island. After this, they were crawling all over. They would snorkel for as long as we would let them snorkel. What had happened was that they realized that there were organisms out there that had already solved the problems that they had spent their careers trying to solve. Learning about the natural world is one thing; learning from the natural world — that's the switch. That's the profound switch. What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere; they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world. 3.8 billion years of field-testing. 10 to 30 — Craig Venter will probably tell you; I think there's a lot more than 30 million — well-adapted solutions. The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context. And the context is the Earth — the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in. So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius. It's not slavishly mimicking — although Al is trying to get the hairdo going — it's not a slavish mimicry; it's taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it. Now, in a group with so many IT people, I do have to mention what I'm not going to talk about, and that is that your field is one that has learned an enormous amount from living things, on the software side. So there's computers that protect themselves, like an immune system, and we're learning from gene regulation and biological development. And we're learning from neural nets, genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing. That's on the software side. But what's interesting to me is that we haven't looked at this, as much. I mean, these machines are really not very high tech in my estimation in the sense that there's dozens and dozens of carcinogens in the water in Silicon Valley. So the hardware is not at all up to snuff in terms of what life would call a success. So what can we learn about making — not just computers, but everything? The plane you came in, cars, the seats that you're sitting on. How do we redesign the world that we make, the human-made world? More importantly, what should we ask in the next 10 years? And there's a lot of cool technologies out there that life has. What's the syllabus? Three questions, for me, are key. How does life make things? This is the opposite; this is how we make things. It's called heat, beat and treat — that's what material scientists call it. And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over and only 4 percent product. You heat it up; you beat it with high pressures; you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat. Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things? How does life make the most of things? That's a geranium pollen. And its shape is what gives it the function of being able to tumble through air so easily. Look at that shape. Life adds information to matter. In other words: structure. It gives it information. By adding information to matter, it gives it a function that's different than without that structure. And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems? Because life doesn't really deal in things; there are no things in the natural world divorced from their systems. Really quick syllabus. As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story, there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences. And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses and finding what their sort of grand challenges are. The two groups are not talking to each other. At all. What in the world of biology might be helpful at this juncture, to get us through this sort of evolutionary knothole that we're in? I'm going to try to go through 12, really quickly. One that's exciting to me is self-assembly. Now, you've heard about this in terms of nanotechnology. Back to that shell: the shell is a self-assembling material. On the lower left there is a picture of mother of pearl forming out of seawater. It's a layered structure that's mineral and then polymer, and it makes it very, very tough. It's twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics. But what's really interesting: unlike our ceramics that are in kilns, it happens in seawater. It happens near, in and near, the organism's body. This is Sandia National Labs. A guy named Jeff Brinker has found a way to have a self-assembling coding process. Imagine being able to make ceramics at room temperature by simply dipping something into a liquid, lifting it out of the liquid, and having evaporation force the molecules in the liquid together, so that they jigsaw together in the same way as this crystallization works. Imagine making all of our hard materials that way. Imagine spraying the precursors to a PV cell, to a solar cell, onto a roof, and having it self-assemble into a layered structure that harvests light. Here's an interesting one for the IT world: bio-silicon. This is a diatom, which is made of silicates. And so silicon, which we make right now — it's part of our carcinogenic problem in the manufacture of our chips — this is a bio-mineralization process that's now being mimicked. This is at UC Santa Barbara. Look at these diatoms. This is from Ernst Haeckel's work. Imagine being able to — and, again, it's a templated process, and it solidifies out of a liquid process — imagine being able to have that sort of structure coming out at room temperature. Imagine being able to make perfect lenses. On the left, this is a brittle star; it's covered with lenses that the people at Lucent Technologies have found have no distortion whatsoever. It's one of the most distortion-free lenses we know of. And there's many of them, all over its entire body. What's interesting, again, is that it self-assembles. A woman named Joanna Aizenberg, at Lucent, is now learning to do this in a low-temperature process to create these sort of lenses. She's also looking at fiber optics. That's a sea sponge that has a fiber optic. Down at the very base of it, there's fiber optics that work better than ours, actually, to move light, but you can tie them in a knot; they're incredibly flexible. Here's another big idea: CO2 as a feedstock. A guy named Geoff Coates, at Cornell, said to himself, you know, plants do not see CO2 as the biggest poison of our time. We see it that way. Plants are busy making long chains of starches and glucose, right, out of CO2. He's found a way — he's found a catalyst — and he's found a way to take CO2 and make it into polycarbonates. Biodegradable plastics out of CO2 — how plant-like. Solar transformations: the most exciting one. There are people who are mimicking the energy-harvesting device inside of purple bacterium, the people at ASU. Even more interesting, lately, in the last couple of weeks, people have seen that there's an enzyme called hydrogenase that's able to evolve hydrogen from proton and electrons, and is able to take hydrogen up — basically what's happening in a fuel cell, in the anode of a fuel cell and in a reversible fuel cell. In our fuel cells, we do it with platinum; life does it with a very, very common iron. And a team has now just been able to mimic that hydrogen-juggling hydrogenase. That's very exciting for fuel cells — to be able to do that without platinum. Power of shape: here's a whale. We've seen that the fins of this whale have tubercles on them. And those little bumps actually increase efficiency in, for instance, the edge of an airplane — increase efficiency by about 32 percent. Which is an amazing fossil fuel savings, if we were to just put that on the edge of a wing. Color without pigments: this peacock is creating color with shape. Light comes through, it bounces back off the layers; it's called thin-film interference. Imagine being able to self-assemble products with the last few layers playing with light to create color. Imagine being able to create a shape on the outside of a surface, so that it's self-cleaning with just water. That's what a leaf does. See that up-close picture? That's a ball of water, and those are dirt particles. And that's an up-close picture of a lotus leaf. There's a company making a product called Lotusan, which mimics — when the building facade paint dries, it mimics the bumps in a self-cleaning leaf, and rainwater cleans the building. Water is going to be our big, grand challenge: quenching thirst. Here are two organisms that pull water. The one on the left is the Namibian beetle pulling water out of fog. The one on the right is a pill bug — pulls water out of air, does not drink fresh water. Pulling water out of Monterey fog and out of the sweaty air in Atlanta, before it gets into a building, are key technologies. Separation technologies are going to be extremely important. What if we were to say, no more hard rock mining? What if we were to separate out metals from waste streams, small amounts of metals in water? That's what microbes do; they chelate metals out of water. There's a company here in San Francisco called MR3 that is embedding mimics of the microbes' molecules on filters to mine waste streams. Green chemistry is chemistry in water. We do chemistry in organic solvents. This is a picture of the spinnerets coming out of a spider and the silk being formed from a spider. Isn't that beautiful? Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones. To figure out the elegant recipes that would take the small subset of the periodic table, and create miracle materials like that cell, is the task of green chemistry. Timed degradation: packaging that is good until you don't want it to be good anymore, and dissolves on cue. That's a mussel you can find in the waters out here, and the threads holding it to a rock are timed; at exactly two years, they begin to dissolve. Healing: this is a good one. That little guy over there is a tardigrade. There is a problem with vaccines around the world not getting to patients. And the reason is that the refrigeration somehow gets broken; what's called the "cold chain" gets broken. A guy named Bruce Rosner looked at the tardigrade — which dries out completely, and yet stays alive for months and months and months, and is able to regenerate itself. And he found a way to dry out vaccines — encase them in the same sort of sugar capsules as the tardigrade has within its cells — meaning that vaccines no longer need to be refrigerated. They can be put in a glove compartment, OK. Learning from organisms. This is a session about water — learning about organisms that can do without water, in order to create a vaccine that lasts and lasts and lasts without refrigeration. I'm not going to get to 12. But what I am going to do is tell you that the most important thing, besides all of these adaptations, is the fact that these organisms have figured out a way to do the amazing things they do while taking care of the place that's going to take care of their offspring. When they're involved in foreplay, they're thinking about something very, very important — and that's having their genetic material remain, 10,000 generations from now. And that means finding a way to do what they do without destroying the place that'll take care of their offspring. That's the biggest design challenge. Luckily, there are millions and millions of geniuses willing to gift us with their best ideas. Good luck having a conversation with them. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Talk about foreplay, I — we need to get to 12, but really quickly. Janine Benyus: Oh really? CA: Yeah. Just like, you know, like the 10-second version of 10, 11 and 12. Because we just — your slides are so gorgeous, and the ideas are so big, I can't stand to let you go down without seeing 10, 11 and 12. JB: OK, put this — OK, I'll just hold this thing. OK, great. OK, so that's the healing one. Sensing and responding: feedback is a huge thing. This is a locust. There can be 80 million of them in a square kilometer, and yet they don't collide with one another. And yet we have 3.6 million car collisions a year. (Laughter) Right. There's a person at Newcastle who has figured out that it's a very large neuron. And she's actually figuring out how to make a collision-avoidance circuitry based on this very large neuron in the locust. This is a huge and important one, number 11. And that's the growing fertility. That means, you know, net fertility farming. We should be growing fertility. And, oh yes — we get food, too. Because we have to grow the capacity of this planet to create more and more opportunities for life. And really, that's what other organisms do as well. In ensemble, that's what whole ecosystems do: they create more and more opportunities for life. Our farming has done the opposite. So, farming based on how a prairie builds soil, ranching based on how a native ungulate herd actually increases the health of the range, even wastewater treatment based on how a marsh not only cleans the water, but creates incredibly sparkling productivity. This is the simple design brief. I mean, it looks simple because the system, over 3.8 billion years, has worked this out. That is, those organisms that have not been able to figure out how to enhance or sweeten their places, are not around to tell us about it. That's the twelfth one. Life — and this is the secret trick; this is the magic trick — life creates conditions conducive to life. It builds soil; it cleans air; it cleans water; it mixes the cocktail of gases that you and I need to live. And it does that in the middle of having great foreplay and meeting their needs. So it's not mutually exclusive. We have to find a way to meet our needs, while making of this place an Eden. CA: Janine, thank you so much. (Applause)

The story of life in photographs

Frans Lanting

{0: 'Frans Lanting'}

{0: ['nature photographer']}

{0: "Frans Lanting is one of the greatest nature photographers of our time. His work has been featured in National Geographic, Audubon andTime, as well as numerous award-winning books. Lanting's recent exhibition, The LIFE Project, offers a lyrical interpretation of the history of life on Earth."}

2005-02-02

2007-04-05

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'ml', 'mr', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['animals', 'art', 'design', 'evolution', 'fish', 'nature', 'photography', 'storytelling', 'global commons']

{69: 'Dreams from endangered cultures', 324: 'How photography connects us', 147: 'Visualizing the wonder of a living cell', 573: 'Life in Biosphere 2', 440: "A theory of Earth's mass extinctions", 49433: 'This ancient rock is changing our theory on the origin of life'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_lanting_the_story_of_life_in_photographs/

In this stunning slideshow, celebrated nature photographer Frans Lanting presents The LIFE Project, a poetic collection of photographs that tell the story of our planet, from its eruptive beginnings to its present diversity. Soundtrack by Philip Glass.

Nature's my muse and it's been my passion. As a photographer for National Geographic, I've portrayed it for many. But five years ago, I went on a personal journey. I wanted to visualize the story of life. It's the hardest thing I've ever attempted, and there have been plenty of times when I felt like backing out. But there were also revelations. And one of those I'd like to share with you today. I went down to a remote lagoon in Australia, hoping to see the Earth the way it was three billion years ago, back before the sky turned blue. There's stromatolites down there — the first living things to capture photosynthesis — and it's the only place they still occur today. Going down there was like entering a time capsule, and I came out with a different sense of myself in time. The oxygen exhaled by those stromatolites is what we all breathe today. Stromatolites are the heroes in my story. I hope it's a story that has some resonance for our time. It's a story about you and me, nature and science. And with that said, I'd like to invite you for a short, brief journey of life through time. Our journey starts in space, where matter condenses into spheres over time ... solidifying into surface, molded by fire. The fire gave way, Earth emerged — but this was an alien planet. The moon was closer; things were different. Heat from within made geysers erupt — that is how the oceans were born. Water froze around the poles and shaped the edges of the Earth. Water is the key to life, but in frozen form, it is a latent force. And when it vanishes, Earth becomes Mars. But this planet is different — it's roiling inside. And where that energy touches water, something new emerges: life. It arises around cracks in the Earth. Mud and minerals become substrate; there are bacteria. Learn to multiply, thickening in places ... Growing living structures under an alien sky ... Stromatolites were the first to exhale oxygen. And they changed the atmosphere. A breath that's fossilized now as iron. Meteorites delivered chemistry, and perhaps membranes, too. Life needs a membrane to contain itself so it can replicate and mutate. These are diatoms, single-celled phytoplankton with skeletons of silicon ... circuit boards of the future. Shallow seas nurtured life early on, and that's where it morphed into more complex forms. It grew as light and oxygen increased. Life hardened and became defensive. It learned to move and began to see. The first eyes grew on trilobites. Vision was refined in horseshoe crabs, among the first to leave the sea. They still do what they've done for ages, their enemies long gone. Scorpions follow prey out of the sea. Slugs became snails. Fish tried amphibian life. Frogs adapted to deserts. Lichens arose as a co-op. Fungi married algae ... clinging to rock, and eating it too ... transforming barren land. True land plants arose, leafless at first. Once they learn how to stay upright, they grew in size and shape. The fundamental forms of ferns followed, to bear spores that foreshadowed seeds. Life flourished in swamps. On land, life turned a corner. Jaws formed first; teeth came later. Leatherbacks and tuataras are echoes from that era. It took time for life to break away from water, and it still beckons all the time. Life turned hard so it could venture inland. And the dragons that arose are still among us today. Jurassic Park still shimmers in part of Madagascar, and the center of Brazil, where plants called "cycads" remain rock hard. Forests arose and nurtured things with wings. One early form left an imprint, like it died only yesterday. And others fly today like echoes of the past. In birds, life gained new mobility. Flamingos covered continents. Migrations got underway. Birds witnessed the emergence of flowering plants. Water lilies were among the first. Plants began to diversify and grew, turning into trees. In Australia, a lily turned into a grass tree, and in Hawaii, a daisy became a silver sword. In Africa, Gondwana molded Proteas. But when that ancient continent broke up, life got lusher. Tropical rainforests arose, sparking new layers of interdependence. Fungi multiplied. Orchids emerged, genitalia shaped to lure insects ... a trick shared by the largest flower on Earth. Co-evolution entwined insects and birds and plants forever. When birds can't fly, they become vulnerable. Kiwis are, and so are these hawks trapped near Antarctica. Extinction can come slowly, but sometimes it arrives fast. An asteroid hits, and the world went down in flames. But there were witnesses, survivors in the dark. When the skies cleared, a new world was born. A world fit for mammals. From tiny shrews [came] tenrecs, accustomed to the dark. New forms became bats. Civets. New predators, hyenas, getting faster and faster still. Grasslands created opportunities. Herd safety came with sharpened senses. Growing big was another answer, but size always comes at a price. Some mammals turned back to water. Walruses adapted with layers of fat. Sea lions got sleek. And cetaceans moved into a world without bounds. There are many ways to be a mammal. A 'roo hops in Oz; a horse runs in Asia; and a wolf evolves stilt legs in Brazil. Primates emerge from jungles, as tarsiers first, becoming lemurs not much later. Learning became reinforced. Bands of apes ventured into the open. And forests dried out once more. Going upright became a lifestyle. So who are we? Brothers of masculine chimps, sisters of feminine bonobos? We are all of them, and more. We're molded by the same life force. The blood veins in our hands echoed a course of water traces on the Earth. And our brains — our celebrated brains — reflect a drainage of a tidal marsh. Life is a force in its own right. It is a new element. And it has altered the Earth. It covers Earth like a skin. And where it doesn't, as in Greenland in winter, Mars is still not very far. But that likelihood fades as long as ice melts again. And where water is liquid, it becomes a womb for cells green with chlorophyll — and that molecular marvel is what's made a difference — it powers everything. The whole animal world today lives on a stockpile of bacterial oxygen that is cycled constantly through plants and algae, and their waste is our breath, and vice versa. This Earth is alive, and it's made its own membrane. We call it "atmosphere." This is the icon of our journey. And you all here today can imagine and will shape where we go next. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you.

Singing "What I Want"

Nora York

{0: 'Nora York'}

{0: ['singer', 'performance artist']}

{0: '"Philosopher diva" Nora York is an adventurous singer-songwriter with a drive to explore the human condition.'}

2006-12-14

2007-04-05

TEDSalon 2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['entertainment', 'live music', 'music', 'poetry', 'singer', 'performance']

{158: '"Thula Mama"', 110: '"Kiteflyer\'s Hill"', 117: 'Cape Breton fiddling in reel time', 946: 'The technology of the heart', 42248: '"The Nutritionist"', 24072: 'How the heart actually pumps blood'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/nora_york_singing_what_i_want/

Nora York gives a stunning performance of her song "What I Want," with Jamie Lawrence (keyboards), Steve Tarshis (guitar) and Arthur Kell (bass).

I'd like to begin this song I wrote about ceaseless yearning and never-ending want with a poem of popular Petrarchan paradoxes by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder: "I find no peace, and all my war is done; I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice; I fly above the wind, and yet I cannot arise; And naught I have, and all the world I seize upon." ♫ I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have ♫ ♫ It feels like all I got is loss on a bad back ♫ ♫ Gone with the last train, honey don't you fret ♫ ♫ Every cloud has a silver lining ♫ ♫ Just a little rain, just a little rain, just a little rain ♫ ♫ I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says go ♫ ♫ Nobody knows how to hold me ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says, ♫ ♫ "Good things come to those who wait" ♫ ♫ And I can't stand in ... ♫ ♫ I can't stand in line forever ♫ ♫ Stand the cold air ♫ ♫ Glad-handed ♫ ♫ Sick and tired of the "Later, maybe" ♫ ♫ Take it, fake it, take it, take-it-or-leave-it life ♫ ♫ And I gotta just tame it ♫ ♫ I gotta just name it ♫ ♫ I gotta just seize, so please, oh please, oh please, oh please ♫ ♫ Oh please me right, 'cause ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop ♫ ♫ And my heart says go ♫ ♫ Nobody knows how to hold me ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop — and my heart says go-ooooo ... ♫ ♫ Good things must be here — yes, right here ♫ ♫ Here, right here, right here ♫ ♫ I won't live this life forever ♫ ♫ One time round is all the offer is ♫ ♫ Sick and tired of the "Later, maybe" ♫ ♫ Take it, fake it, make it, leave it life ♫ ♫ And I gotta just name it, I gotta just claim it ♫ ♫ I gotta just seize ♫ ♫ Oh please, oh please, oh please me right ♫ ♫ I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have — you know that ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says go ♫ ♫ Nobody knows how to hold me, no ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says go ♫ ♫ 'Cause I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I — have what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have what I want ♫ (Applause)

Visual illusions that show how we (mis)think

Al Seckel

{0: 'Al Seckel'}

{0: ['master of visual illusions']}

{0: 'Al Seckel explored how eye tricks can reveal the way the brain processes visual information -- or fails to do so. Among his other accomplishments: He co-created the Darwin Fish.'}

2004-02-26

2007-04-05

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'mk', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['brain', 'cognitive science', 'culture', 'design', 'illusion', 'psychology']

{32: 'Art with wire, sugar, chocolate and string', 22: 'Why people believe weird things', 310: 'Brain magic', 50: 'Happiness by design', 1607: 'Want to be happier? Stay in the moment', 211: "TED's nonprofit transition"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/al_seckel_visual_illusions_that_show_how_we_mis_think/

Al Seckel, an expert on illusions, explores the perceptual illusions that fool our brains. He shares loads of cool tricks to prove that not only are we easily fooled, we kind of like it.

We're going to talk — my — a new lecture, just for TED — and I'm going show you some illusions that we've created for TED, and I'm going to try to relate this to happiness. What I was thinking about with happiness is, what gives happiness — or happiness, which I equate with joy in my particular area, and I think there's something very fundamental. And I was thinking about this. And it's in terms of both illusions and movies that we go see and jokes and magic shows is that there's something about these things where our expectations are violated in some sort of pleasing way. You go see a movie. And it has an unexpected twist — something that you didn't expect — and you find a joyful experience. You look at those sort of illusions in my book and it's not as what you'd expect. And there's something joyful about it. And it's the same thing with jokes and all these sorts of things. So, what I'm going to try and do in my lecture is go a little bit further and see if I can violate your expectations in a pleasing way. I mean, sometimes expectations that are violated are not pleasant, but I'm going to try to do it in a pleasant way, in a very primal way, so I can make the audience here happy. So I'm going to show you some ways that we can violate your expectations. First of all, I want to show you the particular illusion here. I want you first of all when it pops up on the screen to notice that the two holes are perpendicular to each other. These are all perceptual tricks. These are real objects that I'm going to show you. Now I'm going to show you how it is done. I've looped the film here so you can get a very interesting experience. I want you to see how this illusion is constructed, and it's going to rotate so you see that it's inside out. Now watch, as it rotates back, how quickly your perception snaps. OK now. Watch it as it rotates back again. And this is a very bright audience, all right? See if you can stop it from happening, even though you know 100 percent it's true that — bam! You can't undo it. What does that tell you about yourselves? We're going to do it again. No doubt about it. See if you can stop it from happening. No. It's difficult. And we can violate your expectations in a whole variety of ways about representation, about shape, about color and so forth and it's very primal. And it's an interesting question to ponder, why these things — we find these things joyful. Why would we find them joyful? So, here's something that Lionel did a while ago. I like these sort of little things like this. Again, this is not an optical trick. This is what you would see. In other words, it's not a camera cut. It's a perceptual trick. OK. We can violate your expectations about shape. We can violate your expectations on representation — what an image represents. What do you see here? How many of you here see dolphins? Raise your hand if you see dolphins. OK, those people who raised their hands, afterwards, the rest of the audience, go talk to them, all right? Actually, this is the best example of priming by experience that I know. If you are a child under the age of 10 who haven't been ruined yet, you will look at this image and see dolphins. Now, some of you adults here are saying, "What dolphins? What dolphins?" But in fact, if you reversed the figure ground — in other words, the dark areas here — I forgot to ask for a pointer — but if you reverse it, you'll see a whole series of little dolphins. By the way, if you're also a student at CalTech — they also tend to just see the dolphins. It's based on experience. Now, something like this can be used because this is after all talk about design, too. This was done by Saatchi and Saatchi, and they actually got away with this ad in Australia. So, if you look at this ad for beer, all those people are in sort of provocative positions. But they got it passed, and actually won the Clio awards, so it's funny how you can do these things. Remember that sort of, um. This is the joke I did when the Florida ballot was going around. You know, count the dots for Gore; count the dots for Bush; count 'em again ... You can violate your expectations about experience. Here is an outside water fountain that I created with some friends of mine, but you can stop the water in drops and — actually make all the drops levitate. This is something we're building for, you know, amusement parks and that kind of stuff. Now let's take a static image. Can you see this? Do you see the middle section moving down and the outer sections moving up? It's completely static. It's a static image. How many people see this illusion? It's completely static. Right. Now, when — it's interesting that when we look at an image we see, you know, color, depth, texture. And you can look at this whole scene and analyze it. You can see the woman is in closer than the wall and so forth. But the whole thing is actually flat. It's painted. It's trompe l'oeil. And it was such a good trompe l'oeil that people got irritated when they tried to talk to the woman and she wouldn't respond. Now, you can make design mistakes. Like this building in New York. So that when you see it from this side, it looks like the balconies tilt up, and when you walk around to the other side it looks like the balconies go down. So there are cases where you have mistakes in design that incorporate illusions. Or, you take this particular un-retouched photograph. Now, interestingly enough, I get a lot of emails from people who say, "Is there any perceptual difference between males and females?" And I really say, "No." I mean, women can navigate through the world just as well as males can — and why wouldn't they? However, this is the one illusion that women can consistently do better than males: in matching which head because they rely on fashion cues. They can match the hat. Okay, now getting to a part — I want to show design in illusions. I believe that the first example of illusions being used purposely was by da Vinci in this anamorphic image of an eye. So that when you saw from one little angle was like this. And this little technique got popular in the 16th century and the 17th century to disguise hidden meanings, where you could flip the image and see it from one little point of view like this. But these are early incorporations of illusions brought to — sort of high point with Hans Holbein's "Ambassadors." And Hans Holbein worked for Henry VIII. This was hung on a wall where you could walk down from the stair and you can see this hidden skull. All right, now I'm going to show you some designers who work with illusions to give that element of surprise. One of my favorites is Scott Kim. I worked with Scott to create some illusions for TED that I hope you will enjoy. We have one here on TED and happiness. OK now. Arthur [Ganson] hasn't talked yet, but his is going to be a delightful talk and he has some of his really fantastic machines outside. And so, we — Scott created this wonderful tribute to Arthur Ganson. Well, there's analog and digital. Thought that was appropriate here. And figure goes to ground. And for the musicians. And of course, since happiness — we want "joy to the world." Now, another great designer — he's very well known in Japan — Shigeo Fukuda. And he just builds some fantastic things. This is simply amazing. This is a pile of junk that when you view it from one particular angle, you see its reflection in the mirror as a perfect piano. Pianist transforms to violinist. This is really wild. This assemblage of forks, knives and spoons and various cutlery, welded together. It gives a shadow of a motorcycle. You learn something in the sort of thing that I do, which is there are people out there with a lot of time on their hands. Ken Knowlton does wonderful composite images, like creating Jacques Cousteau out of seashells — un-retouched seashells, but just by rearranging them. He did Einstein out of dice because, after all, Einstein said, "God does not play dice with the universe." Bert Herzog out of un-retouched keyboards. Will Shortz, crossword puzzle. John Cederquist does these wonderful trompe l'oeil cabinets. Now, I'm going to skip ahead since I'm sort of running [behind]. I want to show you quickly what I've created, some new type of illusions. I've done something with taking the Pixar-type illusions. So you see these kids the same size here, running down the hall. The two table tops of the same size. They're looking out two directions at once. You have a larger piece fitting in with a smaller. And that's something for you to think about, all right? So you see larger pieces fitting in within smaller pieces here. Does everyone see that? Which is impossible. You can see the two kids are looking out simultaneously out of two different directions at once. Now can you believe these two table tops are the same size and shape? They are. So, if you measured them, they would be. And as I say, those two figures are identical in size and shape. And it's interesting, by doing this in this sort of rendered fashion, how much stronger the illusions are. Any case, I hope this has brought you a little joy and happiness, and if you're interested in seeing more cool effects, see me outside. I'd be happy to show you lots of things.

The gentle genius of bonobos

Susan Savage-Rumbaugh

{0: 'Susan Savage-Rumbaugh'}

{0: ['primate authority']}

{0: 'Susan Savage-Rumbaugh has made startling breakthroughs in her lifelong work with chimpanzees and bonobos, showing the animals to be adept in picking up language and other "intelligent" behaviors.'}

2004-02-02

2007-04-05

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'da', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['animals', 'apes', 'biology', 'culture', 'evolution', 'genetics', 'intelligence', 'language']

{340: 'How humans and animals can live together', 77: 'The shrimp with a kick!', 145: 'The emergent genius of ant colonies', 1102: "Evolution's gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans", 2539: 'Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent', 11: 'What separates us from chimpanzees?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_the_gentle_genius_of_bonobos/

Savage-Rumbaugh's work with bonobo apes, which can understand spoken language and learn tasks by watching, forces the audience to rethink how much of what a species can do is determined by biology -- and how much by cultural exposure.

I work with a species called "Bonobo." And I'm happy most of the time, because I think this is the happiest species on the planet. It's kind of a well-kept secret. This species lives only in the Congo. And they're not in too many zoos, because of their sexual behavior. Their sexual behavior is too human-like for most of us to be comfortable with. (Laughter) But — (Laughter) actually, we have a lot to learn from them, because they're a very egalitarian society and they're a very empathetic society. And sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they sort of set aside. It permeates their entire life. And it's used for communication. And it's used for conflict resolution. And I think perhaps somewhere in our history we sort of, divided our lives up into lots of parts. We divided our world up with lots of categories. And so everything sort of has a place that it has to fit. But I don't think that we were that way initially. There are many people who think that the animal world is hard-wired and that there's something very, very special about man. Maybe it's his ability to have causal thought. Maybe it's something special in his brain that allows him to have language. Maybe it's something special in his brain that allows him to make tools or to have mathematics. Well, I don't know. There were Tasmanians who were discovered around the 1600s and they had no fire. They had no stone tools. To our knowledge they had no music. So when you compare them to the Bonobo, the Bonobo is a little hairier. He doesn't stand quite as upright. But there are a lot of similarities. And I think that as we look at culture, we kind of come to understand how we got to where we are. And I don't really think it's in our biology; I think we've attributed it to our biology, but I don't really think it's there. So what I want to do now is introduce you to a species called the Bonobo. This is Kanzi. He's a Bonobo. Right now, he's in a forest in Georgia. His mother originally came from a forest in Africa. And she came to us when she was just at puberty, about six or seven years of age. Now this shows a Bonobo on your right, and a chimpanzee on your left. Clearly, the chimpanzee has a little bit harder time of walking. The Bonobo, although shorter than us and their arms still longer, is more upright, just as we are. This shows the Bonobo compared to an australopithecine like Lucy. As you can see, there's not a lot of difference between the way a Bonobo walks and the way an early australopithecine would have walked. As they turn toward us you'll see that the pelvic area of early australopithecines is a little flatter and doesn't have to rotate quite so much from side to side. So the — the bipedal gait is a little easier. And now we see all four. Video: Narrator: The wild Bonobo lives in central Africa, in the jungle encircled by the Congo River. Canopied trees as tall as 40 meters, 130 feet, grow densely in the area. It was a Japanese scientist who first undertook serious field studies of the Bonobo, almost three decades ago. Bonobos are built slightly smaller than the chimpanzee. Slim-bodied, Bonobos are by nature very gentle creatures. Long and careful studies have reported many new findings on them. One discovery was that wild Bonobos often walk bidpedally. What's more, they are able to walk upright for long distances. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh (video): Let's go say hello to Austin first and then go to the A frame. SS: This is Kanzi and I, in the forest. None of the things you will see in this particular video are trained. None of them are tricks. They all happened to be captured on film spontaneously, by NHK of Japan. We have eight Bonobos. Video: Look at all this stuff that's here for our campfire. SS: An entire family at our research centre. Video: You going to help get some sticks? Good. We need more sticks, too. I have a lighter in my pocket if you need one. That's a wasps' nest. You can get it out. I hope I have a lighter. You can use the lighter to start the fire. SS: So Kanzi is very interested in fire. He doesn't do it yet without a lighter, but I think if he saw someone do it, he might be able to do — make a fire without a lighter. He's learning about how to keep a fire going. He's learning the uses for a fire, just by watching what we do with fire. (Laughter) This is a smile on the face of a Bonobo. These are happy vocalizations. Video: You're happy. You're very happy about this part. You've got to put some water on the fire. You see the water? Good job. SS: Forgot to zip up the back half of his backpack. But he likes to carry things from place to place. Video: Austin, I hear you saying "Austin." SS: He talks to other Bonobos at the lab, long-distance, farther than we can hear. This is his sister. This is her first time to try to drive a golf cart. Video: Goodbye. (Laughter) SS: She's got the pedals down, but not the wheel. She switches from reverse to forward and she holds onto the wheel, rather than turns it. (Laughter) Like us, she knows that that individual in the mirror is her. (Music) Video: Narrator: By raising Bonobos in a culture that is both Bonobo and human, and documenting their development across two decades, scientists are exploring how cultural forces (Laughter) may have operated during human evolution. His name is Nyota. It means "star" in Swahili. (Music) Panbanisha is trying to give Nyota a haircut with a pair of scissors. In the wild, the parent Bonobo is known to groom its offspring. Here Panbanisha uses scissors, instead of her hands, to groom Nyota. Very impressive. Subtle maneuvering of the hands is required to perform delicate tasks like this. Nyota tries to imitate Panbanisha by using the scissors himself. Realizing that Nyota might get hurt, Panbanisha, like any human mother, carefully tugs to get the scissors back. He can now cut through tough animal hide. SS: Kanzi's learned to make stone tools. Video: Kanzi now makes his tools, just as our ancestors may have made them, two-and-a-half million years ago — by holding the rocks in both hands, to strike one against the other. He has learned that by using both hands and aiming his glancing blows, he can make much larger, sharper flakes. Kanzi chooses a flake he thinks is sharp enough. The tough hide is difficult to cut, even with a knife. The rock that Kanzi is using is extremely hard and ideal for stone tool making, but difficult to handle, requiring great skill. Kanzi's rock is from Gona, Ethiopia and is identical to that used by our African ancestors two-and-a-half million years ago. These are the rocks Kanzi used and these are the flakes he made. The flat sharp edges are like knife blades. Compare them to the tools our ancestors used; they bear a striking resemblance to Kanzi's. Panbanisha is longing to go for a walk in the woods. She keeps staring out the window. SS: This is — let me show you something we didn't think they would do. Video: For several days now, Panbanisha has not been outside. SS: I normally talk about language. Video: Then Panbanisha does something unexpected. SS: But since I'm advised not to do what I normally do, I haven't told you that these apes have language. It's a geometric language. Video: She takes a piece of chalk and begins writing something on the floor. What is she writing? SS: She's also saying the name of that, with her voice. Video: Now she comes up to Dr. Sue and starts writing again. SS: These are her symbols on her keyboard. (Music) They speak when she touches them. Video: Panbanisha is communicating to Dr. Sue where she wants to go. "A frame" represents a hut in the woods. Compare the chalk writing with the lexigram on the keyboard. Panbanisha began writing the lexigrams on the forest floor. SS (video): Very nice. Beautiful, Panbanisha. SS: At first we didn't really realize what she was doing, until we stood back and looked at it and rotated it. Video: This lexigram also refers to a place in the woods. The curved line is very similar to the lexigram. The next symbol Panbanisha writes represents "collar." It indicates the collar that Panbanisha must wear when she goes out. SS: That's an institutional requirement. Video: This symbol is not as clear as the others, but one can see Panbanisha is trying to produce a curved line and several straight lines. Researchers began to record what Panbanisha said, by writing lexigrams on the floor with chalk. Panbanisha watched. Soon she began to write as well. The Bonobo's abilities have stunned scientists around the world. How did they develop? SS (video): We found that the most important thing for permitting Bonobos to acquire language is not to teach them. It's simply to use language around them, because the driving force in language acquisition is to understand what others, that are important to you, are saying to you. Once you have that capacity, the ability to produce language comes rather naturally and rather freely. So we want to create an environment in which Bonobos, like all of the individuals with whom they are interacting — we want to create an environment in which they have fun, and an environment in which the others are meaningful individuals for them. Narrator: This environment brings out unexpected potential in Kanzi and Panbanisha. Panbanisha is enjoying playing her harmonica, until Nyota, now one year old, steals it. Then he peers eagerly into his mother's mouth. Is he looking for where the sound came from? Dr. Sue thinks it's important to allow such curiosity to flourish. This time Panbanisha is playing the electric piano. She wasn't forced to learn the piano; she saw a researcher play the instrument and took an interest. Researcher: Go ahead. Go ahead. I'm listening. Do that real fast part that you did. Yeah, that part. Narrator: Kanzi plays the xylophone; using both hands he enthusiastically accompanies Dr. Sue's singing. Kanzi and Panbanisha are stimulated by this fun-filled environment, which promotes the emergence of these cultural capabilities. (Laughter) Researcher: OK, now get the monsters. Get them. Take the cherries too. Now watch out, stay away from them now. Now you can chase them again. Time to chase them. Now you have to stay away. Get away. Run away. Run. Now we can chase them again. Go get them. Oh no! Good Kanzi. Very good. Thank you so much. Narrator: None of us, Bonobo or human, can possibly even imagine? SS: So we have a bi-species environment, we call it a "panhomoculture." We're learning how to become like them. We're learning how to communicate with them, in really high-pitched tones. We're learning that they probably have a language in the wild. And they're learning to become like us. Because we believe that it's not biology; it's culture. So we're sharing tools and technology and language with another species. Thank you.

The route to a sustainable future

Alex Steffen

{0: 'Alex Steffen'}

{0: ['planetary futurist']}

{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."}

2005-07-07

2007-04-05

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'mk', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['alternative energy', 'business', 'cities', 'collaboration', 'culture', 'design', 'environment', 'global issues', 'invention', 'sustainability']

{104: 'Cradle to cradle design', 18: "Biomimicry's surprising lessons from nature's engineers", 266: 'Designing objects that tell stories', 174: 'My green agenda for architecture', 1207: 'The shareable future of cities', 9: 'To invent is to give'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_steffen_the_route_to_a_sustainable_future/

Worldchanging.com founder Alex Steffen argues that reducing humanity’s ecological footprint is incredibly vital now, as the western consumer lifestyle spreads to developing countries.

When I'm starting talks like this, I usually do a whole spiel about sustainability because a lot of people out there don't know what that is. This is a crowd that does know what it is, so I'll like just do like the 60-second crib-note version. Right? So just bear with me. We'll go real fast, you know? Fill in the blanks. So, you know, sustainability, small planet. Right? Picture a little Earth, circling around the sun. You know, about a million years ago, a bunch of monkeys fell out of trees, got a little clever, harnessed fire, invented the printing press, made, you know, luggage with wheels on it. And, you know, built the society that we now live in. Unfortunately, while this society is, without a doubt, the most prosperous and dynamic the world has ever created, it's got some major, major flaws. One of them is that every society has an ecological footprint. It has an amount of impact on the planet that's measurable. How much stuff goes through your life, how much waste is left behind you. And we, at the moment, in our society, have a really dramatically unsustainable level of this. We're using up about five planets. If everybody on the planet lived the way we did, we'd need between five, six, seven, some people even say 10 planets to make it. Clearly we don't have 10 planets. Again, you know, mental, visual, 10 planets, one planet, 10 planets, one planet. Right? We don't have that. So that's one problem. The second problem is that the planet that we have is being used in wildly unfair ways. Right? North Americans, such as myself, you know, we're basically sort of wallowing, gluttonous hogs, and we're eating all sorts of stuff. And, you know, then you get all the way down to people who live in the Asia-Pacific region, or even more, Africa. And people simply do not have enough to survive. This is producing all sorts of tensions, all sorts of dynamics that are deeply disturbing. And there's more and more people on the way. Right? So, this is what the planet's going to look like in 20 years. It's going to be a pretty crowded place, at least eight billion people. So to make matters even more difficult, it's a very young planet. A third of the people on this planet are kids. And those kids are growing up in a completely different way than their parents did, no matter where they live. They've been exposed to this idea of our society, of our prosperity. And they may not want to live exactly like us. They may not want to be Americans, or Brits, or Germans, or South Africans, but they want their own version of a life which is more prosperous, and more dynamic, and more, you know, enjoyable. And all of these things combine to create an enormous amount of torque on the planet. And if we cannot figure out a way to deal with that torque, we are going to find ourselves more and more and more quickly facing situations which are simply unthinkable. Everybody in this room has heard the worst-case scenarios. I don't need to go into that. But I will ask the question, what's the alternative? And I would say that, at the moment, the alternative is unimaginable. You know, so on the one hand we have the unthinkable; on the other hand we have the unimaginable. We don't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable, which is shareable with everybody on the planet, which promotes stability and democracy and human rights, and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face. We don't know how to do this yet. So what's Worldchanging? Well, Worldchanging you might think of as being a bit of a news service for the unimaginable future. You know, what we're out there doing is looking for examples of tools, models and ideas, which, if widely adopted, would change the game. A lot of times, when I do a talk like this, I talk about things that everybody in this room I'm sure has already heard of, but most people haven't. So I thought today I'd do something a little different, and talk about what we're looking for, rather than saying, you know, rather than giving you tried-and-true examples. Talk about the kinds of things we're scoping out. Give you a little peek into our editorial notebook. And given that I have 13 minutes to do this, this is going to go kind of quick. So, I don't know, just stick with me. Right? So, first of all, what are we looking for? Bright Green city. One of the biggest levers that we have in the developed world for changing the impact that we have on the planet is changing the way that we live in cities. We're already an urban planet; that's especially true in the developed world. And people who live in cities in the developed world tend to be very prosperous, and thus use a lot of stuff. If we can change the dynamic, by first of all creating cities that are denser and more livable ... Here, for example, is Vancouver, which if you haven't been there, you ought to go for a visit. It's a fabulous city. And they are doing density, new density, better than probably anybody else on the planet right now. They're actually managing to talk North Americans out of driving cars, which is a pretty great thing. So you have density. You also have growth management. You leave aside what is natural to be natural. This is in Portland. That is an actual development. That land there will remain pasture in perpetuity. They've bounded the city with a line. Nature, city. Nothing changes. Once you do those things, you can start making all sorts of investments. You can start doing things like, you know, transit systems that actually work to transport people, in effective and reasonably comfortable manners. You can also start to change what you build. This is the Beddington Zero Energy Development in London, which is one of the greenest buildings in the world. It's a fabulous place. We're able to now build buildings that generate all their own electricity, that recycle much of their water, that are much more comfortable than standard buildings, use all-natural light, etc., and, over time, cost less. Green roofs. Bill McDonough covered that last night, so I won't dwell on that too much. But once you also have people living in close proximity to each other, one of the things you can do is — as information technologies develop — you can start to have smart places. You can start to know where things are. When you know where things are, it becomes easier to share them. When you share them, you end up using less. So one great example is car-share clubs, which are really starting to take off in the U.S., have already taken off in many places in Europe, and are a great example. If you're somebody who drives, you know, one day a week, do you really need your own car? Another thing that information technology lets us do is start figuring out how to use less stuff by knowing, and by monitoring, the amount we're actually using. So, here's a power cord which glows brighter the more energy that you use, which I think is a pretty cool concept, although I think it ought to work the other way around, that it gets brighter the more you don't use. But, you know, there may even be a simpler approach. We could just re-label things. This light switch that reads, on the one hand, flashfloods, and on the other hand, off. How we build things can change as well. This is a bio-morphic building. It takes its inspiration in form from life. Many of these buildings are incredibly beautiful, and also much more effective. This is an example of bio-mimicry, which is something we're really starting to look a lot more for. In this case, you have a shell design which was used to create a new kind of exhaust fan, which is greatly more effective. There's a lot of this stuff happening; it's really pretty remarkable. I encourage you to look on Worldchanging if you're into it. We're starting to cover this more and more. There's also neo-biological design, where more and more we're actually using life itself and the processes of life to become part of our industry. So this, for example, is hydrogen-generating algae. So we have a model in potential, an emerging model that we're looking for of how to take the cities most of us live in, and turn them into Bright Green cities. But unfortunately, most of the people on the planet don't live in the cites we live in. They live in the emerging megacities of the developing world. And there's a statistic I often like to use, which is that we're adding a city of Seattle every four days, a city the size of Seattle to the planet every four days. I was giving a talk about two months ago, and this guy, who'd done some work with the U.N., came up to me and was really flustered, and he said, look, you've got that totally wrong; it's totally wrong. It's every seven days. So, we're adding a city the size of Seattle every seven days, and most of those cities look more like this than the city that you or I live in. Most of those cites are growing incredibly quickly. They don't have existing infrastructure; they have enormous numbers of people who are struggling with poverty, and enormous numbers of people are trying to figure out how to do things in new ways. So what do we need in order to make developing nation megacities into Bright Green megacities? Well, the first thing we need is, we need leapfrogging. And this is one of the things that we are looking for everywhere. The idea behind leapfrogging is that if you are a person, or a country, who is stuck in a situation where you don't have the tools and technologies that you need, there's no reason for you to invest in last generation's technologies. Right? That you're much better off, almost universally, looking for a low-cost or locally applicable version of the newest technology. One place we're all familiar with seeing this is with cell phones. Right? All throughout the developing world, people are going directly to cell phones, skipping the whole landline stage. If there are landlines in many developing world cities, they're usually pretty crappy systems that break down a lot and cost enormous amounts of money. So I rather like this picture here. I particularly like the Ganesh in the background, talking on the cell phone. So what we have, increasingly, is cell phones just permeating out through society. We've heard all about this here this week, so I won't say too much more than that, other than to say what is true for cell phones is true for all sorts of technologies. The second thing is tools for collaboration, be they systems of collaboration, or intellectual property systems which encourage collaboration. Right? When you have free ability for people to freely work together and innovate, you get different kinds of solutions. And those solutions are accessible in a different way to people who don't have capital. Right? So, you know, we have open source software, we have Creative Commons and other kinds of Copyleft solutions. And those things lead to things like this. This is a Telecentro in Sao Paulo. This is a pretty remarkable program using free and open source software, cheap, sort of hacked-together machines, and basically sort of abandoned buildings — has put together a bunch of community centers where people can come in, get high-speed internet access, learn computer programming skills for free. And a quarter-million people every year use these now in Sao Paulo. And those quarter-million people are some of the poorest people in Sao Paolo. I particularly like the little Linux penguin in the back. (Laughter) So one of the things that that's leading to is a sort of southern cultural explosion. And one of the things we're really, really interested in at Worldchanging is the ways in which the south is re-identifying itself, and re-categorizing itself in ways that have less and less to do with most of us in this room. So it's not, you know, Bollywood isn't just answering Hollywood. Right? You know, Brazilian music scene isn't just answering the major labels. It's doing something new. There's new things happening. There's interplay between them. And, you know, you get amazing things. Like, I don't know if any of you have seen the movie "City of God?" Yeah, it's a fabulous movie if you haven't seen it. And it's all about this question, in a very artistic and indirect kind of way. You have other radical examples where the ability to use cultural tools is spreading out. These are people who have just been visited by the Internet bookmobile in Uganda. And who are waving their first books in the air, which, I just think that's a pretty cool picture. You know? So you also have the ability for people to start coming together and acting on their own behalf in political and civic ways, in ways that haven't happened before. And as we heard last night, as we've heard earlier this week, are absolutely, fundamentally vital to the ability to craft new solutions, is we've got to craft new political realities. And I would personally say that we have to craft new political realities, not only in places like India, Afghanistan, Kenya, Pakistan, what have you, but here at home as well. Another world is possible. And sort of the big motto of the anti-globalization movement. Right? We tweak that a lot. We talk about how another world isn't just possible; another world's here. That it's not just that we have to sort of imagine there being a different, vague possibility out there, but we need to start acting a little bit more on that possibility. We need to start doing things like Lula, President of Brazil. How many people knew of Lula before today? OK, so, much, much better than the average crowd, I can tell you that. So Lula, he's full of problems, full of contradictions, but one of the things that he's doing is, he is putting forward an idea of how we engage in international relations that completely shifts the balance from the standard sort of north-south dialogue into a whole new way of global collaboration. I would keep your eye on this fellow. Another example of this sort of second superpower thing is the rise of these games that are what we call "serious play." We're looking a lot at this. This is spreading everywhere. This is from "A Force More Powerful." It's a little screenshot. "A Force More Powerful" is a video game that, while you're playing it, it teaches you how to engage in non-violent insurrection and regime change. (Laughter) Here's another one. This is from a game called "Food Force," which is a game that teaches children how to run a refugee camp. These things are all contributing in a very dynamic way to a huge rise in, especially in the developing world, in people's interest in and passion for democracy. We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt. And, you know, we don't hear those stories enough. But it's happening all over the place, and these tools are part of what's making it possible. Now when you add all those things together, when you add together leapfrogging and new kinds of tools, you know, second superpower stuff, etc., what do you get? Well, very quickly, you get a Bright Green future for the developing world. You get, for example, green power spread throughout the world. You get — this is a building in Hyderabad, India. It's the greenest building in the world. You get grassroots solutions, things that work for people who have no capital or limited access. You get barefoot solar engineers carrying solar panels into the remote mountains. You get access to distance medicine. These are Indian nurses learning how to use PDAs to access databases that have information that they don't have access to at home in a distant manner. You get new tools for people in the developing world. These are LED lights that help the roughly billion people out there, for whom nightfall means darkness, to have a new means of operating. These are refrigerators that require no electricity; they're pot within a pot design. And you get water solutions. Water's one of the most pressing problems. Here's a design for harvesting rainwater that's super cheap and available to people in the developing world. Here's a design for distilling water using sunlight. Here's a fog-catcher, which, if you live in a moist, jungle-like area, will distill water from the air that's clean and drinkable. Here's a way of transporting water. I just love this, you know — I mean carrying water is such a drag, and somebody just came up with the idea of well, what if you rolled it. Right? I mean, that's a great design. This is a fabulous invention, LifeStraw. Basically you can suck any water through this and it will become drinkable by the time it hits your lips. So, you know, people who are in desperate straits can get this. This is one of my favorite Worldchanging kinds of things ever. This is a merry-go-round invented by the company Roundabout, which pumps water as kids play. You know? Seriously — give that one a hand, it's pretty great. And the same thing is true for people who are in absolute crisis. Right? We're expecting to have upwards of 200 million refugees by the year 2020 because of climate change and political instability. How do we help people like that? Well, there's all sorts of amazing new humanitarian designs that are being developed in collaborative ways all across the planet. Some of those designs include models for acting, such as new models for village instruction in the middle of refugee camps. New models for pedagogy for the displaced. And we have new tools. This is one of my absolute favorite things anywhere. Does anyone know what this is? Audience: It detects landmines. Alex Steffen: Exactly, this is a landmine-detecting flower. If you are living in one of the places where the roughly half-billion unaccounted for mines are scattered, you can fling these seeds out into the field. And as they grow up, they will grow up around the mines, their roots will detect the chemicals in them, and where the flowers turn red you don't step. Yeah, so seeds that could save your life. You know? (Applause) I also love it because it seems to me that the example, the tools we use to change the world, ought to be beautiful in themselves. You know, that it's not just enough to survive. We've got to make something better than what we've got. And I think that we will. Just to wrap up, in the immortal words of H.G. Wells, I think that better things are on the way. I think that, in fact, that "all of the past is but the beginning of a beginning. All that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening." I hope that that turns out to be true. The people in this room have given me more confidence than ever that it will. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Sampling the ocean's DNA

Craig Venter

{0: 'Craig Venter'}

{0: ['biologist', 'genetics pioneer']}

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

2005-02-24

2007-04-05

TEDGlobal 2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['DNA', 'biotech', 'entrepreneur', 'genetics', 'invention', 'oceans', 'science', 'technology', 'ecology', 'biology', 'biodiversity']

{227: 'On the verge of creating synthetic life', 323: 'A family tree for humanity', 331: 'DNA folding, in detail', 437: 'Genomics 101', 863: 'Watch me unveil "synthetic life"', 80: 'The life code that will reshape the future'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_sampling_the_ocean_s_dna/

Genomics pioneer Craig Venter takes a break from his epic round-the-world expedition to talk about the millions of genes his team has discovered so far in its quest to map the ocean's biodiversity.

At the break, I was asked by several people about my comments about the aging debate. And this will be my only comment on it. And that is, I understand that optimists greatly outlive pessimists. (Laughter) What I'm going to tell you about in my 18 minutes is how we're about to switch from reading the genetic code to the first stages of beginning to write the code ourselves. It's only 10 years ago this month when we published the first sequence of a free-living organism, that of haemophilus influenzae. That took a genome project from 13 years down to four months. We can now do that same genome project in the order of two to eight hours. So in the last decade, a large number of genomes have been added: most human pathogens, a couple of plants, several insects and several mammals, including the human genome. Genomics at this stage of the thinking from a little over 10 years ago was, by the end of this year, we might have between three and five genomes sequenced; it's on the order of several hundred. We just got a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to sequence 130 genomes this year, as a side project from environmental organisms. So the rate of reading the genetic code has changed. But as we look, what's out there, we've barely scratched the surface on what is available on this planet. Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass. And maybe it's something that people in Oxford don't do very often, but if you ever make it to the sea, and you swallow a mouthful of seawater, keep in mind that each milliliter has about a million bacteria and on the order of 10 million viruses. Less than 5,000 microbial species have been characterized as of two years ago, and so we decided to do something about it. And we started the Sorcerer II Expedition, where we were, as with great oceanographic expeditions, trying to sample the ocean every 200 miles. We started in Bermuda for our test project, then moved up to Halifax, working down the U.S. East Coast, the Caribbean Sea, the Panama Canal, through to the Galapagos, then across the Pacific, and we're in the process now of working our way across the Indian Ocean. It's very tough duty; we're doing this on a sailing vessel, in part to help excite young people about going into science. The experiments are incredibly simple. We just take seawater and we filter it, and we collect different size organisms on different filters, and then take their DNA back to our lab in Rockville, where we can sequence a hundred million letters of the genetic code every 24 hours. And with doing this, we've made some amazing discoveries. For example, it was thought that the visual pigments that are in our eyes — there was only one or two organisms in the environment that had these same pigments. It turns out, almost every species in the upper parts of the ocean in warm parts of the world have these same photoreceptors, and use sunlight as the source of their energy and communication. From one site, from one barrel of seawater, we discovered 1.3 million new genes and as many as 50,000 new species. We've extended this to the air now with a grant from the Sloan Foundation. We're measuring how many viruses and bacteria all of us are breathing in and out every day, particularly on airplanes or closed auditoriums. (Laughter) We filter through some simple apparatuses; we collect on the order of a billion microbes from just a day filtering on top of a building in New York City. And we're in the process of sequencing all that at the present time. Just on the data collection side, just where we are through the Galapagos, we're finding that almost every 200 miles, we see tremendous diversity in the samples in the ocean. Some of these make logical sense, in terms of different temperature gradients. So this is a satellite photograph based on temperatures — red being warm, blue being cold — and we found there's a tremendous difference between the warm water samples and the cold water samples, in terms of abundant species. The other thing that surprised us quite a bit is these photoreceptors detect different wavelengths of light, and we can predict that based on their amino acid sequence. And these vary tremendously from region to region. Maybe not surprisingly, in the deep ocean, where it's mostly blue, the photoreceptors tend to see blue light. When there's a lot of chlorophyll around, they see a lot of green light. But they vary even more, possibly moving towards infrared and ultraviolet in the extremes. Just to try and get an assessment of what our gene repertoire was, we assembled all the data — including all of ours thus far from the expedition, which represents more than half of all the gene data on the planet — and it totaled around 29 million genes. And we tried to put these into gene families to see what these discoveries are: Are we just discovering new members of known families, or are we discovering new families? And it turns out we have about 50,000 major gene families, but every new sample we take in the environment adds in a linear fashion to these new families. So we're at the earliest stages of discovery about basic genes, components and life on this planet. When we look at the so-called evolutionary tree, we're up on the upper right-hand corner with the animals. Of those roughly 29 million genes, we only have around 24,000 in our genome. And if you take all animals together, we probably share less than 30,000 and probably maybe a dozen or more thousand different gene families. I view that these genes are now not only the design components of evolution. And we think in a gene-centric view — maybe going back to Richard Dawkins' ideas — than in a genome-centric view, which are different constructs of these gene components. Synthetic DNA, the ability to synthesize DNA, has changed at sort of the same pace that DNA sequencing has over the last decade or two, and is getting very rapid and very cheap. Our first thought about synthetic genomics came when we sequenced the second genome back in 1995, and that from mycoplasma genitalium. And we have really nice T-shirts that say, you know, "I heart my genitalium." This is actually just a microorganism. But it has roughly 500 genes. Haemophilus had 1,800 genes. And we simply asked the question, if one species needs 800, another 500, is there a smaller set of genes that might comprise a minimal operating system? So we started doing transposon mutagenesis. Transposons are just small pieces of DNA that randomly insert in the genetic code. And if they insert in the middle of the gene, they disrupt its function. So we made a map of all the genes that could take transposon insertions and we called those "non-essential genes." But it turns out the environment is very critical for this, and you can only define an essential or non-essential gene based on exactly what's in the environment. We also tried to take a more directly intellectual approach with the genomes of 13 related organisms, and we tried to compare all of those, to see what they had in common. And we got these overlapping circles. And we found only 173 genes common to all 13 organisms. The pool expanded a little bit if we ignored one intracellular parasite; it expanded even more when we looked at core sets of genes of around 310 or so. So we think that we can expand or contract genomes, depending on your point of view here, to maybe 300 to 400 genes from the minimal of 500. The only way to prove these ideas was to construct an artificial chromosome with those genes in them, and we had to do this in a cassette-based fashion. We found that synthesizing accurate DNA in large pieces was extremely difficult. Ham Smith and Clyde Hutchison, my colleagues on this, developed an exciting new method that allowed us to synthesize a 5,000-base pair virus in only a two-week period that was 100 percent accurate, in terms of its sequence and its biology. It was a quite exciting experiment — when we just took the synthetic piece of DNA, injected it in the bacteria and all of a sudden, that DNA started driving the production of the virus particles that turned around and then killed the bacteria. This was not the first synthetic virus — a polio virus had been made a year before — but it was only one ten-thousandth as active and it took three years to do. This is a cartoon of the structure of phi X 174. This is a case where the software now builds its own hardware, and that's the notions that we have with biology. People immediately jump to concerns about biological warfare, and I had recent testimony before a Senate committee, and a special committee the U.S. government has set up to review this area. And I think it's important to keep reality in mind, versus what happens with people's imaginations. Basically, any virus that's been sequenced today — that genome can be made. And people immediately freak out about things about Ebola or smallpox, but the DNA from this organism is not infective. So even if somebody made the smallpox genome, that DNA itself would not cause infections. The real concern that security departments have is designer viruses. And there's only two countries, the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, that had major efforts on trying to create biological warfare agents. If that research is truly discontinued, there should be very little activity on the know-how to make designer viruses in the future. I think single-cell organisms are possible within two years. And possibly eukaryotic cells, those that we have, are possible within a decade. So we're now making several dozen different constructs, because we can vary the cassettes and the genes that go into this artificial chromosome. The key is, how do you put all of the others? We start with these fragments, and then we have a homologous recombination system that reassembles those into a chromosome. This is derived from an organism, deinococcus radiodurans, that can take three million rads of radiation and not be killed. It reassembles its genome after this radiation burst in about 12 to 24 hours, after its chromosomes are literally blown apart. This organism is ubiquitous on the planet, and exists perhaps now in outer space due to all our travel there. This is a glass beaker after about half a million rads of radiation. The glass started to burn and crack, while the microbes sitting in the bottom just got happier and happier. Here's an actual picture of what happens: the top of this shows the genome after 1.7 million rads of radiation. The chromosome is literally blown apart. And here's that same DNA automatically reassembled 24 hours later. It's truly stunning that these organisms can do that, and we probably have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different species on this planet that are capable of doing that. After these genomes are synthesized, the first step is just transplanting them into a cell without a genome. So we think synthetic cells are going to have tremendous potential, not only for understanding the basis of biology but for hopefully environmental and society issues. For example, from the third organism we sequenced, Methanococcus jannaschii — it lives in boiling water temperatures; its energy source is hydrogen and all its carbon comes from CO2 it captures back from the environment. So we know lots of different pathways, thousands of different organisms now that live off of CO2, and can capture that back. So instead of using carbon from oil for synthetic processes, we have the chance of using carbon and capturing it back from the atmosphere, converting that into biopolymers or other products. We have one organism that lives off of carbon monoxide, and we use as a reducing power to split water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. Also, there's numerous pathways that can be engineered metabolizing methane. And DuPont has a major program with Statoil in Norway to capture and convert the methane from the gas fields there into useful products. Within a short while, I think there's going to be a new field called "Combinatorial Genomics," because with these new synthesis capabilities, these vast gene array repertoires and the homologous recombination, we think we can design a robot to make maybe a million different chromosomes a day. And therefore, as with all biology, you get selection through screening, whether you're screening for hydrogen production, or chemical production, or just viability. To understand the role of these genes is going to be well within reach. We're trying to modify photosynthesis to produce hydrogen directly from sunlight. Photosynthesis is modulated by oxygen, and we have an oxygen-insensitive hydrogenase that we think will totally change this process. We're also combining cellulases, the enzymes that break down complex sugars into simple sugars and fermentation in the same cell for producing ethanol. Pharmaceutical production is already under way in major laboratories using microbes. The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce. I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry. Let me just close with ethical and policy studies. We delayed the start of our experiments in 1999 until we completed a year-and-a-half bioethical review as to whether we should try and make an artificial species. Every major religion participated in this. It was actually a very strange study, because the various religious leaders were using their scriptures as law books, and they couldn't find anything in them prohibiting making life, so it must be OK. The only ultimate concerns were biological warfare aspects of this, but gave us the go ahead to start these experiments for the reasons we were doing them. Right now the Sloan Foundation has just funded a multi-institutional study on this, to work out what the risk and benefits to society are, and the rules that scientific teams such as my own should be using in this area, and we're trying to set good examples as we go forward. These are complex issues. Except for the threat of bio-terrorism, they're very simple issues in terms of, can we design things to produce clean energy, perhaps revolutionizing what developing countries can do and provide through various simple processes. Thank you very much.

Art with wire, sugar, chocolate and string

Vik Muniz

{0: 'Vik Muniz'}

{0: ['artist']}

{0: "Vik Muniz delights in subverting a viewer's expectations. He uses unexpected materials to create portraits, landscapes and still lifes, which he then photographs."}

2003-02-27

2007-04-05

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Brazil', 'art', 'creativity', 'design', 'illusion', 'animation']

{162: 'My creations, a new form of life', 267: 'Moving sculpture', 78: 'Visual illusions that show how we (mis)think', 210: 'An unusual glimpse at celebrity', 436: 'Design and discovery', 1613: '4 lessons in creativity'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/vik_muniz_art_with_wire_sugar_chocolate_and_string/

Vik Muniz makes art from pretty much anything, be it shredded paper, wire, clouds or diamonds. Here he describes the thinking behind his work and takes us on a tour of his incredible images.

I was asked to come here and speak about creation. And I only have 15 minutes, and I see they're counting already. And I can — in 15 minutes, I think I can touch only a very rather janitorial branch of creation, which I call "creativity." Creativity is how we cope with creation. While creation sometimes seems a bit un-graspable, or even pointless, creativity is always meaningful. See, for instance, in this picture. You know, creation is what put that dog in that picture, and creativity is what makes us see a chicken on his hindquarters. When you think about — you know, creativity has a lot to do with causality too. You know, when I was a teenager, I was a creator. I just did things. Then I became an adult and started knowing who I was, and tried to maintain that persona — I became creative. It wasn't until I actually did a book and a retrospective exhibition, that I could track exactly — looks like all the craziest things that I had done, all my drinking, all my parties — they followed a straight line that brings me to the point that actually I'm talking to you at this moment. Though it's actually true, you know, the reason I'm talking to you right now is because I was born in Brazil. If I was born in Monterey, probably would be in Brazil. You know, I was born in Brazil and grew up in the '70s under a climate of political distress, and I was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way — in a sort of a semiotic black market. You couldn't really say what you wanted to say; you had to invent ways of doing it. You didn't trust information very much. That led me to another step of why I'm here today, is because I really liked media of all kinds. I was a media junkie, and eventually got involved with advertising. My first job in Brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards, and based on speed, angle of approach and actually blocks of text. It was very — actually, it was a very good study, and got me a job in an ad agency. And they also decided that I had to — to give me a very ugly Plexiglas trophy for it. And another point — why I'm here — is that the day I went to pick up the Plexiglas trophy, I rented a tuxedo for the first time in my life, picked the thing — didn't have any friends. On my way out, I had to break a fight apart. Somebody was hitting somebody else with brass knuckles. They were in tuxedos, and fighting. It was very ugly. And also — advertising people do that all the time — (Laughter) — and I — well, what happened is when I went back, it was on the way back to my car, the guy who got hit decided to grab a gun — I don't know why he had a gun — and shoot the first person he decided to be his aggressor. The first person was wearing a black tie, a tuxedo. It was me. Luckily, it wasn't fatal, as you can all see. And, even more luckily, the guy said that he was sorry and I bribed him for compensation money, otherwise I press charges. And that's how — with this money I paid for a ticket to come to the United States in 1983, and that's very — the basic reason I'm talking to you here today: because I got shot. (Laughter) (Applause) Well, when I started working with my own work, I decided that I shouldn't do images. You know, I became — I took this very iconoclastic approach. Because when I decided to go into advertising, I wanted to do — I wanted to airbrush naked people on ice, for whiskey commercials, that's what I really wanted to do. (Laughter) But I — they didn't let me do it, so I just — you know, they would only let me do other things. But I wasn't into selling whiskey; I was into selling ice. The first works were actually objects. It was kind of a mixture of found object, product design and advertising. And I called them relics. They were displayed first at Stux Gallery in 1983. This is the clown skull. Is a remnant of a race of — a very evolved race of entertainers. They lived in Brazil, long time ago. (Laughter) This is the Ashanti joystick. Unfortunately, it has become obsolete because it was designed for Atari platform. A Playstation II is in the works, maybe for the next TED I'll bring it. The rocking podium. (Laughter) This is the pre-Columbian coffeemaker. (Laughter) Actually, the idea came out of an argument that I had at Starbucks, that I insisted that I wasn't having Colombian coffee; the coffee was actually pre-Columbian. The Bonsai table. The entire Encyclopedia Britannica bound in a single volume, for travel purposes. And the half tombstone, for people who are not dead yet. I wanted to take that into the realm of images, and I decided to make things that had the same identity conflicts. So I decided to do work with clouds. Because clouds can mean anything you want. But now I wanted to work in a very low-tech way, so something that would mean at the same time a lump of cotton, a cloud and Durer's praying hands — although this looks a lot more like Mickey Mouse's praying hands. But I was still, you know — this is a kitty cloud. They're called "Equivalents," after Alfred Stieglitz's work. "The Snail." But I was still working with sculpture, and I was really trying to go flatter and flatter. "The Teapot." I had a chance to go to Florence, in — I think it was '94, and I saw Ghiberti's "Door of Paradise." And he did something that was very tricky. He put together two different media from different periods of time. First, he got an age-old way of making it, which was relief, and he worked this with three-point perspective, which was brand-new technology at the time. And it's totally overkill. And your eye doesn't know which level to read. And you become trapped into this kind of representation. So I decided to make these very simple renderings, that at first they are taken as a line drawing — you know, something that's very — and then I did it with wire. The idea was to — because everybody overlooks white — like pencil drawings, you know? And they would look at it — "Ah, it's a pencil drawing." Then you have this double take and see that it's actually something that existed in time. It had a physicality, and you start going deeper and deeper into sort of narrative that goes this way, towards the image. So this is "Monkey with Leica." "Relaxation." "Fiat Lux." And the same way the history of representation evolved from line drawings to shaded drawings. And I wanted to deal with other subjects. I started taking that into the realm of landscape, which is something that's almost a picture of nothing. I made these pictures called "Pictures of Thread," and I named them after the amount of yards that I used to represent each picture. These always end up being a photograph at the end, or more like an etching in this case. So this is a lighthouse. This is "6,500 Yards," after Corot. "9,000 Yards," after Gerhard Richter. And I don't know how many yards, after John Constable. Departing from the lines, I decided to tackle the idea of points, like which is more similar to the type of representation that we find in photographs themselves. I had met a group of children in the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, and I did work and play with them. I got some photographs from them. Upon my arrival in New York, I decided — they were children of sugar plantation workers. And by manipulating sugar over a black paper, I made portraits of them. These are — (Applause) — Thank you. This is "Valentina, the Fastest." It was just the name of the child, with the little thing you get to know of somebody that you meet very briefly. "Valicia." "Jacynthe." But another layer of representation was still introduced. Because I was doing this while I was making these pictures, I realized that I could add still another thing I was trying to make a subject — something that would interfere with the themes, so chocolate is very good, because it has — it brings to mind ideas that go from scatology to romance. And so I decided to make these pictures, and they were very large, so you had to walk away from it to be able to see them. So they're called "Pictures of Chocolate." Freud probably could explain chocolate better than I. He was the first subject. And Jackson Pollock also. Pictures of crowds are particularly interesting, because, you know, you go to that — you try to figure out the threshold with something you can define very easily, like a face, goes into becoming just a texture. "Paparazzi." I used the dust at the Whitney Museum to render some pieces of their collection. And I picked minimalist pieces because they're about specificity. And you render this with the most non-specific material, which is dust itself. Like, you know, you have the skin particles of every single museum visitor. They do a DNA scan of this, they will come up with a great mailing list. This is Richard Serra. I bought a computer, and [they] told me it had millions of colors in it. You know an artist's first response to this is, who counted it? You know? And I realized that I never worked with color, because I had a hard time controlling the idea of single colors. But once they're applied to numeric structure, then you can feel more comfortable. So the first time I worked with colors was by making these mosaics of Pantone swatches. They end up being very large pictures, and I photographed with a very large camera — an 8x10 camera. So you can see the surface of every single swatch — like in this picture of Chuck Close. And you have to walk very far to be able to see it. Also, the reference to Gerhard Richter's use of color charts — and the idea also entering another realm of representation that's very common to us today, which is the bit map. I ended up narrowing the subject to Monet's "Haystacks." This is something I used to do as a joke — you know, make — the same like — Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" — and then leaving traces, as if it was done on a tabletop. I tried to prove that he didn't do that thing in the Salt Lake. But then, just doing the models, I was trying to explore the relationship between the model and the original. And I felt that I would have to actually go there and make some earthworks myself. I opt for very simple line drawings — kind of stupid looking. And at the same time, I was doing these very large constructions, being 150 meters away. Now I would do very small ones, which would be like — but under the same light, and I would show them together, so the viewer would have to really figure it out what one he was looking. I wasn't interested in the very large things, or in the small things. I was more interested in the things in between, you know, because you can leave an enormous range for ambiguity there. This is like you see — the size of a person over there. This is a pipe. A hanger. And this is another thing that I did — you know working — everybody loves to watch somebody draw, but not many people have a chance to watch somebody draw in — a lot of people at the same time, to evidence a single drawing. And I love this work, because I did these cartoonish clouds over Manhattan for a period of two months. And it was quite wonderful, because I had an interest — an early interest — in theater, that's justified on this thing. In theater, you have the character and the actor in the same place, trying to negotiate each other in front of an audience. And in this, you'd have like a — something that looks like a cloud, and it is a cloud at the same time. So they're like perfect actors. My interest in acting, especially bad acting, goes a long way. Actually, I once paid like 60 dollars to see a very great actor to do a version of "King Lear," and I felt really robbed, because by the time the actor started being King Lear, he stopped being the great actor that I had paid money to see. On the other hand, you know, I paid like three dollars, I think — and I went to a warehouse in Queens to see a version of "Othello" by an amateur group. And it was quite fascinating, because you know the guy — his name was Joey Grimaldi — he impersonated the Moorish general — you know, for the first three minutes he was really that general, and then he went back into plumber, he worked as a plumber, so — plumber, general, plumber, general — so for three dollars, I saw two tragedies for the price of one. See, I think it's not really about impression, making people fall for a really perfect illusion, as much as it is to make — I usually work at the lowest threshold of visual illusion. Because it's not about fooling somebody, it's actually giving somebody a measure of their own belief: how much you want to be fooled. That's why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that. Well, I think that's it. My time is nearly up. Thank you very much.

How to get your ideas to spread

Seth Godin

{0: 'Seth Godin'}

{0: ['marketer and author']}

{0: 'Seth Godin is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age. His newest interest: the tribes we lead.'}

2003-02-27

2007-04-05

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sl', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'choice', 'culture', 'marketing', 'storytelling']

{20: 'Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce', 72: "Technology's long tail", 266: 'Designing objects that tell stories', 27622: 'Confessions of a recovering micromanager', 2274: 'The first secret of design is ... noticing', 848: 'How great leaders inspire action'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_how_to_get_your_ideas_to_spread/

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones.

I'm going to give you four specific examples, I'm going to cover at the end about how a company called Silk tripled their sales; how an artist named Jeff Koons went from being a nobody to making a whole bunch of money and having a lot of impact; to how Frank Gehry redefined what it meant to be an architect. And one of my biggest failures as a marketer in the last few years — a record label I started that had a CD called "Sauce." Before I can do that I've got to tell you about sliced bread, and a guy named Otto Rohwedder. Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said? Like the greatest invention since the telegraph or something. But this guy named Otto Rohwedder invented sliced bread, and he focused, like most inventors did, on the patent part and the making part. And the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this — that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available no one bought it; no one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure. And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. That the success of sliced bread, like the success of almost everything we've talked about at this conference, is not always about what the patent is like, or what the factory is like — it's about can you get your idea to spread, or not. And I think that the way you're going to get what you want, or cause the change that you want to change, to happen, is to figure out a way to get your ideas to spread. And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual, or you're in business, or you're flying hot air balloons. I think that all this stuff applies to everybody regardless of what we do. That what we are living in is a century of idea diffusion. That people who can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. When I talk about it I usually pick business, because they make the best pictures that you can put in your presentation, and because it's the easiest sort of way to keep score. But I want you to forgive me when I use these examples because I'm talking about anything that you decide to spend your time to do. At the heart of spreading ideas is TV and stuff like TV. TV and mass media made it really easy to spread ideas in a certain way. I call it the "TV-industrial complex." The way the TV-industrial complex works, is you buy some ads, interrupt some people, that gets you distribution. You use the distribution you get to sell more products. You take the profit from that to buy more ads. And it goes around and around and around, the same way that the military-industrial complex worked a long time ago. That model of, and we heard it yesterday — if we could only get onto the homepage of Google, if we could only figure out how to get promoted there, or grab that person by the throat, and tell them about what we want to do. If we did that then everyone would pay attention, and we would win. Well, this TV-industrial complex informed my entire childhood and probably yours. I mean, all of these products succeeded because someone figured out how to touch people in a way they weren't expecting, in a way they didn't necessarily want, with an ad, over and over again until they bought it. And the thing that's happened is, they canceled the TV-industrial complex. That just over the last few years, what anybody who markets anything has discovered is that it's not working the way that it used to. This picture is really fuzzy, I apologize; I had a bad cold when I took it. (Laughter) But the product in the blue box in the center is my poster child. I go to the deli; I'm sick; I need to buy some medicine. The brand manager for that blue product spent 100 million dollars trying to interrupt me in one year. 100 million dollars interrupting me with TV commercials and magazine ads and Spam and coupons and shelving allowances and spiff — all so I could ignore every single message. And I ignored every message because I don't have a pain reliever problem. I buy the stuff in the yellow box because I always have. And I'm not going to invest a minute of my time to solve her problem, because I don't care. Here's a magazine called "Hydrate." It's 180 pages about water. (Laughter) Articles about water, ads about water. Imagine what the world was like 40 years ago, with just the Saturday Evening Post and Time and Newsweek. Now there are magazines about water. New product from Coke Japan: water salad. (Laughter) Coke Japan comes out with a new product every three weeks, because they have no idea what's going to work and what's not. I couldn't have written this better myself. It came out four days ago — I circled the important parts so you can see them here. They've come out... Arby's is going to spend 85 million dollars promoting an oven mitt with the voice of Tom Arnold, hoping that that will get people to go to Arby's and buy a roast beef sandwich. (Laughter) Now, I had tried to imagine what could possibly be in an animated TV commercial featuring Tom Arnold, that would get you to get in your car, drive across town and buy a roast beef sandwich. (Laughter) Now, this is Copernicus, and he was right, when he was talking to anyone who needs to hear your idea. "The world revolves around me." Me, me, me, me. My favorite person — me. I don't want to get email from anybody; I want to get "memail." (Laughter) So consumers, and I don't just mean people who buy stuff at the Safeway; I mean people at the Defense Department who might buy something, or people at, you know, the New Yorker who might print your article. Consumers don't care about you at all; they just don't care. Part of the reason is — they've got way more choices than they used to, and way less time. And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving because you've seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say — "Oh, look, a cow." Nobody. (Laughter) But if the cow was purple — isn't that a great special effect? I could do that again if you want. If the cow was purple, you'd notice it for a while. I mean, if all cows were purple you'd get bored with those, too. The thing that's going to decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built, is: "Is it remarkable?" And "remarkable" is a really cool word, because we think it just means "neat," but it also means "worth making a remark about." And that is the essence of where idea diffusion is going. That two of the hottest cars in the United States is a 55,000-dollar giant car, big enough to hold a Mini in its trunk. People are paying full price for both, and the only thing they have in common is that they don't have anything in common. (Laughter) Every week, the number one best-selling DVD in America changes. It's never "The Godfather," it's never "Citizen Kane," it's always some third-rate movie with some second-rate star. But the reason it's number one is because that's the week it came out. Because it's new, because it's fresh. People saw it and said "I didn't know that was there" and they noticed it. Two of the big success stories of the last 20 years in retail — one sells things that are super-expensive in a blue box, and one sells things that are as cheap as they can make them. The only thing they have in common is that they're different. We're now in the fashion business, no matter what we do for a living, we're in the fashion business. And people in the fashion business know what it's like to be in the fashion business — they're used to it. The rest of us have to figure out how to think that way. How to understand that it's not about interrupting people with big full-page ads, or insisting on meetings with people. But it's a totally different sort of process that determines which ideas spread, and which ones don't. They sold a billion dollars' worth of Aeron chairs by reinventing what it meant to sell a chair. They turned a chair from something the purchasing department bought, to something that was a status symbol about where you sat at work. This guy, Lionel Poilâne, the most famous baker in the world — he died two and a half months ago, and he was a hero of mine and a dear friend. He lived in Paris. Last year, he sold 10 million dollars' worth of French bread. Every loaf baked in a bakery he owned, by one baker at a time, in a wood-fired oven. And when Lionel started his bakery, the French pooh-pooh-ed it. They didn't want to buy his bread. It didn't look like "French bread." It wasn't what they expected. It was neat; it was remarkable; and slowly, it spread from one person to another person until finally, it became the official bread of three-star restaurants in Paris. Now he's in London, and he ships by FedEx all around the world. What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That's what mass marketing is. Smooth out the edges; go for the center; that's the big market. They would ignore the geeks, and God forbid, the laggards. It was all about going for the center. But in a world where the TV-industrial complex is broken, I don't think that's a strategy we want to use any more. I think the strategy we want to use is to not market to these people because they're really good at ignoring you. But market to these people because they care. These are the people who are obsessed with something. And when you talk to them, they'll listen, because they like listening — it's about them. And if you're lucky, they'll tell their friends on the rest of the curve, and it'll spread. It'll spread to the entire curve. They have something I call "otaku" — it's a great Japanese word. It describes the desire of someone who's obsessed to say, drive across Tokyo to try a new ramen noodle place, because that's what they do: they get obsessed with it. To make a product, to market an idea, to come up with any problem you want to solve that doesn't have a constituency with an otaku, is almost impossible. Instead, you have to find a group that really, desperately cares about what it is you have to say. Talk to them and make it easy for them to tell their friends. There's a hot sauce otaku, but there's no mustard otaku. That's why there's lots and lots of kinds of hot sauces, and not so many kinds of mustard. Not because it's hard to make interesting mustard — you could make interesting mustard — but people don't, because no one's obsessed with it, and thus no one tells their friends. Krispy Kreme has figured this whole thing out. It has a strategy, and what they do is, they enter a city, they talk to the people, with the otaku, and then they spread through the city to the people who've just crossed the street. This yoyo right here cost 112 dollars, but it sleeps for 12 minutes. Not everybody wants it but they don't care. They want to talk to the people who do, and maybe it'll spread. These guys make the loudest car stereo in the world. (Laughter) It's as loud as a 747 jet. You can't get in, the car's got bulletproof glass, because it'll blow out the windshield otherwise. But the fact remains that when someone wants to put a couple of speakers in their car, if they've got the otaku or they've heard from someone who does, they go ahead and they pick this. It's really simple — you sell to the people who are listening, and just maybe, those people tell their friends. So when Steve Jobs talks to 50,000 people at his keynote, who are all tuned in from 130 countries watching his two-hour commercial — that's the only thing keeping his company in business — it's that those 50,000 people care desperately enough to watch a two-hour commercial, and then tell their friends. Pearl Jam, 96 albums released in the last two years. Every one made a profit. How? They only sell them on their website. Those people who buy them have the otaku, and then they tell their friends, and it spreads and it spreads. This hospital crib cost 10,000 dollars, 10 times the standard. But hospitals are buying it faster than any other model. Hard Candy nail polish, doesn't appeal to everybody, but to the people who love it, they talk about it like crazy. This paint can right here saved the Dutch Boy paint company, making them a fortune. It costs 35 percent more than regular paint because Dutch Boy made a can that people talk about, because it's remarkable. They didn't just slap a new ad on the product; they changed what it meant to build a paint product. AmIhotornot.com — everyday 250,000 people go to this site, run by two volunteers, and I can tell you they are hard graders — (Laughter) They didn't get this way by advertising a lot. They got this way by being remarkable, sometimes a little too remarkable. And this picture frame has a cord going out the back, and you plug it into the wall. My father has this on his desk, and he sees his grandchildren everyday, changing constantly. And every single person who walks into his office hears the whole story of how this thing ended up on his desk. And one person at a time, the idea spreads. These are not diamonds, not really. They're made from "cremains." After you're cremated you can have yourself made into a gem. (Laughter) Oh, you like my ring? It's my grandmother. (Laughter) Fastest-growing business in the whole mortuary industry. But you don't have to be Ozzie Osborne — you don't have to be super-outrageous to do this. What you have to do is figure out what people really want and give it to them. A couple of quick rules to wrap up. The first one is: Design is free when you get to scale. The people who come up with stuff that's remarkable more often than not figure out how to put design to work for them. Number two: The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe. Proctor and Gamble knows this, right? The whole model of being Proctor and Gamble is always about average products for average people. That's risky. The safe thing to do now is to be at the fringes, be remarkable. And being very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do. Very good is boring. Very good is average. It doesn't matter whether you're making a record album, or you're an architect, or you have a tract on sociology. If it's very good, it's not going to work, because no one's going to notice it. So my three stories. Silk put a product that does not need to be in the refrigerated section next to the milk in the refrigerated section. Sales tripled. Why? Milk, milk, milk, milk, milk — not milk. For the people who were there and looking at that section, it was remarkable. They didn't triple their sales with advertising; they tripled it by doing something remarkable. That is a remarkable piece of art. You don't have to like it, but a 40-foot tall dog made out of bushes in the middle of New York City is remarkable. (Laughter) Frank Gehry didn't just change a museum; he changed an entire city's economy by designing one building that people from all over the world went to see. Now, at countless meetings at, you know, the Portland City Council, or who knows where, they said, we need an architect — can we get Frank Gehry? Because he did something that was at the fringes. And my big failure? I came out with an entire — (Music) A record album and hopefully a whole bunch of record albums in SACD, this remarkable new format — and I marketed it straight to people with 20,000-dollar stereos. People with 20,000-dollar stereos don't like new music. (Laughter) So what you need to do is figure out who does care. Who is going to raise their hand and say, "I want to hear what you're doing next," and sell something to them. The last example I want to give you. This is a map of Soap Lake, Washington. As you can see, if that's nowhere, it's in the middle of it. (Laughter) But they do have a lake. And people used to come from miles around to swim in the lake. They don't anymore. So the founding fathers said, "We've got some money to spend. What can we build here?" And like most committees, they were going to build something pretty safe. And then an artist came to them — this is a true artist's rendering — he wants to build a 55-foot tall lava lamp in the center of town. That's a purple cow; that's something worth noticing. I don't know about you, but if they build it, that's where I'm going to go. Thank you very much for your attention.

How architecture can connect us

Thom Mayne

{0: 'Thom Mayne'}

{0: ['architect']}

{0: 'Founder of the influential studio Morphosis, and co-founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne marries conceptual ideas with form, challenging the way we perceive structure, building and the environment.'}

2005-02-25

2007-04-05

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['architecture', 'cities', 'culture', 'design', 'invention']

{27: 'Organic design, inspired by nature', 359: 'The Blur Building and other tech-empowered architecture', 54: 'My wish: A call for open-source architecture', 1854: 'Architecture at home in its community', 589: '17 words of architectural inspiration', 750: 'Building a theater that remakes itself'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/thom_mayne_how_architecture_can_connect_us/

Architect Thom Mayne has never been one to take the easy option, and this whistle-stop tour of the buildings he's created makes you glad for it. These are big ideas cast in material form.

I don't know your name. Audience Member: Howard. Howard. Thom Mayne: Howard? I'm sitting next to Howard. I don't know Howard, obviously, and he's going, I hope you're not next. (Laughter) Amazing. Amazing performance. I kind of erased everything in my brain to follow that. Let me start some place. I'm interested — I kind of do the same thing, but I don't move my body. (Laughter) And instead of using human figures to develop ideas of time and space, I work in the mineral world. I work with more or less inert matter. And I organize it. And, well, it's also a bit different because an architect versus, let's say, a dance company finally is a negotiation between one's private world, one's conceptual world, the world of ideas, the world of aspirations, of inventions, with the relationship of the exterior world and all the limitations, the naysayers. Because I have to say, for my whole career, if there's anything that's been consistent, it's been that you can't do it. No matter what I've done, what I've tried to do, everybody says it can't be done. And it's continuous across the complete spectrum of the various kind of realities that you confront with your ideas. And to be an architect, somehow you have to negotiate between left and right, and you have to negotiate between this very private place where ideas take place and the outside world, and then make it understood. I can start any number of places, because this process is also — I think — very different from some of the morning sessions, which you had such a kind of very clear, such a lineal idea, like the last one, say, with Howard, that I think the creative process in architecture, the design process, is extremely circuitous. It's labyrinthine. It's Calvino's idea of the quickest way between two points is the circuitous line, not the straight line. And definitely my life has been part of that. I'm going to start with some simple kind of notions of how we organize things. But basically, what we do is, we try to give coherence to the world. We make physical things, buildings that become a part in an accretional process; they make cities. And those things are the reflection of the processes, and the time that they are made. And what I'm doing is attempting to synthesize the way one sees the world and the territories which are useful as generative material. Because, really, all I'm interested in, always, as an architect, is the way things are produced because that's what I do. Right? And it's not based on an a priori notion. I have no interest at all in conceiving something in my brain and saying, "This is what it looks like." In fact, somebody mentioned — Ewan, maybe it was you in your introduction — about this is what architects — did somebody say it's what business people come to, it's what the corporate world comes to when they want to make it look like something at the end of the line? Huh. Wow. It doesn't work that way for me at all. I have no interest in that whatsoever. Architecture is the beginning of something, because it's — if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration. And I've nothing wrong with cake decoration and cake decorators, if anybody's involved in cake decorations — it's not what I'm interested in doing. (Laughter) And so, in the formation of things, in giving it form, in concretizing these things, it starts with some notion of how one organizes. And I've had for 30 years an interest in a series of complexities where a series of forces are brought to bear, and to understand the nature of the final result of that, representing the building itself. There's been a continual relationship between inventions, which are private, and reality, which has been important to me. A project which is part of an exhibition in Copenhagen 10 years ago, which was the modeling of a hippocampus — the territory of the brain that records short-term memory — and the documentation of that, the imaginative and documentation of that through a series of drawings which literally attempt to organize that experience. And it had to do with the notion of walking a kilometer, observing every kilometer a particular object of desire, and then placing that within this. And the notion was that I could make an organization not built on normal coherencies, but built on non-sequiturs, built on randomness. And I'd been extremely interested in this notion of randomness as it produces architectural work and as it definitely connects to the notion of the city, an accretional notion of the city, and that led to various ideas of organization. And then this led to broader ideas of buildings that come together through the multiplicity of systems. And it's not any single system that makes the work. It's the relationship — it's the dynamics between the systems — which have the power to transform and invent and produce an architecture that is — that would otherwise not exist. And those systems could be identified, and they could be grouped together. And of course, today, with the technology of the computer and with the rapid prototyping, etc., we have the mechanisms to understand and to respond to these systems, and to allow them to adjust to the various accommodations of functionalities because that's all we do. We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making. This is a project that we just finished in Penang for a very, very large city project that came directly out of this process, which is the result of the multiplicity of forces that produce it. And the project — again, enormous, enormous competition — on the Hudson River and in New York that we were asked to do three years ago, which uses these processes. And what you're looking at are possibilities that have to do with the generation of the city as one applies a methodology that uses notions of these multiple forces, that deals with the enormity of the problem, the complexity of the problem, when we're designing cities at larger and larger aggregates. Because one of the issues today is that the economic aggregate is driving the development aggregate, and as the aggregates get larger we require more and more complex investigation processes to solve these problems. And that led us directly to the Olympic Village. I was in New York on Monday presenting it to the IOC. We won the competition — what was it, nine months ago? Again, a direct reflection from using these processes to develop extremely complicated, very large-scale organisms. And then, also, was working with broad strategies. In this case, we only used 15 of the 60 acres of land, and the 45 acres was a park and would become the legacy of the Olympic Village. And it would become the second largest park in the boroughs, etc. Its position, of course, in the middle of Manhattan — it's on Hunter's Point. And then the broader ideas of city-making start having direct influences on architecture, on the elements that make up the broader scheme, the buildings themselves, and start guiding us. Architecture for me has been an investigation of a multiplicity of forces that could come from literally any place. And so I can start this discussion in any number of places, and I've chosen three or four to talk about. And it has also to do with an interest in the vast kind of territory that architecture touches. It literally is connected to anything in terms of knowledge base. There's just no place that it doesn't somehow have a connective tissue to. This is Jim Dine, and it's the absence of presence, etc. It's the clothing, the skin, without the presence of the character. It became kind of an idea for the notion of the surface of a work, and it was used in a project where we could unravel that surface, and it was a figurative idea that was going to be folded and made into a very, kind of complex space. And the idea was the relationship of the space, which was made up of the fold of the image, and the dialectic or the conflict between the figuration, and the clarity of the image and the complexity of the space, which were in dialog. And it made us rethink the whole notion of how we work and how we make things, and it led us to ideas that were closer to fashion design as we flattened out surfaces, and then brought them back together as they could make spatial combinations. And this was the first prototype in Korea, as we're dealing with a dynamic envelope, and then the same characteristic of the fabric. It has a material identity and it's translucent and it's porous, and it allows us for a very different notion of what a skin of a building is. And that turned right away into another project. This is the Caltrans building in Los Angeles. And now we're seeing as the skin and the body is differentiated. Again, it's a very, very simple notion. If you look at most buildings, what you look at is the building, the facade, and it is the building. And all of a sudden we're kind of moving away, and we're separating the skin from the body, and that's going to lead to broader performance criteria, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. And you're looking at how it drapes over and differentiates from the body. And then, again, the building itself, middle of Los Angeles, right across from City Hall. And as it moves, it takes pieces of the earth with it. It bends up. It's part of a sign system, which was part of the kind of legacy of Los Angeles — the two-dimension, three-dimension signing, etc. And then it allows one to penetrate the work itself. It's transparent, and it allows you to understand, I think, what is always the most interesting thing in any building, which is the actual constructional processes that make it. And it's probably the most intense kind of territory of the work, which is not occupied, because architecture is always the most interesting in some mechanism when it's separated from function, and this is an area that allows for that. And then the skin starts transforming into other materials. We're using light as a building material in this case. We're working with Keith Sonnier in New York, and we're making this large outside room, which is possible in Los Angeles, and which is very much reflective of the urban, the contemporary urban environments that you would find in Shibuya or you'd find in Mexico City or Sao Paulo, etc., that have to do with activating the city over a longer span of time. And that was very much part of the notion of the urban objective of this project in Los Angeles. And, again, all of it promoting transparency. And an image which may be closest talks about the use of light as a medium, that light becomes literally a building material. Well, that immediately turned into something much broader, and as a scope. And again, we're looking at an early sketch where I'm understanding now that the skin can be a transition between the ground and the tower. This is a building in San Francisco which is under construction. And now it turned into something much, much broader as a problem, and it has to do with performance. This will be the first building in the United States that took — well, I can't say it took the air conditioning out. It's a hybrid. I wanted a pure thing, and I can't get it. It's a wrong attitude, actually, because the hybrid is probably more interesting. But we took the air conditioning out of the tower. There's some air conditioning left in the base, but the skin now moves on hydraulics. It forces air through a Venturi force if there's no wind. It adjusts continually. And we removed the air conditioning. Huge, huge thing. Half a million dollars a year delta. 10 of these — it's just under a million square feet — 800 and some thousand square feet — 10 of these would power Sausalito — the delta on this. And so now what we're looking at, as the projects get larger in scale, as they interface with broader problems, that they expand the capabilities in terms of their performance. Well, I could also start here. We could talk about the relationship at a more biological sense of the relationship of building and ground. Well, our research — my generation for sure, people who were going to school in the late '60s — made very much a shift out of the internal focus of architecture, looking at architecture within its own territory, and we were much more affected by film, by what was going on in the art world, etc. This is, of course, Michael Heizer. And when I saw this, first an image and then visited, it completely changed the way I thought after that point. And I understood that building really could be the augmentation of the Earth's surface, and it completely shifted the notion of building ground in the most basic sense. And then — well, he was probably looking at this — this is Nazca; this is 700 years ago — the most amazing four-kilometer land sculptures. They're just totally incredible. And that led us to then completely rethinking how we draw, how we work. This is the first sketch of a high school in Pomona — well, whatever it is, a model, a conceptual, kind of idea. And it's the reshaping of the Earth to make it occupiable. So it puts 200,000 square feet of stuff that make a high school work in the surface of that Earth. There it is modeled as it was developing into a piece of work. And there it is, again, as it's starting to get resolved tectonically, and then there's the school. And, of course, we're interested in participating with education. I have absolutely no interest in producing a building that just accommodates X, Y and Z function. What I'm interested in are how these ideas participate in the educational process of young people. It demands some sort of notion of inquiry because it's a system that's developed not sculpturally. It's an idea that started from my first discussion. It has to do with a broad, consistent logic, and that logic could be understood as one occupies the building. And there's an overt — at least, there's an attempt to make a very overt notion of a building that connects to the land in a very different way because I was interested in a very didactic approach to the problem, as one would understand that. And the second project that was just finished in Los Angeles that uses some of the same ideas. It uses landscape as a major idea. Then, again, we're doing the headquarters for NOAA — National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency — outside of Washington in Maryland. And this is how they see the world. They have 22 satellites zipping around at plus or minus 100 miles, and the site's in red. And what we really want to do — well, the architects, if there are architects out there, this is the Laugier Hut; this is the primitive hut that's been around for so long — and what we wanted to do is really build this, because they see themselves as the caretakers of the world, and we wanted them to look down at their satellite, how they see their own site, that eight-acre site, and we wanted nothing left. We wanted it to stay green. There's actually three baseball fields on it right now, and they're going to stay there. We put one piece directly north-south, and it holds the dishes at the ears, right? And then right below that the processing, and the mission lift, and the mission control room, and all the other spaces are underground. And what you look at is an aircraft carrier that's performance-driven by the cone vision of these satellite dishes. And that the building itself is occupied in the lower portion, broken up by a series of courts, and it's five acres of uninterrupted, horizontal space for their administrative offices. And then that, in turn, propelled us to look at larger-scale projects where this notion of landscape building interface becomes a connective tissue. The new capital competition for Berlin, four years ago. And again we just finished the ECB — actually Coop Himmelblau in Vienna just won this project, where the building was separated into a series of landscape elements that became part of a connective tissue of a park, which is parallel to the river, and develops ideas of the buildings themselves and becomes part of the connective fabric — the social, cultural and the landscape, recreational fabric of the city. And the building is no longer seen as an autonomous thing, but something that's only inextricably connected to this city and this place at this time. And a project that was realized in Austria, the Hooper Bank, which again used this idea of connecting typology, the traditional buildings, and morphology, or the relationship of the development of land as an idea, into a complex, which is a piece of a city where we can see part of it is literally just this augmenting, this movement of the land that's a very simple idea of just lifting it up and occupying it, and other parts are much more energetic and intense. And talk about that intensity in terms of the collisions of the kind of events they make that have to do with putting a series of systems together, and then where part of it is in the ground, part of it is oppositional lifts. One enters the building as it lifts off the ground, and it becomes part of the idea. And then the skin — the edges of this — all promote the dynamic, the movement of the building as a series of seismic shifts, geologic shifts. Right? And it makes for event space and then it breaks in places that allow you to peer into the interior, and those interiors, again, are promoting transparency for the workplace, which has been a continual interest of ours. And then, again, in a more, kind of traditional setting, this is a graduate student housing in Toronto, and it's very much about the relationship of a building as it makes a connective tissue to the city. The main idea was the gateway, where it breaks the site, and the building occupies both the public space and the private space. And it's that territory of — it's this thing. I visited the site many times, and everybody, kind of — you can see this from two kilometers away; it's an exact center of the street, and the whole notion is to engage the public, to engage buildings as part of the public tissue of the city. And finally, one of the most interesting projects — it's a courthouse. And what I want to talk about — this is the Supreme Court, of course — and, well, I'm dealing with Michael Hogan, the Chief Justice of Oregon. You could not proceed without making this negotiation between one's own values and the relationship of the character you're working with and how he understands the court, because I'm showing him, of course, Corbusier at Savoy, which is 1928, which is the beginning of modern architecture. Well, then we get to this image. And this is where the project started. Because I'm going, I'm interested in the phenomenon that's taking place in here. And really what we're talking about is constructing reality. And I'm a character that's extremely interested in understanding the nature of that constructed reality because there's no such thing as nature any more. Nature is gone. Nature in the 19th-century sense, alright? Nature is only a cultural edifice today, right? We construct it and we construct those ideas. And then of course, this one, our governor at the moment. And we spent some time with Conan, believe it or not, and then that led us to, kind of, the very differences of our worlds from a legal and an artistic, architectural. And it forced us to talk about notions of how we work, and the dynamics of that, and what other sources of the work is. And it led us to the project, the courthouse, which is absolutely a part of a negotiation between tradition and pieces of the traditional courthouse. You'll find a stair that's the same length as the Supreme Court. Here's a piano nobile, which is a device used in the Renaissance. The courts were made of that. The skin is this series of layers that reflect even rusticated stonework, but which were embedded with fragments of the Constitution, which were part of the little process, all set on a plinth that defined it from the community. Thank you so much. (Applause)

What separates us from chimpanzees?

Jane Goodall

{0: 'Jane Goodall'}

{0: ['primatologist', 'environmentalist']}

{0: 'Jane Goodall, dubbed by her biographer "the woman who redefined man," has changed our perceptions of primates, people, and the connection between the two. Over the past 45 years, Goodall herself has also evolved -- from steadfast scientist to passionate conservationist and humanitarian.'}

2003-03-01

2007-04-05

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Africa', 'animals', 'culture', 'environment', 'global issues', 'nature', 'primates', 'science']

{76: 'The gentle genius of bonobos', 145: 'The emergent genius of ant colonies', 77: 'The shrimp with a kick!', 340: 'How humans and animals can live together', 168: "The search for humanity's roots", 2307: 'What explains the rise of humans?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_goodall_what_separates_us_from_chimpanzees/

Jane Goodall hasn't found the missing link, but she's come closer than nearly anyone else. The primatologist says the only real difference between humans and chimps is our sophisticated language. She urges us to start using it to change the world.

Good morning everyone. First of all, it's been fantastic being here over these past few days. And secondly, I feel it's a great honor to kind of wind up this extraordinary gathering of people, these amazing talks that we've had. I feel that I've fitted in, in many ways, to some of the things that I've heard. I came directly here from the deep, deep tropical rainforest in Ecuador, where I was out — you could only get there by a plane — with indigenous people with paint on their faces and parrot feathers on their headdresses, where these people are fighting to try and keep the oil companies, and keep the roads, out of their forests. They're fighting to develop their own way of living within the forest in a world that's clean, a world that isn't contaminated, a world that isn't polluted. And what was so amazing to me, and what fits right in with what we're all talking about here at TED, is that there, right in the middle of this rainforest, was some solar panels — the first in that part of Ecuador — and that was mainly to bring water up by pump so that the women wouldn't have to go down. The water was cleaned, but because they got a lot of batteries, they were able to store a lot of electricity. So every house — and there were, I think, eight houses in this little community — could have light for, I think it was about half an hour each evening. And there is the Chief, in all his regal finery, with a laptop computer. (Laughter) And this man, he has been outside, but he's gone back, and he was saying, "You know, we have suddenly jumped into a whole new era, and we didn't even know about the white man 50 years ago, and now here we are with laptop computers, and there are some things we want to learn from the modern world. We want to know about health care. We want to know about what other people do — we're interested in it. And we want to learn other languages. We want to know English and French and perhaps Chinese, and we're good at languages." So there he is with his little laptop computer, but fighting against the might of the pressures — because of the debt, the foreign debt of Ecuador — fighting the pressure of World Bank, IMF, and of course the people who want to exploit the forests and take out the oil. And so, coming directly from there to here. But, of course, my real field of expertise lies in an even different kind of civilization — I can't really call it a civilization. A different way of life, a different being. We've talked earlier — this wonderful talk by Wade Davis about the different cultures of the humans around the world — but the world is not composed only of human beings; there are also other animal beings. And I propose to bring into this TED conference, as I always do around the world, the voice of the animal kingdom. Too often we just see a few slides, or a bit of film, but these beings have voices that mean something. And so, I want to give you a greeting, as from a chimpanzee in the forests of Tanzania — Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh! (Applause) I've been studying chimpanzees in Tanzania since 1960. During that time, there have been modern technologies that have really transformed the way that field biologists do their work. For example, for the first time, a few years ago, by simply collecting little fecal samples we were able to have them analyzed — to have DNA profiling done — so for the first time, we actually know which male chimps are the fathers of each individual infant. Because the chimps have a very promiscuous mating society. So this opens up a whole new avenue of research. And we use GSI — geographic whatever it is, GSI — to determine the range of the chimps. And we're using — you can see that I'm not really into this kind of stuff — but we're using satellite imagery to look at the deforestation in the area. And of course, there's developments in infrared, so you can watch animals at night, and equipment for recording by video, and tape recording is getting lighter and better. So in many, many ways, we can do things today that we couldn't do when I began in 1960. Especially when chimpanzees, and other animals with large brains, are studied in captivity, modern technology is helping us to search for the upper levels of cognition in some of these non-human animals. So that we know today, they're capable of performances that would have been thought absolutely impossible by science when I began. I think the chimpanzee in captivity who is the most skilled in intellectual performance is one called Ai in Japan — her name means love — and she has a wonderfully sensitive partner working with her. She loves her computer — she'll leave her big group, and her running water, and her trees and everything. And she'll come in to sit at this computer — it's like a video game for a kid; she's hooked. She's 28, by the way, and she does things with her computer screen and a touch pad that she can do faster than most humans. She does very complex tasks, and I haven't got time to go into them, but the amazing thing about this female is she doesn't like making mistakes. If she has a bad run, and her score isn't good, she'll come and reach up and tap on the glass — because she can't see the experimenter — which is asking to have another go. And her concentration — she's already concentrated hard for 20 minutes or so, and now she wants to do it all over again, just for the satisfaction of having done it better. And the food is not important — she does get a tiny reward, like one raisin for a correct response — but she will do it for nothing, if you tell her beforehand. So here we are, a chimpanzee using a computer. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans also learn human sign language. But the point is that when I was first in Gombe in 1960 — I remember so well, so vividly, as though it was yesterday — the first time, when I was going through the vegetation, the chimpanzees were still running away from me, for the most part, although some were a little bit acclimatized — and I saw this dark shape, hunched over a termite mound, and I peered with my binoculars. It was, fortunately, one adult male whom I'd named David Greybeard — and by the way, science at that time was telling me that I shouldn't name the chimps; they should all have numbers; that was more scientific. Anyway, David Greybeard — and I saw that he was picking little pieces of grass and using them to fish termites from their underground nest. And not only that — he would sometimes pick a leafy twig and strip the leaves — modifying an object to make it suitable for a specific purpose — the beginning of tool-making. The reason this was so exciting and such a breakthrough is at that time, it was thought that humans, and only humans, used and made tools. When I was at school, we were defined as man, the toolmaker. So that when Louis Leakey, my mentor, heard this news, he said, "Ah, we must now redefine 'man,' redefine 'tool,' or accept chimpanzees as humans." (Laughter) We now know that at Gombe alone, there are nine different ways in which chimpanzees use different objects for different purposes. Moreover, we know that in different parts of Africa, wherever chimps have been studied, there are completely different tool-using behaviors. And because it seems that these patterns are passed from one generation to the next, through observation, imitation and practice — that is a definition of human culture. What we find is that over these 40-odd years that I and others have been studying chimpanzees and the other great apes, and, as I say, other mammals with complex brains and social systems, we have found that after all, there isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very wuzzy line. It's getting wuzzier all the time as we find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was just human. The chimps — there's no time to discuss their fascinating lives — but they have this long childhood, five years of suckling and sleeping with the mother, and then another three, four or five years of emotional dependence on her, even when the next child is born. The importance of learning in that time, when behavior is flexible — and there's an awful lot to learn in chimpanzee society. The long-term affectionate supportive bonds that develop throughout this long childhood with the mother, with the brothers and sisters, and which can last through a lifetime, which may be up to 60 years. They can actually live longer than 60 in captivity, so we've only done 40 years in the wild so far. And we find chimps are capable of true compassion and altruism. We find in their non-verbal communication — this is very rich — they have a lot of sounds, which they use in different circumstances, but they also use touch, posture, gesture, and what do they do? They kiss; they embrace; they hold hands. They pat one another on the back; they swagger; they shake their fist — the kind of things that we do, and they do them in the same kind of context. They have very sophisticated cooperation. Sometimes they hunt — not that often, but when they hunt, they show sophisticated cooperation, and they share the prey. We find that they show emotions, similar to — maybe sometimes the same — as those that we describe in ourselves as happiness, sadness, fear, despair. They know mental as well as physical suffering. And I don't have time to go into the information that will prove some of these things to you, save to say that there are very bright students, in the best universities, studying emotions in animals, studying personalities in animals. We know that chimpanzees and some other creatures can recognize themselves in mirrors — "self" as opposed to "other." They have a sense of humor, and these are the kind of things which traditionally have been thought of as human prerogatives. But this teaches us a new respect — and it's a new respect not only for the chimpanzees, I suggest, but some of the other amazing animals with whom we share this planet. Once we're prepared to admit that after all, we're not the only beings with personalities, minds and above all feelings, and then we start to think about ways we use and abuse so many other sentient, sapient creatures on this planet, it really gives cause for deep shame, at least for me. So, the sad thing is that these chimpanzees — who've perhaps taught us, more than any other creature, a little humility — are in the wild, disappearing very fast. They're disappearing for the reasons that all of you in this room know only too well. The deforestation, the growth of human populations, needing more land. They're disappearing because some timber companies go in with clear-cutting. They're disappearing in the heart of their range in Africa because the big multinational logging companies have come in and made roads — as they want to do in Ecuador and other parts where the forests remain untouched — to take out oil or timber. And this has led in Congo basin, and other parts of the world, to what is known as the bush-meat trade. This means that although for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, people have lived in those forests, or whatever habitat it is, in harmony with their world, just killing the animals they need for themselves and their families — now, suddenly, because of the roads, the hunters can go in from the towns. They shoot everything, every single thing that moves that's bigger than a small rat; they sun-dry it or smoke it. And now they've got transport; they take it on the logging trucks or the mining trucks into the towns where they sell it. And people will pay more for bush-meat, as it's called, than for domestic meat — it's culturally preferred. And it's not sustainable, and the huge logging camps in the forest are now demanding meat, so the Pygmy hunters in the Congo basin who've lived there with their wonderful way of living for so many hundreds of years are now corrupted. They're given weapons; they shoot for the logging camps; they get money. Their culture is being destroyed, along with the animals upon whom they depend. So, when the logging camp moves, there's nothing left. We talked already about the loss of human cultural diversity, and I've seen it happening with my own eyes. And the grim picture in Africa — I love Africa, and what do we see in Africa? We see deforestation; we see the desert spreading; we see massive hunger; we see disease and we see population growth in areas where there are more people living on a certain piece of land than the land can possibly support, and they're too poor to buy food from elsewhere. Were the people that we heard about yesterday, on the Easter Island, who cut down their last tree — were they stupid? Didn't they know what was happening? Of course, but if you've seen the crippling poverty in some of these parts of the world it isn't a question of "Let's leave the tree for tomorrow." "How am I going to feed my family today? Maybe I can get just a few dollars from this last tree which will keep us going a little bit longer, and then we'll pray that something will happen to save us from the inevitable end." So, this is a pretty grim picture. The one thing we have, which makes us so different from chimpanzees or other living creatures, is this sophisticated spoken language — a language with which we can tell children about things that aren't here. We can talk about the distant past, plan for the distant future, discuss ideas with each other, so that the ideas can grow from the accumulated wisdom of a group. We can do it by talking to each other; we can do it through video; we can do it through the written word. And we are abusing this great power we have to be wise stewards, and we're destroying the world. In the developed world, in a way, it's worse, because we have so much access to knowledge of the stupidity of what we're doing. Do you know, we're bringing little babies into a world where, in many places, the water is poisoning them? And the air is harming them, and the food that's grown from the contaminated land is poisoning them. And that's not just in the far-away developing world; that's everywhere. Do you know we all have about 50 chemicals in our bodies we didn't have about 50 years ago? And so many of these diseases, like asthma and certain kinds of cancers, are on the increase around places where our filthy toxic waste is dumped. We're harming ourselves around the world, as well as harming the animals, as well as harming nature herself — Mother Nature, that brought us into being; Mother Nature, where I believe we need to spend time, where there's trees and flowers and birds for our good psychological development. And yet, there are hundreds and hundreds of children in the developed world who never see nature, because they're growing up in concrete and all they know is virtual reality, with no opportunity to go and lie in the sun, or in the forest, with the dappled sun-specks coming down from the canopy above. As I was traveling around the world, you know, I had to leave the forest — that's where I love to be. I had to leave these fascinating chimpanzees for my students and field staff to continue studying because, finding they dwindled from about two million 100 years ago to about 150,000 now, I knew I had to leave the forest to do what I could to raise awareness around the world. And the more I talked about the chimpanzees' plight, the more I realized the fact that everything's interconnected, and the problems of the developing world so often stem from the greed of the developed world, and everything was joining together, and making — not sense, hope lies in sense, you said — it's making a nonsense. How can we do it? Somebody said that yesterday. And as I was traveling around, I kept meeting young people who'd lost hope. They were feeling despair, they were feeling, "Well, it doesn't matter what we do; eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Everything is hopeless — we're always being told so by the media." And then I met some who were angry, and anger that can turn to violence, and we're all familiar with that. And I have three little grandchildren, and when some of these students would say to me at high school or university, they'd say, "We're angry," or "We're filled with despair, because we feel you've compromised our future, and there's nothing we can do about it." And I looked in the eyes of my little grandchildren, and think how much we've harmed this planet since I was their age. I feel this deep shame, and that's why in 1991 in Tanzania, I started a program that's called Roots and Shoots. There's little brochures all around outside, and if any of you have anything to do with children and care about their future, I beg that you pick up that brochure. And Roots and Shoots is a program for hope. Roots make a firm foundation. Shoots seem tiny, but to reach the sun they can break through brick walls. See the brick walls as all the problems that we've inflicted on this planet. Then, you see, it is a message of hope. Hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through, and can make this a better world. And the most important message of Roots and Shoots is that every single individual makes a difference. Every individual has a role to play. Every one of us impacts the world around us everyday, and you scientists know that you can't actually — even if you stay in bed all day, you're breathing oxygen and giving out CO2, and probably going to the loo, and things like that — you're making a difference in the world. So, the Roots and Shoots program involves youth in three kinds of projects. And these are projects to make the world around them a better place. One project to show care and concern for your own human community. One for animals, including domestic animals — and I have to say, I learned everything I know about animal behavior even before I got to Gombe and the chimps from my dog, Rusty, who was my childhood companion. And the third kind of project: something for the local environment. So what the kids do depends first of all, how old are they — and we go now from pre-school right through university. It's going to depend whether they're inner-city or rural. It's going to depend if they're wealthy or impoverished. It's going to depend which part, say, of America they're in. We're in every state now, and the problems in Florida are different from the problems in New York. It's going to depend on which country they're in — and we're already in 60-plus countries, with about 5,000 active groups — and there are groups all over the place that I keep hearing about that I've never even heard of, because the kids are taking the program and spreading it themselves. Why? Because they're buying into it, and they're the ones who get to decide what they're going to do. It isn't something that their parents tell them, or their teachers tell them. That's effective, but if they decide themselves, "We want to clean this river and put the fish back that used to be there. We want to clear away the toxic soil from this area and have an organic garden. We want to go and spend time with the old people and hear their stories and record their oral histories. We want to go and work in a dog shelter. We want to learn about animals. We want ... " You know, it goes on and on, and this is very hopeful for me. As I travel around the world 300 days a year, everywhere there's a group of Roots and Shoots of different ages. Everywhere there are children with shining eyes saying, "Look at the difference we've made." And now comes the technology into it, because with this new way of communicating electronically these kids can communicate with each other around the world. And if anyone is interested to help us, we've got so many ideas but we need help — we need help to create the right kind of system that will help these young people to communicate their excitement. But also — and this is so important — to communicate their despair, to say, "We've tried this and it doesn't work, and what shall we do?" And then, lo and behold, there's another group answering these kids who may be in America, or maybe this is a group in Israel, saying, "Yeah, you did it a little bit wrong. This is how you should do it." The philosophy is very simple. We do not believe in violence. No violence, no bombs, no guns. That's not the way to solve problems. Violence leads to violence, at least in my view. So how do we solve? The tools for solving the problems are knowledge and understanding. Know the facts, but see how they fit in the big picture. Hard work and persistence —don't give up — and love and compassion leading to respect for all life. How many more minutes? Two, one? Chris Anderson: One — one to two. Jane Goodall: Two, two, I'm going to take two. (Laughter) Are you going to come and drag me off? (Laughter) Anyway — so basically, Roots and Shoots is beginning to change young people's lives. It's what I'm devoting most of my energy to. And I believe that a group like this can have a very major impact, not just because you can share technology with us, but because so many of you have children. And if you take this program out, and give it to your children, they have such a good opportunity to go out and do good, because they've got parents like you. And it's been so clear how much you all care about trying to make this world a better place. It's very encouraging. But the kids do ask me — and this won't take more than two minutes, I promise — the kids say, "Dr. Jane, do you really have hope for the future? You travel, you see all these horrible things happening." Firstly, the human brain — I don't need to say anything about that. Now that we know what the problems are around the world, human brains like yours are rising to solve those problems. And we've talked a lot about that. Secondly, the resilience of nature. We can destroy a river, and we can bring it back to life. We can see a whole area desolated, and it can be brought back to bloom again, with time or a little help. And thirdly, the last speaker talked about — or the speaker before last, talked about the indomitable human spirit. We are surrounded by the most amazing people who do things that seem to be absolutely impossible. Nelson Mandela — I take a little piece of limestone from Robben Island Prison, where he labored for 27 years, and came out with so little bitterness, he could lead his people from the horror of apartheid without a bloodbath. Even after the 11th of September — and I was in New York and I felt the fear — nevertheless, there was so much human courage, so much love and so much compassion. And then as I went around the country after that and felt the fear — the fear that was leading to people feeling they couldn't worry about the environment any more, in case they seemed not to be patriotic — and I was trying to encourage them, somebody came up with a little quotation from Mahatma Gandhi, "If you look back through human history, you see that every evil regime has been overcome by good." And just after that a woman brought me this little bell, and I want to end on this note. She said, "If you're talking about hope and peace, ring this. This bell is made from metal from a defused landmine, from the killing fields of Pol Pot — one of the most evil regimes in human history — where people are now beginning to put their lives back together after the regime has crumbled. So, yes, there is hope, and where is the hope? Is it out there with the politicians? It's in our hands. It's in your hands and my hands and those of our children. It's really up to us. We're the ones who can make a difference. If we lead lives where we consciously leave the lightest possible ecological footprints, if we buy the things that are ethical for us to buy and don't buy the things that are not, we can change the world overnight. Thank you.

Global warming's theme song, "Manhattan in January"

Jill Sobule

{0: 'Jill Sobule'}

{0: ['singer/songwriter']}

{0: "Jill Sobule isn't just another singer-songwriter with catchy tunes and smart lyrics, she's one of the more insightful satirists of our age. Each of her fanciful songs captures an issue or irony, an emotion or epiphany that helps us understand what it's like to live now."}

2006-02-26

2007-04-06

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'lv', 'ms', 'my', 'ne', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'te', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['climate change', 'environment', 'guitar', 'music', 'performance', 'vocals', 'live music']

{222: 'The Jill and Julia Show', 119: '"Black Men Ski"', 1: 'Averting the climate crisis', 1073: "A whistleblower you haven't heard", 108: 'A mockingbird remix of TED2006', 49163: 'How one tree grows 40 different kinds of fruit'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_sobule_global_warming_s_theme_song_manhattan_in_january/

A happy song about global warming, from Jill Sobule.

Okay. ♫ Strolling along in Central Park ♫ ♫ Everyone's out today ♫ ♫ The daisies and dogwoods are all in bloom ♫ ♫ Oh, what a glorious day ♫ ♫ For picnics and Frisbees and roller skaters, ♫ ♫ Friends and lovers and lonely sunbathers ♫ ♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January ♫ (Laughter) (Applause) ♫ I brought the iced tea; ♫ ♫ Did you bring the bug spray? ♫ ♫ The flies are the size of your head ♫ ♫ Next to the palm tree, ♫ ♫ Did you see the 'gators ♫ ♫ Looking happy and well fed? ♫ ♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January ♫ (Whistling) Everyone! (Whistling) (Laughter) ♫ My preacher said, ♫ ♫ Don't you worry ♫ ♫ The scientists have it all wrong ♫ ♫ And so, who cares it's winter here? ♫ ♫ And I have my halter-top on ♫ ♫ I have my halter-top on ♫ ♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January. ♫ (Applause) Chris Anderson: Jill Sobule!

Casting a spell on the cello

Caroline Lavelle

{0: 'Caroline Lavelle'}

{0: ['cellist; singer-songwriter']}

{0: 'Equally talented on cello and vocals, Caroline Lavelle has created a performance style all her own. Her expansive talents, channeling the best of both classical and contemporary influences, have earned her comparisons to both Kate Bush and Jacqueline du Pré. \r\n'}

2005-02-02

2007-04-06

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['cello', 'entertainment', 'music', 'performance', 'vocals', 'live music']

{117: 'Cape Breton fiddling in reel time', 109: '"What You\'ve Got"', 218: 'The untouchable music of the theremin', 849: '"Love Is a Loaded Pistol"', 413: 'The joyful tradition of mountain music', 2010: 'How I started writing songs again'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/caroline_lavelle_casting_a_spell_on_the_cello/

Caroline Lavelle plays the cello like a sorceress casting a spell, occasionally hiding behind her wild mane of blond hair as she sings of pastoral themes. She performs "Farther than the Sun," backed by Thomas Dolby on keyboards.

Thank you very much. Now, I've got a story for you. When I arrived off the plane, after a very long journey from the West of England, my computer, my beloved laptop, had gone mad, and had — oh! — a bit like that! — and the display on it — anyway, the whole thing had burst. And I went to the IT guys here and a gentleman mended my computer, and then he said, "What are you doing here?" and I said "I'm playing the cello and I'm doing a bit of singing," and he said, "Oh, I sort of play the cello as well." And I said, "Do you really?" Anyway, so you're in for a treat, because he's fantastic, and his name's Mark. (Applause) I am also joined by my partner in crime, Thomas Dolby. (Applause) This song is called "Farther than the Sun." (Music) ♫ Strung in the wind I called you ♫ ♫ but you did not hear ... ♫ ♫ And you're a plant that needs poor soil ♫ ♫ and I have treated you too well ♫ ♫ to give up flowers ... ♫ ♫ Oh, I have been too rich for you ... ♫ ♫ Farther than the sun from me ♫ ♫ Farther than I'd have you be ♫ ♫ And I go north, I get so cold ♫ ♫ My heart is lava under stone ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ... ♫ ♫ With your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ spinning figures ♫ ♫ you cannot see me ♫ ♫ You cannot see me ... ♫ ♫ And if I tell myself enough ♫ ♫ I'll believe it ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ The sea, it freezes over ... ♫ ♫ to trap the light ♫ ♫ And I'm in love with being in love ♫ ♫ and you were never quite the one ♫ ♫ In Gerda's eyes ♫ ♫ Fragments of what you've become ♫ ♫ And all the moths that fly at night ♫ ♫ believe electric light is bright ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ With your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ Spinning figures ♫ ♫ You cannot see me, no ♫ ♫ And if I tell myself enough ♫ ♫ I'll believe it ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ Farther than the sun from me ♫ ♫ Farther than I'd have you be ♫ ♫ And I go north, I get so cold ♫ ♫ My heart is lava under stone ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ With your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ Spinning figures ♫ ♫ You cannot see me, no ... ♫ ♫ And if I tell myself enough, I'll believe it ♫ (Applause) Thank you very much.

The illusion of consciousness

Dan Dennett

{0: 'Dan Dennett'}

{0: ['philosopher', 'cognitive scientist']}

{0: 'Dan Dennett thinks that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes.'}

2003-02-27

2007-04-06

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sl', 'sr', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['brain', 'consciousness', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'illusion', 'self', 'visualizations']

{116: 'Dangerous memes', 125: 'How brain science will change computing', 229: 'My stroke of insight', 2045: 'How do you explain consciousness?', 1794: 'Our shared condition -- consciousness', 33799: 'What is consciousness?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consciousness/

Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.

So I'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's that I'm a philosopher. (Laughter) When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "I'm a professor," their eyes glaze over. When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, "philosophy" — their eyes glaze over. (Laughter) When I go to a philosopher's party (Laughter) and they ask me what I work on and I say, "consciousness," their eyes don't glaze over — their lips curl into a snarl. (Laughter) And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, "That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness." The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question. My late, lamented friend Bob Nozick, a fine philosopher, in one of his books, "Philosophical Explanations," is commenting on the ethos of philosophy — the way philosophers go about their business. And he says, you know, "Philosophers love rational argument." And he says, "It seems as if the ideal argument for most philosophers is you give your audience the premises and then you give them the inferences and the conclusion, and if they don't accept the conclusion, they die. Their heads explode." The idea is to have an argument that is so powerful that it knocks out your opponents. But in fact that doesn't change people's minds at all. It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. We heard the other day that everybody's got a strong opinion about video games. They all have an idea for a video game, even if they're not experts. But they don't consider themselves experts on video games; they've just got strong opinions. I'm sure that people here who work on, say, climate change and global warming, or on the future of the Internet, encounter people who have very strong opinions about what's going to happen next. But they probably don't think of these opinions as expertise. They're just strongly held opinions. But with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence. And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling — I can feel it myself. I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds — that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. That's the order of the day here. Now, this nice picture shows a thought-balloon, a thought-bubble. I think everybody understands what that means. That's supposed to exhibit the stream of consciousness. This is my favorite picture of consciousness that's ever been done. It's a Saul Steinberg of course — it was a New Yorker cover. And this fellow here is looking at the painting by Braque. That reminds him of the word baroque, barrack, bark, poodle, Suzanne R. — he's off to the races. There's a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if you follow it along, you learn a lot about this man. What I particularly like about this picture, too, is that Steinberg has rendered the guy in this sort of pointillist style. Which reminds us, as Rod Brooks was saying yesterday: what we are, what each of us is — what you are, what I am — is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots. That's what we're made of. No other ingredients at all. We're just made of cells, about 100 trillion of them. Not a single one of those cells is conscious; not a single one of those cells knows who you are, or cares. Somehow, we have to explain how when you put together teams, armies, battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells — not so different really from a bacterium, each one of them — the result is this. I mean, just look at it. The content — there's color, there's ideas, there's memories, there's history. And somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hoards of neurons. How is that possible? Many people just think it isn't possible at all. They think, "No, there can't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness." This is a lovely book by a friend of mine named Lee Siegel, who's a professor of religion, actually, at the University of Hawaii, and he's an expert magician, and an expert on the street magic of India, which is what this book is about, "Net of Magic." And there's a passage in it which I would love to share with you. It speaks so eloquently to the problem. "'I'm writing a book on magic,' I explain, and I'm asked, 'Real magic?' By 'real magic,' people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. 'No,' I answer. 'Conjuring tricks, not real magic.' 'Real magic,' in other words, refers to the magic that is not real; while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic." (Laughter) Now, that's the way a lot of people feel about consciousness. (Laughter) Real consciousness is not a bag of tricks. If you're going to explain this as a bag of tricks, then it's not real consciousness, whatever it is. And, as Marvin said, and as other people have said, "Consciousness is a bag of tricks." This means that a lot of people are just left completely dissatisfied and incredulous when I attempt to explain consciousness. So this is the problem. So I have to do a little bit of the sort of work that a lot of you won't like, for the same reason that you don't like to see a magic trick explained to you. How many of you here, if somebody — some smart aleck — starts telling you how a particular magic trick is done, you sort of want to block your ears and say, "No, no, I don't want to know! Don't take the thrill of it away. I'd rather be mystified. Don't tell me the answer." A lot of people feel that way about consciousness, I've discovered. And I'm sorry if I impose some clarity, some understanding on you. You'd better leave now if you don't want to know some of these tricks. But I'm not going to explain it all to you. I'm going to do what philosophers do. Here's how a philosopher explains the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick. You know the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick? The philosopher says, "I'm going to explain to you how that's done. You see, the magician doesn't really saw the lady in half." (Laughter) "He merely makes you think that he does." And you say, "Yes, and how does he do that?" He says, "Oh, that's not my department, I'm sorry." (Laughter) So now I'm going to illustrate how philosophers explain consciousness. But I'm going to try to also show you that consciousness isn't quite as marvelous — your own consciousness isn't quite as wonderful — as you may have thought it is. This is something, by the way, that Lee Siegel talks about in his book. He marvels at how he'll do a magic show, and afterwards people will swear they saw him do X, Y, and Z. He never did those things. He didn't even try to do those things. People's memories inflate what they think they saw. And the same is true of consciousness. Now, let's see if this will work. All right. Let's just watch this. Watch it carefully. I'm working with a young computer-animator documentarian named Nick Deamer, and this is a little demo that he's done for me, part of a larger project some of you may be interested in. We're looking for a backer. It's a feature-length documentary on consciousness. OK, now, you all saw what changed, right? How many of you noticed that every one of those squares changed color? Every one. I'll just show you by running it again. Even when you know that they're all going to change color, it's very hard to notice. You have to really concentrate to pick up any of the changes at all. Now, this is an example — one of many — of a phenomenon that's now being studied quite a bit. It's one that I predicted in the last page or two of my 1991 book, "Consciousness Explained," where I said if you did experiments of this sort, you'd find that people were unable to pick up really large changes. If there's time at the end, I'll show you the much more dramatic case. Now, how can it be that there are all those changes going on, and that we're not aware of them? Well, earlier today, Jeff Hawkins mentioned the way your eye saccades, the way your eye moves around three or four times a second. He didn't mention the speed. Your eye is constantly in motion, moving around, looking at eyes, noses, elbows, looking at interesting things in the world. And where your eye isn't looking, you're remarkably impoverished in your vision. That's because the foveal part of your eye, which is the high-resolution part, is only about the size of your thumbnail held at arms length. That's the detail part. It doesn't seem that way, does it? It doesn't seem that way, but that's the way it is. You're getting in a lot less information than you think. Here's a completely different effect. This is a painting by Bellotto. It's in the museum in North Carolina. Bellotto was a student of Canaletto's. And I love paintings like that — the painting is actually about as big as it is right here. And I love Canalettos, because Canaletto has this fantastic detail, and you can get right up and see all the details on the painting. And I started across the hall in North Carolina, because I thought it was probably a Canaletto, and would have all that in detail. And I noticed that on the bridge there, there's a lot of people — you can just barely see them walking across the bridge. And I thought as I got closer I would be able to see all the detail of most people, see their clothes, and so forth. And as I got closer and closer, I actually screamed. I yelled out because when I got closer, I found the detail wasn't there at all. There were just little artfully placed blobs of paint. And as I walked towards the picture, I was expecting detail that wasn't there. The artist had very cleverly suggested people and clothes and wagons and all sorts of things, and my brain had taken the suggestion. You're familiar with a more recent technology, which is — There, you can get a better view of the blobs. See, when you get close they're really just blobs of paint. You will have seen something like this — this is the reverse effect. I'll just give that to you one more time. Now, what does your brain do when it takes the suggestion? When an artful blob of paint or two, by an artist, suggests a person — say, one of Marvin Minsky's little society of mind — do they send little painters out to fill in all the details in your brain somewhere? I don't think so. Not a chance. But then, how on Earth is it done? Well, remember the philosopher's explanation of the lady? It's the same thing. The brain just makes you think that it's got the detail there. You think the detail's there, but it isn't there. The brain isn't actually putting the detail in your head at all. It's just making you expect the detail. Let's just do this experiment very quickly. Is the shape on the left the same as the shape on the right, rotated? Yes. How many of you did it by rotating the one on the left in your mind's eye, to see if it matched up with the one on the right? How many of you rotated the one on the right? OK. How do you know that's what you did? (Laughter) There's in fact been a very interesting debate raging for over 20 years in cognitive science — various experiments started by Roger Shepherd, who measured the angular velocity of rotation of mental images. Yes, it's possible to do that. But the details of the process are still in significant controversy. And if you read that literature, one of the things that you really have to come to terms with is even when you're the subject in the experiment, you don't know. You don't know how you do it. You just know that you have certain beliefs. And they come in a certain order, at a certain time. And what explains the fact that that's what you think? Well, that's where you have to go backstage and ask the magician. This is a figure that I love: Bradley, Petrie, and Dumais. You may think that I've cheated, that I've put a little whiter-than-white boundary there. How many of you see that sort of boundary, with the Necker cube floating in front of the circles? Can you see it? Well, you know, in effect, the boundary's really there, in a certain sense. Your brain is actually computing that boundary, the boundary that goes right there. But now, notice there are two ways of seeing the cube, right? It's a Necker cube. Everybody can see the two ways of seeing the cube? OK. Can you see the four ways of seeing the cube? Because there's another way of seeing it. If you're seeing it as a cube floating in front of some circles, some black circles, there's another way of seeing it. As a cube, on a black background, as seen through a piece of Swiss cheese. (Laughter) Can you get it? How many of you can't get it? That'll help. (Laughter) Now you can get it. These are two very different phenomena. When you see the cube one way, behind the screen, those boundaries go away. But there's still a sort of filling in, as we can tell if we look at this. We don't have any trouble seeing the cube, but where does the color change? Does your brain have to send little painters in there? The purple-painters and the green-painters fight over who's going to paint that bit behind the curtain? No. Your brain just lets it go. The brain doesn't need to fill that in. When I first started talking about the Bradley, Petrie, Dumais example that you just saw — I'll go back to it, this one — I said that there was no filling-in behind there. And I supposed that that was just a flat truth, always true. But Rob Van Lier has recently shown that it isn't. Now, if you think you see some pale yellow — I'll run this a few more times. Look in the gray areas, and see if you seem to see something sort of shadowy moving in there — yeah, it's amazing. There's nothing there. It's no trick. ["Failure to Detect Changes in Scenes" slide] This is Ron Rensink's work, which was in some degree inspired by that suggestion right at the end of the book. Let me just pause this for a second if I can. This is change-blindness. What you're going to see is two pictures, one of which is slightly different from the other. You see here the red roof and the gray roof, and in between them there will be a mask, which is just a blank screen, for about a quarter of a second. So you'll see the first picture, then a mask, then the second picture, then a mask. And this will just continue, and your job as the subject is to press the button when you see the change. So, show the original picture for 240 milliseconds. Blank. Show the next picture for 240 milliseconds. Blank. And keep going, until the subject presses the button, saying, "I see the change." So now we're going to be subjects in the experiment. We're going to start easy. Some examples. No trouble there. Can everybody see? All right. Indeed, Rensink's subjects took only a little bit more than a second to press the button. Can you see that one? 2.9 seconds. How many don't see it still? What's on the roof of that barn? (Laughter) It's easy. Is it a bridge or a dock? There are a few more really dramatic ones, and then I'll close. I want you to see a few that are particularly striking. This one because it's so large and yet it's pretty hard to see. Can you see it? Audience: Yes. Dan Dennett: See the shadows going back and forth? Pretty big. So 15.5 seconds is the median time for subjects in his experiment there. I love this one. I'll end with this one, just because it's such an obvious and important thing. How many still don't see it? How many still don't see it? How many engines on the wing of that Boeing? (Laughter) Right in the middle of the picture! Thanks very much for your attention. What I wanted to show you is that scientists, using their from-the-outside, third-person methods, can tell you things about your own consciousness that you would never dream of, and that, in fact, you're not the authority on your own consciousness that you think you are. And we're really making a lot of progress on coming up with a theory of mind. Jeff Hawkins, this morning, was describing his attempt to get theory, and a good, big theory, into the neuroscience. And he's right. This is a problem. Harvard Medical School once — I was at a talk — director of the lab said, "In our lab, we have a saying. If you work on one neuron, that's neuroscience. If you work on two neurons, that's psychology." (Laughter) We have to have more theory, and it can come as much from the top down. Thank you very much. (Applause)

How to truly listen

Evelyn Glennie

{0: 'Evelyn Glennie'}

{0: ['musician']}

{0: 'Percussionist and composer Dame Evelyn Glennie lost nearly all of her hearing by age 12. Rather than isolating her, it has given her a unique connection to her music.'}

2003-02-02

2007-04-06

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'eu', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['creativity', 'entertainment', 'live music', 'music', 'performance']

{286: 'The transformative power of classical music', 246: 'Inventing instruments that unlock new music', 218: 'The untouchable music of the theremin', 660: 'The 4 ways sound affects us', 2357: 'The enchanting music of sign language', 2351: 'The unexpected beauty of everyday sounds'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_how_to_truly_listen/

In this soaring demonstration, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie illustrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums.

I'm not quite sure whether I really want to see a snare drum at nine o'clock or so in the morning. (Laughter) But anyway, it's just great to see such a full theater, and really, I must thank Herbie Hancock and his colleagues for such a great presentation. (Applause) One of the interesting things, of course, is the combination of that raw hand on the instrument and technology, and what he said about listening to our young people. Of course, my job is all about listening. And my aim, really, is to teach the world to listen. That's my only real aim in life. And it sounds quite simple, but actually, it's quite a big, big job. Because you know, when you look at a piece of music, for example, if I just open my little motorbike bag — we have here, hopefully, a piece of music that is full of little black dots on the page. And, you know, we open it up ... And I read the music. So technically, I can actually read this. I will follow the instructions, the tempo markings, the dynamics. I will do exactly as I'm told. And so therefore, because time is short, if I just played you, literally, the first, maybe, two lines or so — It's very straightforward; there's nothing too difficult about the piece. But here, I'm being told that the piece of music is very quick. I'm being told where to play on the drum. I'm being told which part of the stick to use. And I'm being told the dynamic. And I'm also being told that the drum is without snares. Snares on, snares off. So therefore, if I translate this piece of music, we have this idea. (Drum sounds) (Drum sounds end) And so on. My career would probably last about five years. (Laughter) However, what I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music; everything that there isn't time to learn from a teacher, or to talk about, even, from a teacher. But it's the things you notice when you're not actually with your instrument that, in fact, become so interesting, and that you want to explore through this tiny, tiny surface of a drum. So there, we experience the translation. Now we'll experience the interpretation. (Drum sounds) (Drum sounds end) (Applause) Now my career may last a little longer. (Laughter) But in a way, you know, it's the same if I look at you and I see a nice, bright young lady with a pink top on. I see that you're clutching a teddy bear, etc., etc. So I get a basic idea as to what you might be about, what you might like, what you might do as a profession, etc., etc. However, that's just the initial idea I may have that we all get when we actually look and we try to interpret. But actually it's so unbelievably shallow. In the same way, I look at the music; I get a basic idea; I wonder what technically might be hard, or, you know, what I want to do. Just the basic feeling. However, that is simply not enough. And I think what Herbie said: please listen, listen. We have to listen to ourselves, first of all. If I play, for example, holding the stick — where literally I do not let go of the stick — (Drum sound) you'll experience quite a lot of shock coming up through the arm. And you feel really quite — believe it or not — detached from the instrument and from the stick, even though I'm actually holding the stick quite tightly. (Drum sound) By holding it tightly, I feel strangely more detached. If I just simply let go and allow my hand, my arm, to be more of a support system, suddenly — (Drum sound) I have more dynamic with less effort. Much more — (Drum sound) and I just feel, at last, one with the stick and one with the drum. And I'm doing far, far less. So in the same way that I need time with this instrument, I need time with people in order to interpret them. Not just translate them, but interpret them. If, for example, I play just a few bars of a piece of music for which I think of myself as a technician — that is, someone who is basically a percussion player — (Marimba sounds) (Marimba sounds end) And so on, if I think of myself as a musician — (Marimba sounds) (Marimba sounds end) And so on. There is a little bit of a difference there that is worth just — (Applause) thinking about. And I remember when I was 12 years old, and I started playing timpani and percussion, and my teacher said, "Well, how are we going to do this? You know, music is about listening." And I said, "Yes, I agree with that, so what's the problem?" And he said, "Well, how are you going to hear this? How are you going to hear that?" And I said, "Well, how do you hear it?" He said, "Well, I think I hear it through here." And I said, "Well, I think I do too, but I also hear it through my hands, through my arms, cheekbones, my scalp, my tummy, my chest, my legs and so on." And so we began our lessons every single time tuning drums, in particular, the kettle drums, or timpani to such a narrow pitch interval, so something like — (Marimba sounds) that of a difference. Then gradually: (Marimba sounds) And gradually: (Marimba sounds) And it's amazing that when you do open your body up, and open your hand up to allow the vibration to come through, that in fact the tiny, tiny difference — (Marimba sounds) can be felt with just the tiniest part of your finger, there. And so what we would do is that I would put my hands on the wall of the music room, and together, we would "listen" to the sounds of the instruments, and really try to connect with those sounds far, far more broadly than simply depending on the ear. Because of course, the ear is subject to all sorts of things. The room we happen to be in, the amplification, the quality of the instrument, the type of sticks — (Marimba sounds) (Marimba sounds end) Etc., etc., they're all different. (Marimba sounds) (Marimba sounds end) Same amount of weight, but different sound colors. And that's basically what we are; we're just human beings, but we all have our own little sound colors, as it were, that make up these extraordinary personalities and characters and interests and things. And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, "Well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue, you know, of the future of a so-called 'deaf musician.'" And I just couldn't quite accept that. And so therefore, I said to them, "Well, look, if you refuse — if you refuse me through those reasons, as opposed to the ability to perform and to understand and love the art of creating sound — then we have to think very, very hard about the people you do actually accept." And as a result, once we got over a little hurdle, and having to audition twice, they accepted me. And not only that, what had happened was that it changed the whole role of the music institutions throughout the United Kingdom. Under no circumstances were they to refuse any application whatsoever on the basis of whether someone had no arms, no legs — they could still perhaps play a wind instrument if it was supported on a stand. No circumstances at all were used to refuse any entry. And every single entry had to be listened to, experienced, and then, based on the musical ability, then that person could either enter or not. And so therefore, this in turn meant that there was an extremely interesting bunch of students who arrived in these various music institutions, and I have to say, many of them now in the professional orchestras throughout the world. The interesting thing about this as well, though — (Applause) is quite simply that not only were people connected with sound — which is basically all of us — we well know that music really is our daily medicine. I say "music," but actually I mean "sound." Because some of the extraordinary things I've experienced as a musician — when you may have a 15-year-old lad who has got the most incredible challenges, who may not be able to control his movements, who may be deaf, who may be blind, etc., etc. — suddenly, if that young lad sits close to this instrument, and perhaps even lies underneath the marimba, and you play something that's so incredibly organ-like, almost — I don't really have the right sticks, perhaps — but something like this — let me change — (Soft marimba sounds) (Soft marimba sounds end) Something that's so unbelievably simple — but he would be experiencing something that I wouldn't be, because I'm on top of the sound. I have the sound coming this way. He would have the sound coming through the resonators. If there were no resonators on here, we would have: (Marimba sounds) So he would have a fullness of sound that those of you in the front few rows wouldn't experience, those of you in the back few rows wouldn't experience, either. Every single one of us, depending on where we're sitting, will experience this sound quite, quite differently. And of course, being the participator of the sound, and that is, starting from the idea of what type of sound I want to produce, for example, this sound: (No sound) Can you hear anything? Exactly — because I'm not even touching it. (Laughter) But yet, we get the sensation of something happening. In the same way that when I see a tree moves, then I imagine that tree making a rustling sound. Do you see what I mean? Whatever the eye sees, then there's always sound happening. So there's always, always that huge — I mean, just this kaleidoscope of things to draw from. So all of my performances are based on entirely what I experience, and not by learning a piece of music, putting on someone else's interpretation of it, buying all the CDs possible of that particular piece of music, and so on and so forth, because that isn't giving me enough of something that is so raw and so basic, and something that I can fully experience the journey of. So it may be that, in certain halls, this dynamic may well work. (Soft marimba sounds) (Soft marimba sounds end) It may be that in other halls, they're simply not going to experience that at all, and so therefore, my level of soft, gentle playing may have to be — (Marimba sounds) (Marimba sounds end) Do you see what I mean? So, because of this explosion in access to sound, especially through the Deaf community, this has not only affected how music institutions, how schools for the deaf treat sound, and not just as a means of therapy — although, of course, being a participator of music, that definitely is the case as well — but it's meant that acousticians have had to really think about the types of halls they put together. There are so few halls in this world that actually have very good acoustics, dare I say. But by that I mean, where you can absolutely do anything you imagine. The tiniest, softest, softest sound to something that is so broad, so huge, so incredible. There's always something: it may sound good up there, may not be so good there; it may be great there, but terrible up there; maybe terrible over there, but not too bad there, etc., etc. So to find an actual hall is incredible — for which you can play exactly what you imagine, without it being cosmetically enhanced. So therefore, acousticians are actually in conversation with people who are hearing impaired, and who are participators of sound. And this is quite interesting. I cannot give you any detail as far as what is actually happening with those halls, but it's just the fact that they are going to a group of people for whom so many years, we've been saying, "Well, how on earth can they experience music? They're deaf." We go like that, and we imagine that's what deafness is about. Or we go like that, and we imagine that's what blindness is about. If we see someone in a wheelchair, we assume they cannot walk. It may be that they can walk three, four, five steps. That, to them, means they can walk. In a year's time, it could be two extra steps. In another year's time, three extra steps. Those are hugely important aspects to think about. So when we do listen to each other, it's unbelievably important for us to really test our listening skills, to really use our bodies as a resonating chamber, to stop the judgment. For me, as a musician who deals with 99 percent of new music, it's very easy for me to say, "Oh yes, I like that piece. No, I don't like that piece," and so on. And I just find that I have to give those pieces of music real time. It may be that the chemistry isn't quite right between myself and that particular piece of music, but that doesn't mean I have the right to say it's a bad piece of music. And you know, one of the great things about being a musician is that it is so unbelievably fluid. So there are no rules, no right, no wrong, this way, that way. If I asked you to clap — maybe I can do this. If I can just say, "Please clap and create the sound of thunder." I'm assuming we've all experienced thunder. Now, I don't mean just the sound; I mean really listen to that thunder within yourselves. And please try to create that through your clapping. Try, just — please try. (Loud clapping sounds) (Clapping ends) Snow. (Laughter) Snow. (Soft clapping sounds) Have you ever heard snow? Audience: No. Evelyn Glennie: Well, then, stop clapping. (Laughter) Try again. Try again: snow. (No sound) See, you're awake. Rain. (Light clapping sounds) EG: (Laughs) Not bad. Not bad. The interesting thing here, though, is that I asked a group of kids not so long ago exactly the same question. Now — great imagination, thank you very much. However, not one of you got out of your seats to think, "Right! How can I clap? OK, maybe: (Clapping sounds) Maybe I can use my jewelry to create extra sounds. Maybe I can use the other parts of my body to create extra sounds." Not a single one of you thought about clapping in a slightly different way other than sitting in your seats there and using two hands. In the same way, when we listen to music, we assume that it's all being fed through here. This is how we experience music. Of course, it's not. We experience thunder, thunder, thunder. Think, think, think. Listen, listen, listen. Now, what can we do with thunder? I remember my teacher, when I first started, my very first lesson, I was all prepared with sticks, ready to go. And instead of him saying, "OK, Evelyn, please, feet slightly apart, arms at a more or less 90-degree angle, sticks in a more or less V shape, keep this amount of space here, etc. Please keep your back straight, etc., etc., etc." — where I was just probably going to end up absolutely rigid, frozen, and I would not be able to strike the drum because I was thinking of so many other things, he said, "Evelyn, take this drum away for seven days, and I'll see you next week." So — heavens! What was I to do? I no longer required the sticks. I wasn't allowed to have these sticks. I had to basically look at this particular drum, see how it was made, what these little lugs did, what the snares did. Turned it upside down, experimented with the shell. (Drum sounds) Experimented with the head. (Drum sounds) Experimented with my body. (Drum sounds) Experimented with jewelry. Experimented with all sorts of things. (Drum sounds) (Drum sounds end) And of course, I returned with all sorts of bruises. (Laughter) But nevertheless, it was such an unbelievable experience, because where on earth are you going to experience that in a piece of music? Where on earth are you going to experience that in a study book? So we never, ever dealt with actual study books. So for example, one of the things that we learn when we are dealing with being a percussion player as opposed to a musician, is basically, straightforward single-stroke rolls. (Drum sounds) Like that, and then we get a little faster — (Drum sounds) and a little faster — (Drum sounds) and a little faster, and so on and so forth. What does this piece require? Single-stroke rolls. (Drum sound) So why can't I then do that whilst learning a piece of music? And that's exactly what he did. And interestingly, the older I became, and when I became a full-time student at a so-called "music institution," all of that went out of the window. We had to study from study books. And constantly, the question, "Well, why? Why? What is this relating to? I need to play a piece of music." "Well, this will help your control." "Well, how? Why do I need to learn that? I need to relate it to a piece of music. You know, I need to say something. Why am I practicing paradiddles? (Drum sounds) Is it just literally for control, for hand-stick control? Why am I doing that? I need to have the reason, and the reason has to be by saying something through the music." And by saying something through music, which basically is sound, we then can reach all sorts of things to all sorts of people. But I don't want to take responsibility of your emotional baggage. That's up to you, when you walk through a hall, because that then determines what and how we listen to certain things. I may feel sorrowful, or happy, or exhilarated, or angry when I play certain pieces of music, but I'm not necessarily wanting you to feel exactly the same thing. So please, the next time you go to a concert, just allow your body to open up, allow your body to be this resonating chamber. Be aware that you're not going to experience the same thing as the performer is. The performer is in the worst possible position for the actual sound, because they're hearing the contact of the stick — (Drum sound) on the drum, or the mallet on the bit of wood, or the bow on the string, etc., or the breath that's creating the sound from wind and brass. They're experiencing that rawness there. But yet they're experiencing something so unbelievably pure, which is before the sound is actually happening. Please take note of the life of the sound after the actual initial strike, or breath, is being pulled. Just experience the whole journey of that sound in the same way that I wished I'd experienced the whole journey of this particular conference, rather than just arriving last night. But I hope maybe we can share one or two things as the day progresses. But thank you very much for having me! (Applause) (Applause ends) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause)

Cradle to cradle design

William McDonough

{0: 'William McDonough'}

{0: ['architect']}

{0: "Architect William McDonough believes green design can prevent environmental disaster and drive economic growth. He champions “cradle to cradle” design, which considers a product's full life cycle -- from creation with sustainable materials to a recycled afterlife. "}

2005-02-02

2007-04-06

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'mk', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['architecture', 'business', 'china', 'cities', 'culture', 'design', 'environment', 'global issues', 'sustainability', 'technology']

{74: 'The route to a sustainable future', 359: 'The Blur Building and other tech-empowered architecture', 174: 'My green agenda for architecture', 1072: "Using nature's genius in architecture", 2128: 'My architectural philosophy? Bring the community into the process', 56: 'My wish: Manufactured landscapes and green education'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/william_mcdonough_cradle_to_cradle_design/

Green-minded architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account "all children, all species, for all time."

In 1962, with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," I think for people like me in the world of the making of things, the canary in the mine wasn't singing. And so the question that we might not have birds became kind of fundamental to those of us wandering around looking for the meadowlarks that seemed to have all disappeared. And the question was, were the birds singing? Now, I'm not a scientist, that'll be really clear. But, you know, we've just come from this discussion of what a bird might be. What is a bird? Well, in my world, this is a rubber duck. It comes in California with a warning — "This product contains chemicals known by the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm." This is a bird. What kind of culture would produce a product of this kind and then label it and sell it to children? I think we have a design problem. Someone heard the six hours of talk that I gave called "The Monticello Dialogues" on NPR, and sent me this as a thank you note — "We realize that design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world, and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence, and so as we look back at the basic state of affairs in which we design, we, in a way, need to go to the primordial condition to understand the operating system and the frame conditions of a planet, and I think the exciting part of that is the good news that's there, because the news is the news of abundance, and not the news of limits, and I think as our culture tortures itself now with tyrannies and concerns over limits and fear, we can add this other dimension of abundance that is coherent, driven by the sun, and start to imagine what that would be like to share." That was a nice thing to get. That was one sentence. Henry James would be proud. This is — I put it down at the bottom, but that was extemporaneous, obviously. The fundamental issue is that, for me, design is the first signal of human intentions. So what are our intentions, and what would our intentions be — if we wake up in the morning, we have designs on the world — well, what would our intention be as a species now that we're the dominant species? And it's not just stewardship and dominion debate, because really, dominion is implicit in stewardship — because how could you dominate something you had killed? And stewardship's implicit in dominion, because you can't be steward of something if you can't dominate it. So the question is, what is the first question for designers? Now, as guardians — let's say the state, for example, which reserves the right to kill, the right to be duplicitous and so on — the question we're asking the guardian at this point is are we meant, how are we meant, to secure local societies, create world peace and save the environment? But I don't know that that's the common debate. Commerce, on the other hand, is relatively quick, essentially creative, highly effective and efficient, and fundamentally honest, because we can't exchange value for very long if we don't trust each other. So we use the tools of commerce primarily for our work, but the question we bring to it is, how do we love all the children of all species for all time? And so we start our designs with that question. Because what we realize today is that modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, "Well, I didn't intend to cause global warming on the way here," and we say, "That's not part of my plan," then we realize it's part of our de facto plan. Because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan. And I was at the White House for President Bush, meeting with every federal department and agency, and I pointed out that they appear to have no plan. If the end game is global warming, they're doing great. If the end game is mercury toxification of our children downwind of coal fire plants as they scuttled the Clean Air Act, then I see that our education programs should be explicitly defined as, "Brain death for all children. No child left behind." (Applause) So, the question is, how many federal officials are ready to move to Ohio and Pennsylvania with their families? So if you don't have an endgame of something delightful, then you're just moving chess pieces around, if you don't know you're taking the king. So perhaps we could develop a strategy of change, which requires humility. And in my business as an architect, it's unfortunate the word "humility" and the word "architect" have not appeared in the same paragraph since "The Fountainhead." So if anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this — it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage. So, as Kevin Kelly pointed out, there is no endgame. There is an infinite game, and we're playing in that infinite game. And so we call it "cradle to cradle," and our goal is very simple. This is what I presented to the White House. Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean air, clean water, soil and power — economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed, period. (Applause) What don't you like about this? Which part of this don't you like? So we realized we want full diversity, even though it can be difficult to remember what De Gaulle said when asked what it was like to be President of France. He said, "What do you think it's like trying to run a country with 400 kinds of cheese?" But at the same time, we realize that our products are not safe and healthy. So we've designed products and we analyzed chemicals down to the parts per million. This is a baby blanket by Pendleton that will give your child nutrition instead of Alzheimer's later in life. We can ask ourselves, what is justice, and is justice blind, or is justice blindness? And at what point did that uniform turn from white to black? Water has been declared a human right by the United Nations. Air quality is an obvious thing to anyone who breathes. Is there anybody here who doesn't breathe? Clean soil is a critical problem — the nitrification, the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. A fundamental issue that's not being addressed. We've seen the first form of solar energy that's beat the hegemony of fossil fuels in the form of wind here in the Great Plains, and so that hegemony is leaving. And if we remember Sheikh Yamani when he formed OPEC, they asked him, "When will we see the end of the age of oil?" I don't know if you remember his answer, but it was, "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones." We see that companies acting ethically in this world are outperforming those that don't. We see the flows of materials in a rather terrifying prospect. This is a hospital monitor from Los Angeles, sent to China. This woman will expose herself to toxic phosphorous, release four pounds of toxic lead into her childrens' environment, which is from copper. On the other hand, we see great signs of hope. Here's Dr. Venkataswamy in India, who's figured out how to do mass-produced health. He has given eyesight to two million people for free. We see in our material flows that car steels don't become car steel again because of the contaminants of the coatings — bismuth, antimony, copper and so on. They become building steel. On the other hand, we're working with Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett and Shaw Carpet, the largest carpet company in the world. We've developed a carpet that is continuously recyclable, down to the parts per million. The upper is Nylon 6 that can go back to caprolactam, the bottom, a polyolephine — infinitely recyclable thermoplastic. Now if I was a bird, the building on my left is a liability. The building on my right, which is our corporate campus for The Gap with an ancient meadow, is an asset — its nesting grounds. Here's where I come from. I grew up in Hong Kong, with six million people in 40 square miles. During the dry season, we had four hours of water every fourth day. And the relationship to landscape was that of farmers who have been farming the same piece of ground for 40 centuries. You can't farm the same piece of ground for 40 centuries without understanding nutrient flow. My childhood summers were in the Puget Sound of Washington, among the first growth and big growth. My grandfather had been a lumberjack in the Olympics, so I have a lot of tree karma I am working off. I went to Yale for graduate school, studied in a building of this style by Le Corbusier, affectionately known in our business as Brutalism. If we look at the world of architecture, we see with Mies' 1928 tower for Berlin, the question might be, "Well, where's the sun?" And this might have worked in Berlin, but we built it in Houston, and the windows are all closed. And with most products appearing not to have been designed for indoor use, this is actually a vertical gas chamber. When I went to Yale, we had the first energy crisis, and I was designing the first solar-heated house in Ireland as a student, which I then built — which would give you a sense of my ambition. And Richard Meier, who was one of my teachers, kept coming over to my desk to give me criticism, and he would say, "Bill, you've got to understand- — solar energy has nothing to do with architecture." I guess he didn't read Vitruvius. In 1984, we did the first so-called "green office" in America for Environmental Defense. We started asking manufacturers what were in their materials. They said, "They're proprietary, they're legal, go away." The only indoor quality work done in this country at that time was sponsored by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and it was to prove there was no danger from secondhand smoke in the workplace. So, all of a sudden, here I am, graduating from high school in 1969, and this happens, and we realize that "away" went away. Remember we used to throw things away, and we'd point to away? And yet, NOAA has now shown us, for example — you see that little blue thing above Hawaii? That's the Pacific Gyre. It was recently dragged for plankton by scientists, and they found six times as much plastic as plankton. When asked, they said, "It's kind of like a giant toilet that doesn't flush." Perhaps that's away. So we're looking for the design rules of this — this is the highest biodiversity of trees in the world, Irian Jaya, 259 species of tree, and we described this in the book, "Cradle to Cradle." The book itself is a polymer. It is not a tree. That's the name of the first chapter — "This Book is Not a Tree." Because in poetics, as Margaret Atwood pointed out, "we write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears." And with so much polymer, what we really need is technical nutrition, and to use something as elegant as a tree — imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates. Well, why don't we knock that down and write on it? (Laughter) So, we're looking at the same criteria as most people — you know, can I afford it? Does it work? Do I like it? We're adding the Jeffersonian agenda, and I come from Charlottesville, where I've had the privilege of living in a house designed by Thomas Jefferson. We're adding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now if we look at the word "competition," I'm sure most of you've used it. You know, most people don't realize it comes from the Latin competere, which means strive together. It means the way Olympic athletes train with each other. They get fit together, and then they compete. The Williams sisters compete — one wins Wimbledon. So we've been looking at the idea of competition as a way of cooperating in order to get fit together. And the Chinese government has now — I work with the Chinese government now — has taken this up. We're also looking at survival of the fittest, not in just competition terms in our modern context of destroy the other or beat them to the ground, but really to fit together and build niches and have growth that is good. Now most environmentalists don't say growth is good, because, in our lexicon, asphalt is two words: assigning blame. But if we look at asphalt as our growth, then we realize that all we're doing is destroying the planetary's fundamental underlying operating system. So when we see E equals mc squared come along, from a poet's perspective, we see energy as physics, chemistry as mass, and all of a sudden, you get this biology. And we have plenty of energy, so we'll solve that problem, but the biology problem's tricky, because as we put through all these toxic materials that we disgorge, we will never be able to recover that. And as Francis Crick pointed out, nine years after discovering DNA with Mr. Watson, that life itself has to have growth as a precondition — it has to have free energy, sunlight and it needs to be an open system of chemicals. So we're asking for human artifice to become a living thing, and we want growth, we want free energy from sunlight and we want an open metabolism for chemicals. Then, the question becomes not growth or no growth, but what do you want to grow? So instead of just growing destruction, we want to grow the things that we might enjoy, and someday the FDA will allow us to make French cheese. So therefore, we have these two metabolisms, and I worked with a German chemist, Michael Braungart, and we've identified the two fundamental metabolisms. The biological one I'm sure you understand, but also the technical one, where we take materials and put them into closed cycles. We call them biological nutrition and technical nutrition. Technical nutrition will be in an order of magnitude of biological nutrition. Biological nutrition can supply about 500 million humans, which means that if we all wore Birkenstocks and cotton, the world would run out of cork and dry up. So we need materials in closed cycles, but we need to analyze them down to the parts per million for cancer, birth defects, mutagenic effects, disruption of our immune systems, biodegradation, persistence, heavy metal content, knowledge of how we're making them and their production and so on. Our first product was a textile where we analyzed 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry. Using those intellectual filters, we eliminated [7,962.] We were left with 38 chemicals. We have since databased the 4000 most commonly used chemicals in human manufacturing, and we're releasing this database into the public in six weeks. So designers all over the world can analyze their products down to the parts per million for human and ecological health. (Applause) We've developed a protocol so that companies can send these same messages all the way through their supply chains, because when we asked most companies we work with — about a trillion dollars — and say, "Where does your stuff come from?" They say, "Suppliers." "And where does it go?" "Customers." So we need some help there. So the biological nutrients, the first fabrics — the water coming out was clean enough to drink. Technical nutrients — this is for Shaw Carpet, infinitely reusable carpet. Here's nylon going back to caprolactam back to carpet. Biotechnical nutrients — the Model U for Ford Motor, a cradle to cradle car — concept car. Shoes for Nike, where the uppers are polyesters, infinitely recyclable, the bottoms are biodegradable soles. Wear your old shoes in, your new shoes out. There is no finish line. The idea here of the car is that some of the materials go back to the industry forever, some of the materials go back to soil — it's all solar-powered. Here's a building at Oberlin College we designed that makes more energy than it needs to operate and purifies its own water. Here's a building for The Gap, where the ancient grasses of San Bruno, California, are on the roof. And this is our project for Ford Motor Company. It's the revitalization of the River Rouge in Dearborn. This is obviously a color photograph. These are our tools. These are how we sold it to Ford. We saved Ford 35 million dollars doing it this way, day one, which is the equivalent of the Ford Taurus at a four percent margin of an order for 900 million dollars worth of cars. Here it is. It's the world's largest green roof, 10 and a half acres. This is the roof, saving money, and this is the first species to arrive here. These are killdeer. They showed up in five days. And we now have 350-pound auto workers learning bird songs on the Internet. We're developing now protocols for cities — that's the home of technical nutrients. The country — the home of biological. And putting them together. And so I will finish by showing you a new city we're designing for the Chinese government. We're doing 12 cities for China right now, based on cradle to cradle as templates. Our assignment is to develop protocols for the housing for 400 million people in 12 years. We did a mass energy balance — if they use brick, they will lose all their soil and burn all their coal. They'll have cities with no energy and no food. We signed a Memorandum of Understanding — here's Madam Deng Nan, Deng Xiaoping's daughter — for China to adopt cradle to cradle. Because if they toxify themselves, being the lowest-cost producer, send it to the lowest-cost distribution — Wal-Mart — and then we send them all our money, what we'll discover is that we have what, effectively, when I was a student, was called mutually assured destruction. Now we do it by molecule. These are our cities. We're building a new city next to this city; look at that landscape. This is the site. We don't normally do green fields, but this one is about to be built, so they brought us in to intercede. This is their plan. It's a rubber stamp grid that they laid right on that landscape. And they brought us in and said, "What would you do?" This is what they would end up with, which is another color photograph. So this is the existing site, so this is what it looks like now, and here's our proposal. (Applause) So the way we approached this is we studied the hydrology very carefully. We studied the biota, the ancient biota, the current farming and the protocols. We studied the winds and the sun to make sure everybody in the city will have fresh air, fresh water and direct sunlight in every single apartment at some point during the day. We then take the parks and lay them out as ecological infrastructure. We lay out the building areas. We start to integrate commercial and mixed use so the people all have centers and places to be. The transportation is all very simple, everybody's within a five-minute walk of mobility. We have a 24-hour street, so that there's always a place that's alive. The waste systems all connect. If you flush a toilet, your feces will go to the sewage treatment plants, which are sold as assets, not liabilities. Because who wants the fertilizer factory that makes natural gas? The waters are all taken in to construct the wetlands for habitat restorations. And then it makes natural gas, which then goes back into the city to power the fuel for the cooking for the city. So this is — these are fertilizer gas plants. And then the compost is all taken back to the roofs of the city, where we've got farming, because what we've done is lifted up the city, the landscape, into the air to — to restore the native landscape on the roofs of the buildings. The solar power of all the factory centers and all the industrial zones with their light roofs powers the city. And this is the concept for the top of the city. We've lifted the earth up onto the roofs. The farmers have little bridges to get from one roof to the next. We inhabit the city with work/live space on all the ground floors. And so this is the existing city, and this is the new city. (Applause)

A mockingbird remix of TED2006

Rives

{0: ' Rives'}

{0: ['performance poet', 'multimedia artist']}

{0: 'Performance artist and storyteller Rives has been called "the first 2.0 poet," using images, video and technology to bring his words to life. '}

2006-02-02

2007-04-09

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sl', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['entertainment', 'memory', 'performance', 'poetry', 'spoken word', 'storytelling']

{148: 'The 4 a.m. mystery', 2281: 'A powerful poem about what it feels like to be transgender', 2049: 'Are you human?', 981: 'My web playroom', 2054: 'Why I live in mortal dread of public speaking', 413: 'The joyful tradition of mountain music'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_a_mockingbird_remix_of_ted2006/

Rives recaps the most memorable moments of TED2006 in the free-spirited rhyming verse of a fantastical mockingbird lullaby.

Mockingbirds are badass. (Laughter) They are. Mockingbirds — that's Mimus polyglottos — are the emcees of the animal kingdom. They listen and mimic and remix what they like. They rock the mic outside my window every morning. I can hear them sing the sounds of the car alarms like they were songs of spring. I mean, if you can talk it, a mockingbird can squawk it. So check it, I'm gonna to catch mockingbirds. I'm going to trap mockingbirds all across the nation and put them gently into mason jars like mockingbird Molotov cocktails. (Laughter) Yeah. And as I drive through a neighborhood, say, where people got-a-lotta, I'll take a mockingbird I caught in a neighborhood where folks ain't got nada and just let it go, you know. Up goes the bird, out come the words, "Juanito, Juanito, vente a comer mi hijo!" Oh, I'm going to be the Johnny Appleseed of sound. (Laughter) Cruising random city streets, rocking a drop-top Cadillac with a big backseat, packing like 13 brown paper Walmart bags full of loaded mockingbirds, and I'll get everybody. (Laughter) I'll get the nitwit on the network news saying, "We'll be back in a moment with more on the crisis." I'll get some asshole at a watering hole asking what brand the ice is. I'll get that lady at the laundromat who always seems to know what being nice is. I'll get your postman making dinner plans. I'll get the last time you lied. I'll get, "Baby, just give me the frickin' TV guide." I'll get a lonely, little sentence with real error in it, "Yeah, I guess I could come inside, but only for a minute." (Laughter) I'll get an ESL class in Chinatown learning "It's Raining, It's Pouring." I'll put a mockingbird on a late-night train just to get an old man snoring. I'll get your ex-lover telling someone else, "Good morning." I'll get everyone's good mornings. I don't care how you make 'em. Aloha. Konichiwa. Shalom. Ah-Salam Alaikum. Everybody means everybody, means everybody here. And so maybe I'll build a gilded cage. I'll line the bottom with old notebook pages. Inside it, I will place a mockingbird for — short explanation, hippie parents. (Laughter) What does a violin have to do with technology? Where in the world is this world heading? On one end, gold bars — on the other, an entire planet. We are 12 billion light years from the edge. That's a guess. Space is length and breadth continued indefinitely, but you cannot buy a ticket to travel commercially to space in America because countries are beginning to eat like us, live like us and die like us. You might wanna avert your gaze, because that is a newt about to regenerate its limb, and shaking hands spreads more germs than kissing. There's about 10 million phage per job. It's a very strange world inside a nanotube. Women can talk; black men ski; white men build strong buildings; we build strong suns. The surface of the Earth is absolutely riddled with holes, and here we are, right in the middle. (Laughter) It is the voice of life that calls us to come and learn. When all the little mockingbirds fly away, they're going to sound like the last four days. I will get uptown gurus, downtown teachers, broke-ass artists and dealers, and Filipino preachers, leaf blowers, bartenders, boob-job doctors, hooligans, garbage men, your local Congressmen in the spotlight, guys in the overhead helicopters. Everybody gets heard. Everybody gets this one, honest mockingbird as a witness. And I'm on this. I'm on this 'til the whole thing spreads, with chat rooms and copycats and moms maybe tucking kids into bed singing, "Hush, little baby, don't say a word. Wait for the man with the mockingbird." (Laughter) Yeah. And then come the news crews, and the man-in-the-street interviews, and the letters to the editor. Everybody asking, just who is responsible for this citywide, nationwide mockingbird cacophony, and somebody finally is going to tip the City Council of Monterey, California off to me, and they'll offer me a key to the city. A gold-plated, oversized key to the city and that is all I need, 'cause if I get that, I can unlock the air. I'll listen for what's missing, and I'll put it there. Thank you, TED. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Wow. (Applause) Wow. (Applause)

The electricity metaphor for the web's future

Jeff Bezos

{0: 'Jeff Bezos'}

{0: ['online commerce pioneer']}

{0: 'As founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos defined online shopping and rewrote the rules of commerce, ushering in a new era in business. <em>Time</em> magazine named him Man of the Year in 1999.'}

2003-02-02

2007-04-09

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'entrepreneur', 'history', 'innovation', 'invention', 'technology', 'web', 'electricity']

{319: 'The next 5,000 days of the web', 118: 'The genesis of Google', 362: 'The Web as a city', 619: 'A demo of wireless electricity', 566: 'A plug for smart power outlets', 26: 'If I controlled the Internet'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_the_electricity_metaphor_for_the_web_s_future/

The dot-com boom and bust is often compared to the Gold Rush. But Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says it's more like the early days of the electric industry.

When you think about resilience and technology it's actually much easier. You're going to see some other speakers today, I already know, who are going to talk about breaking-bones stuff, and, of course, with technology it never is. So it's very easy, comparatively speaking, to be resilient. I think that, if we look at what happened on the Internet, with such an incredible last half a dozen years, that it's hard to even get the right analogy for it. A lot of how we decide, how we're supposed to react to things and what we're supposed to expect about the future depends on how we bucket things and how we categorize them. And so I think the tempting analogy for the boom-bust that we just went through with the Internet is a gold rush. It's easy to think of this analogy as very different from some of the other things you might pick. For one thing, both were very real. In 1849, in that Gold Rush, they took over $700 million worth of gold out of California. It was very real. The Internet was also very real. This is a real way for humans to communicate with each other. It's a big deal. Huge boom. Huge boom. Huge bust. Huge bust. You keep going, and both things are lots of hype. I don't have to remind you of all the hype that was involved with the Internet — like GetRich.com. But you had the same thing with the Gold Rush. "Gold. Gold. Gold." Sixty-eight rich men on the Steamer Portland. Stacks of yellow metal. Some have 5,000. Many have more. A few bring out 100,000 dollars each. People would get very excited about this when they read these articles. "The Eldorado of the United States of America: the discovery of inexhaustible gold mines in California." And the parallels between the Gold Rush and the Internet Rush continue very strongly. So many people left what they were doing. And what would happen is — and the Gold Rush went on for years. People on the East Coast in 1849, when they first started to get the news, they thought, "Ah, this isn't real." But they keep hearing about people getting rich, and then in 1850 they still hear that. And they think it's not real. By about 1852, they're thinking, "Am I the stupidest person on Earth by not rushing to California?" And they start to decide they are. These are community affairs, by the way. Local communities on the East Coast would get together and whole teams of 10, 20 people would caravan across the United States, and they would form companies. These were typically not solitary efforts. But no matter what, if you were a lawyer or a banker, people dropped what they were doing, no matter what skill set they had, to go pan for gold. This guy on the left, Dr. Richard Beverley Cole, he lived in Philadelphia and he took the Panama route. They would take a ship down to Panama, across the isthmus, and then take another ship north. This guy, Dr. Toland, went by covered wagon to California. This has its parallels, too. Doctors leaving their practices. These are both very successful — a physician in one case, a surgeon in the other. Same thing happened on the Internet. You get DrKoop.com. (Laughter) In the Gold Rush, people literally jumped ship. The San Francisco harbor was clogged with 600 ships at the peak because the ships would get there and the crews would abandon to go search for gold. So there were literally 600 captains and 600 ships. They turned the ships into hotels, because they couldn't sail them anywhere. You had dotcom fever. And you had gold fever. And you saw some of the excesses that the dotcom fever created and the same thing happened. The fort in San Francisco at the time had about 1,300 soldiers. Half of them deserted to go look for gold. And they wouldn't let the other half out to go look for the first half because they were afraid they wouldn't come back. (Laughter) And one of the soldiers wrote home, and this is the sentence that he put: "The struggle between right and six dollars a month and wrong and 75 dollars a day is a rather severe one." They had bad burn rate in the Gold Rush. A very bad burn rate. This is actually from the Klondike Gold Rush. This is the White Pass Trail. They loaded up their mules and their horses. And they didn't plan right. And they didn't know how far they would really have to go, and they overloaded the horses with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of stuff. In fact it was so bad that most of the horses died before they could get where they were going. It got renamed the "Dead Horse Trail." And the Canadian Minister of the Interior wrote this at the time: "Thousands of pack horses lie dead along the way, sometimes in bunches under the cliffs, with pack saddles and packs where they've fallen from the rock above, sometimes in tangled masses, filling the mud holes and furnishing the only footing for our poor pack animals on the march, often, I regret to say, exhausted, but still alive, a fact we were unaware of, until after the miserable wretches turned beneath the hooves of our cavalcade. The eyeless sockets of the pack animals everywhere account for the myriads of ravens along the road. The inhumanity which this trail has been witness to, the heartbreak and suffering which so many have undergone, cannot be imagined. They certainly cannot be described." And you know, without the smell that would have accompanied that, we had the same thing on the Internet: very bad burn rate calculations. I'll just play one of these and you'll remember it. This is a commercial that was played on the Super Bowl in the year 2000. (Video): Bride #1: You said you had a large selection of invitations. Clerk: But we do. Bride #2: Then why does she have my invitation? Announcer: What may be a little thing to some ... Bride #3: You are mine, little man. Announcer: Could be a really big deal to you. Husband #1: Is that your wife? Husband #2: Not for another 15 minutes. Announcer: After all, it's your special day. OurBeginning.com. Life's an event. Announce it to the world. Jeff Bezos: It's very difficult to figure out what that ad is for. (Laughter) But they spent three and a half million dollars in the 2000 Super Bowl to air that ad, even though, at the time, they only had a million dollars in annual revenue. Now, here's where our analogy with the Gold Rush starts to diverge, and I think rather severely. And that is, in a gold rush, when it's over, it's over. Here's this guy: "There are many men in Dawson at the present time who feel keenly disappointed. They've come thousands of miles on a perilous trip, risked life, health and property, spent months of the most arduous labor a man can perform and at length with expectations raised to the highest pitch have reached the coveted goal only to discover the fact that there is nothing here for them." And that was, of course, the very common story. Because when you take out that last piece of gold — and they did incredibly quickly. I mean, if you look at the 1849 Gold Rush — the entire American river region, within two years — every stone had been turned. And after that, only big companies who used more sophisticated mining technologies started to take gold out of there. So there's a much better analogy that allows you to be incredibly optimistic and that analogy is the electric industry. And there are a lot of similarities between the Internet and the electric industry. With the electric industry you actually have to — one of them is that they're both sort of thin, horizontal, enabling layers that go across lots of different industries. It's not a specific thing. But electricity is also very, very broad, so you have to sort of narrow it down. You know, it can be used as an incredible means of transmitting power. It's an incredible means of coordinating, in a very fine-grained way, information flows. There's a bunch of things that are interesting about electricity. And the part of the electric revolution that I want to focus on is sort of the golden age of appliances. The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about — they weren't putting electricity into the home; they were putting lighting into the home. And, but it really — it got the electricity. It took a long time. This was a huge — as you would expect — a huge capital build out. All the streets had to be torn up. This is work going on down in lower Manhattan where they built some of the first electric power generating stations. And they're tearing up all the streets. The Edison Electric Company, which became Edison General Electric, which became General Electric, paid for all of this digging up of the streets. It was incredibly expensive. But that is not the — and that's not the part that's really most similar to the Web. Because, remember, the Web got to stand on top of all this heavy infrastructure that had been put in place because of the long-distance phone network. So all of the cabling and all of the heavy infrastructure — I'm going back now to, sort of, the explosive part of the Web in 1994, when it was growing 2,300 percent a year. How could it grow at 2,300 percent a year in 1994 when people weren't really investing in the Web? Well, it was because that heavy infrastructure had already been laid down. So the light bulb laid down the heavy infrastructure, and then home appliances started coming into being. And this was huge. The first one was the electric fan — this was the 1890 electric fan. And the appliances, the golden age of appliances really lasted — it depends how you want to measure it — but it's anywhere from 40 to 60 years. It goes on a long time. It starts about 1890. And the electric fan was a big success. The electric iron, also very big. By the way, this is the beginning of the asbestos lawsuit. (Laughter) There's asbestos under that handle there. This is the first vacuum cleaner, the 1905 Skinner Vacuum, from the Hoover Company. And this one weighed 92 pounds and took two people to operate and cost a quarter of a car. So it wasn't a big seller. This was truly, truly an early-adopter product — (Laughter) the 1905 Skinner Vacuum. But three years later, by 1908, it weighed 40 pounds. Now, not all these things were highly successful. (Laughter) This is the electric tie press, which never really did catch on. People, I guess, decided that they would not wrinkle their ties. These never really caught on either: the electric shoe warmer and drier. Never a big seller. This came in, like, six different colors. (Laughter) I don't know why. But I thought, you know, sometimes it's just not the right time for an invention; maybe it's time to give this one another shot. So I thought we could build a Super Bowl ad for this. We'd need the right partner. And I thought that really — (Laughter) I thought that would really work, to give that another shot. Now, the toaster was huge because they used to make toast on open fires, and it took a lot of time and attention. I want to point out one thing. This is — you guys know what this is. They hadn't invented the electric socket yet. So this was — remember, they didn't wire the houses for electricity. They wired them for lighting. So your — your appliances would plug in. They would — each room typically had a light bulb socket at the top. And you'd plug it in there. In fact, if you've seen the Carousel of Progress at Disney World, you've seen this. Here are the cables coming up into this light fixture. All the appliances plug in there. And you would just unscrew your light bulb if you wanted to plug in an appliance. The next thing that really was a big, big deal was the washing machine. Now, this was an object of much envy and lust. Everybody wanted one of these electric washing machines. On the left-hand side, this was the soapy water. And there's a rotor there — that this motor is spinning. And it would clean your clothes. This is the clean rinse-water. So you'd take the clothes out of here, put them in here, and then you'd run the clothes through this electric wringer. And this was a big deal. You'd keep this on your porch. It was a little bit messy and kind of a pain. And you'd run a long cord into the house where you could screw it into your light socket. (Laughter) And that's actually kind of an important point in my presentation, because they hadn't invented the off switch. That was to come much later — the off switch on appliances — because it didn't make any sense. I mean, you didn't want this thing clogging up a light socket. So you know, when you were done with it, you unscrewed it. That's what you did. You didn't turn it off. And as I said before, they hadn't invented the electric outlet either, so the washing machine was a particularly dangerous device. And there are — when you research this, there are gruesome descriptions of people getting their hair and clothes caught in these devices. And they couldn't yank the cord out because it was screwed into a light socket inside the house. (Laughter) And there was no off switch, so it wasn't very good. And you might think that that was incredibly stupid of our ancestors to be plugging things into a light socket like this. But, you know, before I get too far into condemning our ancestors, I thought I'd show you: this is my conference room. This is a total kludge, if you ask me. First of all, this got installed upside down. This light socket — (Laughter) and so the cord keeps falling out, so I taped it in. (Laughter) This is supposed — don't even get me started. But that's not the worst one. This is what it looks like under my desk. I took this picture just two days ago. So we really haven't progressed that much since 1908. (Laughter) It's a total, total mess. And, you know, we think it's getting better, but have you tried to install 802.11 yourself? (Laughter) I challenge you to try. It's very hard. I know Ph.D.s in Computer Science — this process has brought them to tears, absolute tears. (Laughter) And that's assuming you already have DSL in your house. Try to get DSL installed in your house. The engineers who do it everyday can't do it. They have to — typically, they come three times. And one friend of mine was telling me a story: not only did they get there and have to wait, but then the engineers, when they finally did get there, for the third time, they had to call somebody. And they were really happy that the guy had a speakerphone because then they had to wait on hold for an hour to talk to somebody to give them an access code after they got there. So we're not — we're pretty kludge-y ourselves. By the way, DSL is a kludge. I mean, this is a twisted pair of copper that was never designed for the purpose it's being put to — you know it's the whole thing — we're very, very primitive. And that's kind of the point. Because, you know, resilience — if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities. And if you believe that, then you believe that where we are — this is what I think — I believe that where we are with the incredible kludge — and I haven't even talked about user interfaces on the Web — but there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff — we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908. And if you believe that, then stuff like this doesn't bother you. This is 1996: "All the negatives add up to making the online experience not worth the trouble." 1998: "Amazon.toast." In 1999: "Amazon.bomb." My mom hates this picture. (Laughter) She — but you know, if you really do believe that it's the very, very beginning, if you believe it's the 1908 Hurley washing machine, then you're incredibly optimistic. And I do think that that's where we are. And I do think there's more innovation ahead of us than there is behind us. And in 1917, Sears — I want to get this exactly right. This was the advertisement that they ran in 1917. It says: "Use your electricity for more than light." And I think that's where we are. We're very, very early. Thank you very much.

"What You've Got"

Eddi Reader

{0: 'Eddi Reader', 1: 'Thomas Dolby'}

{0: ['singer/songwriter'], 1: ['electronic music pioneer']}

{0: 'In her warm, glorious voice, Eddi Reader sings thoughtful songs about love, longing and introspection.', 1: 'Thomas Dolby has spent his career at the intersection of music and technology. He was an early star on MTV, then moved to Silicon Valley, then went back on the road with his album, "A Map of the Floating City."'}

2003-02-02

2007-04-14

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['composing', 'entertainment', 'guitar', 'music', 'performance art', 'piano', 'potential', 'vocals', 'performance', 'live music']

{110: '"Kiteflyer\'s Hill"', 81: 'Singing "What I Want"', 186: '"M\'Bifo"', 24238: 'The benefits of good posture', 2111: 'My father, locked in his body but soaring free', 17238: "How we'll become cyborgs and extend human potential"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/eddi_reader_what_you_ve_got/

Singer/songwriter Eddi Reader performs "What You Do With What You've Got," a meditation on a very TED theme: how to use your gifts and talents to make a difference. With Thomas Dolby on piano.

This song is one of Thomas' favorites, called "What You Do with What You've Got." ♫ You must know someone like him ♫ ♫ He was tall and strong and lean ♫ ♫ With a body like a greyhound ♫ ♫ and a mind so sharp and keen ♫ ♫ But his heart, just like laurel ♫ ♫ grew twisted around itself ♫ ♫ Till almost everything he did ♫ ♫ brought pain to someone else ♫ ♫ It's not just what you're born with ♫ ♫ It's what you choose to bear ♫ ♫ It's not how big your share is ♫ ♫ It's how much you can share ♫ ♫ It's not the fights you dreamed of ♫ ♫ It's those you really fought ♫ ♫ It's not what you've been given ♫ ♫ It's what you do with what you've got ♫ ♫ What's the use of two strong legs ♫ ♫ if you only run away? ♫ ♫ And what's the use of the finest voice ♫ ♫ if you've nothing good to say? ♫ ♫ What's the use of strength and muscle ♫ ♫ if you only push and shove? ♫ ♫ And what's the use of two good ears ♫ ♫ if you can't hear those you love? ♫ ♫ What's the use of two strong legs ♫ ♫ if you only run away? ♫ ♫ And what's the use of the finest voice ♫ ♫ if you've nothing good to say? ♫ ♫ What's the use of strength and muscle ♫ ♫ if you only push and shove? ♫ ♫ And what's the use of two good ears ♫ ♫ if you can't hear those you love? ♫ ♫ Between those who use their neighbors ♫ ♫ and those who use the cane ♫ ♫ Between those in constant power ♫ ♫ and those in constant pain ♫ ♫ Between those who run to glory ♫ ♫ and those who cannot run ♫ ♫ Tell me which ones are the cripples ♫ ♫ and which ones touch the sun ♫ ♫ Which ones touch the sun ♫ ♫ Which ones touch the sun ♫ (Applause) Thank you very much.

"Kiteflyer's Hill"

Eddi Reader

{0: 'Eddi Reader', 1: 'Thomas Dolby'}

{0: ['singer/songwriter'], 1: ['electronic music pioneer']}

{0: 'In her warm, glorious voice, Eddi Reader sings thoughtful songs about love, longing and introspection.', 1: 'Thomas Dolby has spent his career at the intersection of music and technology. He was an early star on MTV, then moved to Silicon Valley, then went back on the road with his album, "A Map of the Floating City."'}

2003-02-02

2007-04-14

TED2003

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['composing', 'entertainment', 'guitar', 'memory', 'music', 'performance', 'piano', 'live music']

{109: '"What You\'ve Got"', 101: 'Casting a spell on the cello', 117: 'Cape Breton fiddling in reel time', 22799: '"Afterneath" / "Killing Me"', 2010: 'How I started writing songs again', 981: 'My web playroom'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/eddi_reader_kiteflyer_s_hill/

Singer/songwriter Eddi Reader performs "Kiteflyer's Hill," a tender look back at a lost love. With Thomas Dolby on piano.

This is about a place in London called Kiteflyer's Hill where I used to go and spend hours going "When is he coming back? When is he coming back?" So this is another one dedicated to that guy ... who I've got over. But this is "Kiteflyer's Hill." It's a beautiful song written by a guy called Martin Evan, actually, for me. Boo Hewerdine, Thomas Dolby, thank you very much for inviting me. It's been a blessing singing for you. Thank you very much. ♫ Do you remember when we used to go ♫ ♫ up to Kiteflyer's Hill? ♫ ♫ Those summer nights, so still ♫ ♫ with all of the city beneath us ♫ ♫ and all of our lives ahead ♫ ♫ before cruel and foolish words ♫ ♫ were cruelly and foolishly said ♫ ♫ Some nights I think of you ♫ ♫ and then I go up ♫ ♫ on Kiteflyer's Hill ♫ ♫ wrapped up against the winter chill ♫ ♫ And somewhere in the city beneath me ♫ ♫ you lie asleep in your bed ♫ ♫ and I wonder if ever just briefly ♫ ♫ do I creep in your dreams now and then ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Have the years been kind? ♫ ♫ And do you think of me sometimes ♫ ♫ up on Kiteflyer's Hill? ♫ ♫ Oh, I pray you one day will ♫ ♫ We won't say a word ♫ ♫ We won't need them ♫ ♫ Sometimes silence is best ♫ ♫ We'll just stand in the still of the evening ♫ ♫ and whisper farewell to loneliness ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Do you think of me sometimes? ♫ ♫ And do you ever make that climb? ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Have the years been kind? ♫ ♫ And do you ever make that climb ♫ ♫ up on Kiteflyer's Hill? Kiteflyer's ... ♫ ♫ [French] ♫ ♫ Where are you? Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Kiteflyer's ... ♫ (Applause) Gracias. Thank you very much.

A comic sendup of TED2006

Tom Rielly

{0: 'Tom Rielly'}

{0: ['satirist']}

{0: 'Traditionally, Tom Rielly closes the TED Conference with a merciless 18-minute monologue, skewering all the speakers with his deadpan delivery, spot-on satire and boundary-less performance (complete with PowerPoint, pratfalls and partial nudity).\r\n'}

2006-02-02

2007-04-16

TED2006

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'it', 'ko', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['comedy', 'culture', 'performance', 'humor']

{108: 'A mockingbird remix of TED2006', 87: 'Nerdcore comedy', 99: 'Global warming\'s theme song, "Manhattan in January"', 436: 'Design and discovery', 1989: 'What does the future hold? 11 characters offer quirky answers', 172: 'Designing for simplicity'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_rielly_a_comic_sendup_of_ted2006/

Satirist Tom Rielly delivers a wicked parody of the 2006 TED conference, taking down the $100 laptop, the plight of the polar bear, and people who mention, one too many times, that they work at Harvard. Watch for a special moment between Tom and Al Gore.

I just want to say, over the last few years I've been — had the opportunity to do this closing conference. And I've had some incredible warm-up acts. About eight years ago, Billy Graham opened for me. And I thought that there was — (Laughter) I thought that there was absolutely no way in hell to top that. But I just wanted to say — and I mean this without irony — I think I can speak for everybody in the audience when I say that I wish to God that you were the President of the United States. (Applause) OK, this is the title of my talk today. (Laughter) I just want to give you a quick overview. First of all, please remember I'm completely politically correct, and I mean everything with great affection. If any of you have sensitive stomachs or are feeling queasy, now is the time to check your Blackberry. (Laughter) Just to review, this is my TEDTalk. We're going to do some jokes, some gags, some little skits — and then we're going to talk about the L1 point. (Laughter) So, one of the questions I ask myself is, was this the most distressing TED ever? Let's try and sum things up, shall we? Images of limb regeneration and faces filled with smallpox: 21 percent of the conference. (Laughter) Mentions of polar bears drowning: four percent. Images of the earth being wiped out by flood or bird flu: 64 percent. (Laughter) And David Pogue singing show tunes. (Applause) Because this is the most distressing TED ever, I've been working with Neil Gershenfeld on next year's TED Bag. And if the — if the conference is anywhere near this distressing, then we're going to have a scream bag next year. (Laughter) It's going to be a cradle-to-cradle scream bag, of course. (Laughter) So you're going to be able to go like this. (Laughter) Bring it over here and open it up. Aaaah! (Laughter) Meanwhile, back at TED University, this wonderful woman is teaching you how to chop Sun Chips. (Laughter) So Robert Wright — I don't know, I felt like if there was anyone that Helen needed to give antidepressants to, it might have been him. I want to deliberately interfere with his dopamine levels. (Laughter) He was talking about morality. Economy class morality is, we want to bomb you back to the Stone Age. Business class morality is, don't bomb Japan — they built my car. And first-class morality is, don't bomb Mexico — they clean my house. (Laughter) Yes, it is politically incorrect. All right, now I want to do a little bit of a thing for you ... (Laughter) All right, now these are the wha — I'd say, [mumble, mumble — mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble] — ahh! (Laughter) So I wanted to show you guys — I wanted to talk about a revolutionary new computer interface that lets you work with images just as easily as you — as a completely natural user interface. (Laughter) And you can — you can use really natural hand gestures to like, go like this. (Applause) Now we had a Harvard professor here — she was from Harvard, I just wanted to mention and — and she was actually a professor from Harvard. And she was talking about seven-dimensional, inverted universes. With, you know, of course, there's the gravity brain. There's the weak brain. And then there's my weak brain, which is too — too — absolutely too weak to understand what the fuck she was talking about. (Laughter) Now — (Laughter) one of the things that is very important to me is to try and figure out what on Earth am I here for. And that's why I went out and I picked up a best-selling business book. You know, it basically uses as its central premise Greek mythology. And it's by a guy named Pastor Rick Warren, and it's called "The Porpoise Driven Life." (Laughter) And Rick is as a pagan god, which I thought was kind of appropriate, in a certain way. And now we're going to have kind of a little more visualization about Rick Warren. OK. (Laughter) All right. Now, red is Rick Warren, and green is Daniel Dennett, OK? (Laughter) The scales here are religiosity from zero percent, or atheist, to 100 percent, Bible literally true. And then this is books sold — the logarithmic scale. (Laughter) 30,000, 300,000, three million, 30 million, 300 million. OK, now they're duking it out. Now they're duking it out. (Laughter) And Rick Warren's kind of pulling ahead, kind of pulling ahead. Yup, and his installed base is getting a little bigger. (Laughter) But Darwin's dangerous idea is coming back. It's coming back. Let me turn the trails on, so you can see that a little bit better. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, one of the things that's very important is, Nicholas Negroponte talked to us about one lap dance per — I'm sorry — (Laughter) about One Laptop Per Child. Now let's talk about some of the characteristics that are important for this revolutionary device. I'll tell you a little bit about the design parameters, and then I'll show it to you in person. First of all, it needs to be small. It needs to be flat, so it's transportable. Lightweight. Portable. Uses very, very little power. Very, very high resolution. Has to be visible in bright daylight. Will work anywhere. And broadly applicable across many platforms. Now, we've actually done some research — Neil Gershenfeld and the Fab Labs went out into the market. They did some research; we came back; and we think we have the perfect prototype of what the students in the field are actually asking for. And here it is, the $100 computer. (Laughter) OK, OK, OK, OK — excellent, excellent. Now, I bought this device from Clifford Stoll for about 900 bucks. And he and his team of junior-high school students were doing real science. So we're trying to check and trying to douse here, and see who uses marijuana. (Laughter) See who uses marijuana. Are we going to be able to find any marijuana, Jim Young? Only if we open enough locker doors. (Laughter) OK, now smallpox is an extremely distressing illness. We had Dr. Larry Brilliant talking about how we eradicated smallpox. I wanted to show you the stages of smallpox. We start. This is day one. (Laughter) Day two. Day three, she gets a massively big pox on her shoulder. Day three. Day four. (Laughter) Day five and day six. (Laughter) Now the good news is, because I'm a trained medical professional, I know that even though she'll be scarred for life, she's going to make a full recovery. (Laughter) Now the good news about Architects for Humanity is they're really kind of the most amazing group. They've been sponsoring a design competition to come up with innovative medical housing solutions, clinic solutions, in Africa, and they've had a design competition. Now the wonderful thing is, Larry Brilliant was just appointed the head of the Google Foundation, and so he decided that he would support — he would support Cameron's work. And the way he decided to support that work was by shipping over 50,000 shipping containers of Google snacks. (Laughter) So I want to show you some prototypes. The U.N. — you know, they took 20 years just to add a flap to a tent, but I think we have some more exciting things. This is a home made entirely out of Fruit Roll-Ups. (Laughter) (Applause) And those roll-up cookies coated with white chocolate. And the really wonderful thing about this is, when you're done, well — you can eat it. But the thing that I'm really, really excited about is this incredible granola house. (Laughter) And the granola house has a special Sun Chip roof to collect water and recycle it. And it's — well, on this side it has regular Sour Patch Kids and Gummy Bears to let in the light. (Laughter) But on this side, it has sugary Gummy Bears, to diffuse the light more slightly. And we — we wanted just to show you what this might look like in situ. (Laughter) (Applause) So, Einstein — Einstein, tell me — what's your favorite song? No, I said what's your favorite song? No, I said what's your favorite song? "Free Bird." (Laughter) (Applause) OK, so, Einstein, what's your favorite singing group? Could you say that again? What's your favorite singing group? OK, one more time — I'm just going to give you a little help. Your favorite singing group — it's Diana Ross and the — Audience: Supremes! Tom Reilly: Exactly. (Applause) Could we have the sound up on the laptop, please? (Laughter) "Free Bird" kind of reminds me that if you — if you listen to "Free Bird" backwards, this is what you might hear. Computer: Satan. Satan. Satan. Satan. Satan. Satan. Satan. TR: Now it's a little hard to hear the whole message, so I wanted to — (Laughter) so I wanted to help you a little bit. Computer: My sweet Satan. Dan Dennett worships Satan. Buy "The Purpose-Driven Life," or Satan will take your soul. (Laughter) TR: So, we've talked a lot about global warming, but, you know, as Jill said, it sounds kind of nice — good weather in the wintertime, and New York City. And as Jay Walker pointed out, that is just not scary enough. So Al, I actually think I'm rather good at branding. So I've tried to figure out a good design process to come up with a new term to replace "global warming." So we started with Babel Fish. We put in global warming. And then we decided that we'd change it from English to Dutch — into "Het globale Verwarmen." From Dutch to [Korean], into "Hordahordaneecheewa." (Laughter) [Korean] to Portuguese: Aquecer-se Global. Then Portuguese to Pig Latin. (Laughter) Aquecer-se ucked-fay. And then finally back into the English, which is, we're totally fucked. (Laughter) (Applause) Now I don't know about you, but Michael Shermer talked about the willingness for human beings — evolutionarily, they're designed to see patterns in things. For example, in cheese sandwiches. Now can you look at that carefully and see if you see the Virgin Mary? I tried to make it a little bit clearer. (Laughter) Is it the Virgin Mary? Or is it Mena Trott? So, I talked to Josh Prince-Ramus about the convention center and the conferences. It's getting awfully big. It's getting just a little bit too big. It's bursting at the seams here a little bit. So we tried to come up with a program — how we could remake this structure to better accommodate TED. So first of all we decided — (Laughter) that we needed about one-third bookstore, one-third Google cafe, about 20 percent registration, 80 percent luxury hotel, about five percent for restrooms. And then of course, we wanted to have the simulcast lounge, the lobby and the Steinbeck forum. Now let me show you how that literally translated into the design program. So first, one of the problems with Monterey is that if there is global warming and Greenland melts as you say, the ocean level is going to rise 20 feet and flood the hell out of the convention center. So we're going to build this new building on stilts. So we build this building on stilts, then up here — (Laughter) is where we're going to put the new Steinbeck auditorium. (Laughter) And the wonderful thing about the new bookstore is, it's going to be shaped in a spiral that's organized by the Dewey Decimal System. (Laughter) Then we're going to make an escalator that helps you get up there. And finally, we're going to put the Marriott Hotel and the Portola Plaza on the top. (Applause) Now I don't know about you, but sometimes I have these images in my head of separated at birth. I don't know about you, but when I see Aubrey de Grey, I immediately go to Gandalf the Grey. (Laughter) OK. Now, we've heard, of course, that we're all soldiers here. So what I'd really, really like you to do now is, pick up your white piece of paper. Does everybody have their white piece of paper? And I want you to get out a pen, and I want you to write a terrorist note. (Laughter) If we put up the ELMO for a moment — if we put up the ELMO, then we'll get, you know, I'll give you a model that you can work from, OK? (Laughter) And then I want you to fold that note into a paper airplane. And once you've folded it into a paper airplane, I want you to take some anthrax — (Laughter) and I want you to put that in the paper airplane. And then I want you to throw it on Jim Young. (Laughter) Luckily, I was the recipient of the TED Prize this year. And I wanted to see — I want to dedicate this film to my father, Homer. OK. Now this film isn't really hard enough, so I wanted to make it a little bit harder. So I'm going to try and do this while reciting pi. (Laughter) 3.1415, 2657, 753, 8567, 24972 — — 85871, 25871, 3928, 5657, 2592, 5624. (Applause) Can we cue the music please? (Applause) Now I wanted to use this talk to talk about global warming a little bit. Back in 1968, you can see that the mountain range of Brokeback Mountain was covered in 151 inches of snow pack. Parenthetically, over there on the slopes, I did want to show you that black men ski. (Laughter) But over the years, 10 years later, the snow packs eroded, and, if you notice, the trees have started turning yellow. The water level of the lake has started drying up. A few years later, there's no snow left at all. And all the trees have turned brown. This year, unfortunately the lakebed's turned into an absolute cracked dry bed. And I fear, if we do nothing for our planet, in 20 years, it's going to look like this. (Laughter) Mr. Vice President, I wish I knew how to quit you. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause)

Militant atheism

Richard Dawkins

{0: 'Richard Dawkins'}

{0: ['evolutionary biologist']}

{0: 'Oxford professor Richard Dawkins has helped steer evolutionary science into the 21st century, and his concept of the "meme" contextualized the spread of ideas in the information age. In recent years, his devastating critique of religion has made him a leading figure in the New Atheism.'}

2002-02-02

2007-04-16

TED2002

en

['ar', 'bg', 'bn', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'ko', 'lt', 'lv', 'ml', 'mn', 'mr', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'tr', 'uk', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['God', 'atheism', 'culture', 'religion', 'science']

{86: 'Letting go of God', 94: "Let's teach religion -- all religion -- in schools", 22: 'Why people believe weird things', 2643: "It's time to reclaim religion", 9125: 'My failed mission to find God -- and what I found instead', 71: 'A life of purpose'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_militant_atheism/

Richard Dawkins urges all atheists to openly state their position -- and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science. A fiery, funny, powerful talk.

That splendid music, the coming-in music, "The Elephant March" from "Aida," is the music I've chosen for my funeral. (Laughter) And you can see why. It's triumphal. I won't feel anything, but if I could, I would feel triumphal at having lived at all, and at having lived on this splendid planet, and having been given the opportunity to understand something about why I was here in the first place, before not being here. Can you understand my quaint English accent? (Laughter) Like everybody else, I was entranced yesterday by the animal session. Robert Full and Frans Lanting and others; the beauty of the things that they showed. The only slight jarring note was when Jeffrey Katzenberg said of the mustang, "the most splendid creatures that God put on this earth." Now of course, we know that he didn't really mean that, but in this country at the moment, you can't be too careful. (Laughter) I'm a biologist, and the central theorem of our subject: the theory of design, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. In professional circles everywhere, it's of course universally accepted. In non-professional circles outside America, it's largely ignored. But in non-professional circles within America, it arouses so much hostility — (Laughter) it's fair to say that American biologists are in a state of war. The war is so worrying at present, with court cases coming up in one state after another, that I felt I had to say something about it. If you want to know what I have to say about Darwinism itself, I'm afraid you're going to have to look at my books, which you won't find in the bookstore outside. (Laughter) Contemporary court cases often concern an allegedly new version of creationism, called "Intelligent Design," or ID. Don't be fooled. There's nothing new about ID. It's just creationism under another name, rechristened — I choose the word advisedly — (Laughter) for tactical, political reasons. The arguments of so-called ID theorists are the same old arguments that had been refuted again and again, since Darwin down to the present day. There is an effective evolution lobby coordinating the fight on behalf of science, and I try to do all I can to help them, but they get quite upset when people like me dare to mention that we happen to be atheists as well as evolutionists. They see us as rocking the boat, and you can understand why. Creationists, lacking any coherent scientific argument for their case, fall back on the popular phobia against atheism: Teach your children evolution in biology class, and they'll soon move on to drugs, grand larceny and sexual "pre-version." (Laughter) In fact, of course, educated theologians from the Pope down are firm in their support of evolution. This book, "Finding Darwin's God," by Kenneth Miller, is one of the most effective attacks on Intelligent Design that I know and it's all the more effective because it's written by a devout Christian. People like Kenneth Miller could be called a "godsend" to the evolution lobby, (Laughter) because they expose the lie that evolutionism is, as a matter of fact, tantamount to atheism. People like me, on the other hand, rock the boat. But here, I want to say something nice about creationists. It's not a thing I often do, so listen carefully. (Laughter) I think they're right about one thing. I think they're right that evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion. I've already said that many individual evolutionists, like the Pope, are also religious, but I think they're deluding themselves. I believe a true understanding of Darwinism is deeply corrosive to religious faith. Now, it may sound as though I'm about to preach atheism, and I want to reassure you that that's not what I'm going to do. In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir. No, what I want to urge upon you — (Laughter) Instead, what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism. (Laughter) (Applause) But that's putting it too negatively. If I was a person who were interested in preserving religious faith, I would be very afraid of the positive power of evolutionary science, and indeed science generally, but evolution in particular, to inspire and enthrall, precisely because it is atheistic. Now, the difficult problem for any theory of biological design is to explain the massive statistical improbability of living things. Statistical improbability in the direction of good design — "complexity" is another word for this. The standard creationist argument — there is only one; they're all reduced to this one — takes off from a statistical improbability. Living creatures are too complex to have come about by chance; therefore, they must have had a designer. This argument of course, shoots itself in the foot. Any designer capable of designing something really complex has to be even more complex himself, and that's before we even start on the other things he's expected to do, like forgive sins, bless marriages, listen to prayers — favor our side in a war — (Laughter) disapprove of our sex lives, and so on. (Laughter) Complexity is the problem that any theory of biology has to solve, and you can't solve it by postulating an agent that is even more complex, thereby simply compounding the problem. Darwinian natural selection is so stunningly elegant because it solves the problem of explaining complexity in terms of nothing but simplicity. Essentially, it does it by providing a smooth ramp of gradual, step-by-step increment. But here, I only want to make the point that the elegance of Darwinism is corrosive to religion, precisely because it is so elegant, so parsimonious, so powerful, so economically powerful. It has the sinewy economy of a beautiful suspension bridge. The God theory is not just a bad theory. It turns out to be — in principle — incapable of doing the job required of it. So, returning to tactics and the evolution lobby, I want to argue that rocking the boat may be just the right thing to do. My approach to attacking creationism is — unlike the evolution lobby — my approach to attacking creationism is to attack religion as a whole. And at this point I need to acknowledge the remarkable taboo against speaking ill of religion, and I'm going to do so in the words of the late Douglas Adams, a dear friend who, if he never came to TED, certainly should have been invited. (Richard Saul Wurman: He was.) Richard Dawkins: He was. Good. I thought he must have been. He begins this speech, which was tape recorded in Cambridge shortly before he died — he begins by explaining how science works through the testing of hypotheses that are framed to be vulnerable to disproof, and then he goes on. I quote, "Religion doesn't seem to work like that. It has certain ideas at the heart of it, which we call 'sacred' or 'holy.' What it means is: here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about. You're just not. Why not? Because you're not." (Laughter) "Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the universe began, about who created the universe — no, that's holy. So, we're used to not challenging religious ideas, and it's very interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it." — He meant me, not that one. "Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it, because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally, there's no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we've agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be." And that's the end of the quote from Douglas. In my view, not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations, and blinds them to the wonderful, real explanations that we have within our grasp. It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith, instead of always insisting on evidence. There's Douglas Adams, magnificent picture from his book, "Last Chance to See." Now, there's a typical scientific journal, The Quarterly Review of Biology. And I'm going to put together, as guest editor, a special issue on the question, "Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?" And the first paper is a standard scientific paper, presenting evidence, "Iridium layer at the K-T boundary, and potassium argon dated crater in Yucatan, indicate that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." Perfectly ordinary scientific paper. Now, the next one. "The President of the Royal Society has been vouchsafed a strong inner conviction that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." (Laughter) "It has been privately revealed to Professor Huxtane that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." (Laughter) "Professor Hordley was brought up to have total and unquestioning faith" — (Laughter) — "that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." "Professor Hawkins has promulgated an official dogma binding on all loyal Hawkinsians that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." (Laughter) That's inconceivable, of course. But suppose — [Supporters of the Asteroid Theory cannot be patriotic citizens] (Laughter) (Applause) In 1987, a reporter asked George Bush, Sr. whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists. Mr. Bush's reply has become infamous. "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." Bush's bigotry was not an isolated mistake, blurted out in the heat of the moment and later retracted. He stood by it in the face of repeated calls for clarification or withdrawal. He really meant it. More to the point, he knew it posed no threat to his election — quite the contrary. Democrats as well as Republicans parade their religiousness if they want to get elected. Both parties invoke "one nation under God." What would Thomas Jefferson have said? [In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty] Incidentally, I'm not usually very proud of being British, but you can't help making the comparison. (Applause) In practice, what is an atheist? An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. (Laughter) (Applause) And however we define atheism, it's surely the kind of academic belief that a person is entitled to hold without being vilified as an unpatriotic, unelectable non-citizen. Nevertheless, it's an undeniable fact that to own up to being an atheist is tantamount to introducing yourself as Mr. Hitler or Miss Beelzebub. And that all stems from the perception of atheists as some kind of weird, way-out minority. Natalie Angier wrote a rather sad piece in the New Yorker, saying how lonely she felt as an atheist. She clearly feels in a beleaguered minority. But actually, how do American atheists stack up numerically? The latest survey makes surprisingly encouraging reading. Christianity, of course, takes a massive lion's share of the population, with nearly 160 million. But what would you think was the second largest group, convincingly outnumbering Jews with 2.8 million, Muslims at 1.1 million, Hindus, Buddhists and all other religions put together? The second largest group, with nearly 30 million, is the one described as non-religious or secular. You can't help wondering why vote-seeking politicians are so proverbially overawed by the power of, for example, the Jewish lobby — the state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote — while at the same time, consigning the non-religious to political oblivion. This secular non-religious vote, if properly mobilized, is nine times as numerous as the Jewish vote. Why does this far more substantial minority not make a move to exercise its political muscle? Well, so much for quantity. How about quality? Is there any correlation, positive or negative, between intelligence and tendency to be religious? [Them folks misunderestimated me] (Laughter) The survey that I quoted, which is the ARIS survey, didn't break down its data by socio-economic class or education, IQ or anything else. But a recent article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine provides some straws in the wind. Mensa, as you know, is an international organization for people with very high IQ. And from a meta-analysis of the literature, Bell concludes that, I quote — "Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief, and one's intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one's intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious." Well, I haven't seen the original 42 studies, and I can't comment on that meta-analysis, but I would like to see more studies done along those lines. And I know that there are — if I could put a little plug here — there are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question, and I put the suggestion up, for what it's worth. But let me know show you some data that have been properly published and analyzed, on one special group — namely, top scientists. In 1998, Larson and Witham polled the cream of American scientists, those who'd been honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences, and among this select group, belief in a personal God dropped to a shattering seven percent. About 20 percent are agnostic; the rest could fairly be called atheists. Similar figures obtained for belief in personal immortality. Among biological scientists, the figure is even lower: 5.5 percent, only, believe in God. Physical scientists, it's 7.5 percent. I've not seen corresponding figures for elite scholars in other fields, such as history or philosophy, but I'd be surprised if they were different. So, we've reached a truly remarkable situation, a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligentsia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe, which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it — the intelligentsia — unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly: American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest. (Laughter) (Applause) I'm not a citizen of this country, so I hope it won't be thought unbecoming if I suggest that something needs to be done. (Laughter) And I've already hinted what that something is. From what I've seen of TED, I think this may be the ideal place to launch it. Again, I fear it will cost money. We need a consciousness-raising, coming-out campaign for American atheists. (Laughter) This could be similar to the campaign organized by homosexuals a few years ago, although heaven forbid that we should stoop to public outing of people against their will. In most cases, people who out themselves will help to destroy the myth that there is something wrong with atheists. On the contrary, they'll demonstrate that atheists are often the kinds of people who could serve as decent role models for your children, the kinds of people an advertising agent could use to recommend a product, the kinds of people who are sitting in this room. There should be a snowball effect, a positive feedback, such that the more names we have, the more we get. There could be non-linearities, threshold effects. When a critical mass has been obtained, there's an abrupt acceleration in recruitment. And again, it will need money. I suspect that the word "atheist" itself contains or remains a stumbling block far out of proportion to what it actually means, and a stumbling block to people who otherwise might be happy to out themselves. So, what other words might be used to smooth the path, oil the wheels, sugar the pill? Darwin himself preferred "agnostic" — and not only out of loyalty to his friend Huxley, who coined the term. Darwin said, "I have never been an atheist in the same sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally an 'agnostic' would be the most correct description of my state of mind." He even became uncharacteristically tetchy with Edward Aveling. Aveling was a militant atheist who failed to persuade Darwin to accept the dedication of his book on atheism — incidentally, giving rise to a fascinating myth that Karl Marx tried to dedicate "Das Kapital" to Darwin, which he didn't, it was actually Edward Aveling. What happened was that Aveling's mistress was Marx's daughter, and when both Darwin and Marx were dead, Marx's papers became muddled up with Aveling's papers, and a letter from Darwin saying, "My dear sir, thank you very much but I don't want you to dedicate your book to me," was mistakenly supposed to be addressed to Marx, and that gave rise to this whole myth, which you've probably heard. It's a sort of urban myth, that Marx tried to dedicate "Kapital" to Darwin. Anyway, it was Aveling, and when they met, Darwin challenged Aveling. "Why do you call yourselves atheists?" "'Agnostic, '" retorted Aveling, "was simply 'atheist' writ respectable, and 'atheist' was simply 'agnostic' writ aggressive." Darwin complained, "But why should you be so aggressive?" Darwin thought that atheism might be well and good for the intelligentsia, but that ordinary people were not, quote, "ripe for it." Which is, of course, our old friend, the "don't rock the boat" argument. It's not recorded whether Aveling told Darwin to come down off his high horse. (Laughter) But in any case, that was more than 100 years ago. You'd think we might have grown up since then. Now, a friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew, who, incidentally, observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a "tooth-fairy agnostic." He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but "agnostic" on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non-existence. So, my friend is strictly agnostic about the tooth fairy, but it isn't very likely, is it? Like God. Hence the phrase, "tooth-fairy agnostic." Bertrand Russell made the same point using a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars. You would strictly have to be agnostic about whether there is a teapot in orbit about Mars, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as on all fours with its non-existence. The list of things which we strictly have to be agnostic about doesn't stop at tooth fairies and teapots; it's infinite. If you want to believe one particular one of them — unicorns or tooth fairies or teapots or Yahweh — the onus is on you to say why. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why not. We, who are atheists, are also a-fairyists and a-teapotists. (Laughter) But we don't bother to say so. And this is why my friend uses "tooth-fairy agnostic" as a label for what most people would call atheist. Nonetheless, if we want to attract deep-down atheists to come out publicly, we're going to have find something better to stick on our banner than "tooth-fairy" or "teapot agnostic." So, how about "humanist"? This has the advantage of a worldwide network of well-organized associations and journals and things already in place. My problem with it is only its apparent anthropocentrism. One of the things we've learned from Darwin is that the human species is only one among millions of cousins, some close, some distant. And there are other possibilities, like "naturalist," but that also has problems of confusion, because Darwin would have thought naturalist — "Naturalist" means, of course, as opposed to "supernaturalist" — and it is used sometimes — Darwin would have been confused by the other sense of "naturalist," which he was, of course, and I suppose there might be others who would confuse it with "nudism". (Laughter) Such people might be those belonging to the British lynch mob, which last year attacked a pediatrician in mistake for a pedophile. (Laughter) I think the best of the available alternatives for "atheist" is simply "non-theist." It lacks the strong connotation that there's definitely no God, and it could therefore easily be embraced by teapot or tooth-fairy agnostics. It's completely compatible with the God of the physicists. When atheists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein use the word "God," they use it of course as a metaphorical shorthand for that deep, mysterious part of physics which we don't yet understand. "Non-theist" will do for all that, yet unlike "atheist," it doesn't have the same phobic, hysterical responses. But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word "atheism" itself, precisely because it is a taboo word, carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be harder to achieve with the word "atheist" than with the word "non-theist," or some other non-confrontational word. But if we did achieve it with that dread word "atheist" itself, the political impact would be even greater. Now, I said that if I were religious, I'd be very afraid of evolution — I'd go further: I would fear science in general, if properly understood. And this is because the scientific worldview is so much more exciting, more poetic, more filled with sheer wonder than anything in the poverty-stricken arsenals of the religious imagination. As Carl Sagan, another recently dead hero, put it, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophet said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths." Now, this is an elite audience, and I would therefore expect about 10 percent of you to be religious. Many of you probably subscribe to our polite cultural belief that we should respect religion. But I also suspect that a fair number of those secretly despise religion as much as I do. (Laughter) If you're one of them, and of course many of you may not be, but if you are one of them, I'm asking you to stop being polite, come out, and say so. And if you happen to be rich, give some thought to ways in which you might make a difference. The religious lobby in this country is massively financed by foundations — to say nothing of all the tax benefits — by foundations, such as the Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute. We need an anti-Templeton to step forward. If my books sold as well as Stephen Hawking's books, instead of only as well as Richard Dawkins' books, I'd do it myself. People are always going on about, "How did September the 11th change you?" Well, here's how it changed me. Let's all stop being so damned respectful. Thank you very much. (Applause)

"La Vie en Rose"

Rachelle Garniez

{0: 'Rachelle Garniez', 1: 'Thomas Dolby'}

{0: ['musician'], 1: ['electronic music pioneer']}

{0: 'Mischievous and deeply original, accordionist Rachelle Garniez plays her own witty songs and gives a beautiful swing to the classics.', 1: 'Thomas Dolby has spent his career at the intersection of music and technology. He was an early star on MTV, then moved to Silicon Valley, then went back on the road with his album, "A Map of the Floating City."'}

2004-02-02

2007-04-16

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'my', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sq', 'sr', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['entertainment', 'live music', 'music', 'performance']

{108: 'A mockingbird remix of TED2006', 87: 'Nerdcore comedy', 99: 'Global warming\'s theme song, "Manhattan in January"', 22703: '"You Never Can Tell" / "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea"', 81: 'Singing "What I Want"', 2345: "Home is a song I've always remembered"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/rachelle_garniez_la_vie_en_rose/

Featuring the vocals and mischievous bell-playing of accordionist and singer Rachelle Garniez, the TED House Band -- led by Thomas Dolby on keyboard -- delivers this delightful rendition of the Edith Piaf standard "La Vie en Rose."

Thomas Dolby: For pure pleasure please welcome the lovely, the delectable, and the bilingual Rachelle Garniez. (Applause) (Bells) (Trumpet) Rachelle Garniez: ♫ Quand il me prend dans ses bras ♫ ♫ Il me parle tout bas, ♫ ♫ Je vois la vie en rose. ♫ ♫ Il me dit des mots d'amour, ♫ ♫ Des mots de tous les jours, ♫ ♫ Et ca me fait quelque chose. ♫ ♫ Il est entre dans mon coeur ♫ ♫ Une part de bonheur ♫ ♫ Dont je connais la cause. ♫ ♫ C'est lui pour moi. Moi pour lui ♫ ♫ Dans la vie, ♫ ♫ Il me l'a dit, l'a jure [pour] la vie. ♫ ♫ Et des que je l'apercois ♫ ♫ Alors je sens en moi ♫ ♫ Mon coeur qui bat ♫ (Applause)

Why would God create a tsunami?

Tom Honey

{0: 'Tom Honey'}

{0: ['priest']}

{0: "The Vicar of St David's Church, Exeter, in the UK, is unafraid to take on some of religion's tougher issues."}

2005-02-02

2007-04-16

TED2005

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['God', 'culture', 'disaster relief', 'global issues', 'natural disaster', 'philosophy', 'religion']

{234: 'My wish: The Charter for Compassion', 308: 'On technology and faith', 71: 'A life of purpose', 673: 'The balancing act of compassion', 676: 'Lose your ego, find your compassion', 52402: 'The myth of Loki and the master builder'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_honey_why_would_god_create_a_tsunami/

In the days following the tragic South Asian tsunami of 2004, the Rev. Tom Honey pondered the question, "How could a loving God have done this?" Here is his answer.

I am a vicar in the Church of England. I've been a priest in the Church for 20 years. For most of that time, I've been struggling and grappling with questions about the nature of God. Who is God? And I'm very aware that when you say the word "God," many people will turn off immediately. And most people, both within and outside the organized church, still have a picture of a celestial controller, a rule maker, a policeman in the sky who orders everything, and causes everything to happen. He will protect his own people, and answer the prayers of the faithful. And in the worship of my church, the most frequently used adjective about God is "almighty." But I have a problem with that. I have become more and more uncomfortable with this perception of God over the years. Do we really believe that God is the kind of male boss that we've been presenting in our worship and in our liturgies over all these years? Of course, there have been thinkers who have suggested different ways of looking at God. Exploring the feminine, nurturing side of divinity. Suggesting that God expresses Himself or Herself through powerlessness, rather than power. Acknowledging that God is unknown and unknowable by definition. Finding deep resonances with other religions and philosophies and ways of looking at life as part of what is a universal and global search for meaning. These ideas are well known in liberal academic circles, but clergy like myself have been reluctant to air them, for fear of creating tension and division in our church communities, for fear of upsetting the simple faith of more traditional believers. I have chosen not to rock the boat. Then, on December 26th last year, just two months ago, that underwater earthquake triggered the tsunami. And two weeks later, Sunday morning, 9th of January, I found myself standing in front of my congregation — intelligent, well meaning, mostly thoughtful Christian people — and I needed to express, on their behalf, our feelings and our questions. I had my own personal responses, but I also have a public role, and something needed to be said. And this is what I said. Shortly after the tsunami I read a newspaper article written by the Archbishop of Canterbury — fine title — about the tragedy in Southern Asia. The essence of what he said was this: the people most affected by the devastation and loss of life do not want intellectual theories about how God let this happen. He wrote, "If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense, would we feel happier, or safer, or more confident in God?" If the man in the photograph that appeared in the newspapers, holding the hand of his dead child was standing in front of us now, there are no words that we could say to him. A verbal response would not be appropriate. The only appropriate response would be a compassionate silence and some kind of practical help. It isn't a time for explanation, or preaching, or theology; it's a time for tears. This is true. And yet here we are, my church in Oxford, semi-detached from events that happened a long way away, but with our faith bruised. And we want an explanation from God. We demand an explanation from God. Some have concluded that we can only believe in a God who shares our pain. In some way, God must feel the anguish, and grief, and physical pain that we feel. In some way the eternal God must be able to enter into the souls of human beings and experience the torment within. And if this is true, it must also be that God knows the joy and exaltation of the human spirit, as well. We want a God who can weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice. This seems to me both a deeply moving and a convincing re-statement of Christian belief about God. For hundreds of years, the prevailing orthodoxy, the accepted truth, was that God the Father, the Creator, is unchanging and therefore by definition cannot feel pain or sadness. Now the unchanging God feels a bit cold and indifferent to me. And the devastating events of the 20th century have forced people to question the cold, unfeeling God. The slaughter of millions in the trenches and in the death camps have caused people to ask, "Where is God in all this? Who is God in all this?" And the answer was, "God is in this with us, or God doesn't deserve our allegiance anymore." If God is a bystander, observing but not involved, then God may well exist, but we don't want to know about Him. Many Jews and Christians now feel like this, I know. And I am among them. So we have a suffering God — a God who is intimately connected with this world and with every living soul. I very much relate to this idea of God. But it isn't enough. I need to ask some more questions, and I hope they are questions that you will want to ask, as well, some of you. Over the last few weeks I have been struck by the number of times that words in our worship have felt a bit inappropriate, a bit dodgy. We have a pram service on Tuesday mornings for mums and their pre-school children. And last week we sang with the children one of their favorite songs, "The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock." Perhaps some of you know it. Some of the words go like this: "The foolish man built his house upon the sand / And the floods came up / And the house on the sand went crash." Then in the same week, at a funeral, we sang the familiar hymn "We Plow the Fields and Scatter," a very English hymn. In the second verse comes the line, "The wind and waves obey Him." Do they? I don't feel we can sing that song again in church, after what's happened. So the first big question is about control. Does God have a plan for each of us? Is God in control? Does God order each moment? Does the wind and the waves obey Him? From time to time, one hears Christians telling the story of how God organized things for them, so that everything worked out all right — some difficulty overcome, some illness cured, some trouble averted, a parking space found at a crucial time. I can remember someone saying this to me, with her eyes shining with enthusiasm at this wonderful confirmation of her faith and the goodness of God. But if God can or will do these things — intervene to change the flow of events — then surely he could have stopped the tsunami. Do we have a local God who can do little things like parking spaces, but not big things like 500 mile-per-hour waves? That's just not acceptable to intelligent Christians, and we must acknowledge it. Either God is responsible for the tsunami, or God is not in control. After the tragedy, survival stories began to emerge. You probably heard some of them: the man who surfed the wave, the teenage girl who recognized the danger because she had just been learning about tsunamis at school. Then there was the congregation who had left their usual church building on the shore to hold a service in the hills. The preacher delivered an extra long sermon, so that they were still out of harm's way when the wave struck. Afterwards someone said that God must have been looking after them. So the next question is about partiality. Can we earn God's favor by worshipping Him or believing in Him? Does God demand loyalty, like any medieval tyrant? A God who looks after His own, so that Christians are OK, while everyone else perishes? A cosmic us and them, and a God who is guilty of the worst kind of favoritism? That would be appalling, and that would be the point at which I would hand in my membership. Such a God would be morally inferior to the highest ideals of humanity. So who is God, if not the great puppet-master or the tribal protector? Perhaps God allows or permits terrible things to happen, so that heroism and compassion can be shown. Perhaps God is testing us: testing our charity, or our faith. Perhaps there is a great, cosmic plan that allows for horrible suffering so that everything will work out OK in the end. Perhaps, but these ideas are all just variations on God controlling everything, the supreme commander toying with expendable units in a great campaign. We are still left with a God who can do the tsunami and allow Auschwitz. In his great novel, "The Brothers Karamazov," Dostoevsky gives these words to Ivan, addressed to his naive and devout younger brother, Alyosha: "If the sufferings of children go to make up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price. We cannot afford to pay so much for admission. It is not God that I do not accept. I merely, most respectfully, return Him the ticket." Or perhaps God set the whole universe going at the beginning and then relinquished control forever, so that natural processes could occur, and evolution run its course. This seems more acceptable, but it still leaves God with the ultimate moral responsibility. Is God a cold, unfeeling spectator? Or a powerless lover, watching with infinite compassion things God is unable to control or change? Is God intimately involved in our suffering, so that He feels it in His own being? If we believe something like this, we must let go of the puppet-master completely, take our leave of the almighty controller, abandon traditional models. We must think again about God. Maybe God doesn't do things at all. Maybe God isn't an agent like all of us are agents. Early religious thought conceived God as a sort of superhuman person, doing things all over the place. Beating up the Egyptians, drowning them in the Red Sea, wasting cities, getting angry. The people knew their God by His mighty acts. But what if God doesn't act? What if God doesn't do things at all? What if God is in things? The loving soul of the universe. An in-dwelling compassionate presence, underpinning and sustaining all things. What if God is in things? In the infinitely complex network of relationships and connections that make up life. In the natural cycle of life and death, the creation and destruction that must happen continuously. In the process of evolution. In the incredible intricacy and magnificence of the natural world. In the collective unconscious, the soul of the human race. In you, in me, mind and body and spirit. In the tsunami, in the victims. In the depth of things. In presence and in absence. In simplicity and complexity. In change and development and growth. How does this in-ness, this innerness, this interiority of God work? It's hard to conceive, and begs more questions. Is God just another name for the universe, with no independent existence at all? I don't know. To what extent can we ascribe personality to God? I don't know. In the end, we have to say, "I don't know." If we knew, God would not be God. To have faith in this God would be more like trusting an essential benevolence in the universe, and less like believing a system of doctrinal statements. Isn't it ironic that Christians who claim to believe in an infinite, unknowable being then tie God down in closed systems and rigid doctrines? How could one practice such a faith? By seeking the God within. By cultivating my own inwardness. In silence, in meditation, in my inner space, in the me that remains when I gently put aside my passing emotions and ideas and preoccupations. In awareness of the inner conversation. And how would we live such a faith? How would I live such a faith? By seeking intimate connection with your inwardness. The kind of relationships when deep speaks to deep. If God is in all people, then there is a meeting place where my relationship with you becomes a three-way encounter. There is an Indian greeting, which I'm sure some of you know: "Namaste," accompanied by a respectful bow, which, roughly translated means, "That which is of God in me greets that which of God is in you." Namaste. And how would one deepen such a faith? By seeking the inwardness which is in all things. In music and poetry, in the natural world of beauty and in the small ordinary things of life, there is a deep, indwelling presence that makes them extraordinary. It needs a profound attentiveness and a patient waiting, a contemplative attitude and a generosity and openness to those whose experience is different from my own. When I stood up to speak to my people about God and the tsunami, I had no answers to offer them. No neat packages of faith, with Bible references to prove them. Only doubts and questioning and uncertainty. I had some suggestions to make — possible new ways of thinking about God. Ways that might allow us to go on, down a new and uncharted road. But in the end, the only thing I could say for sure was, "I don't know," and that just might be the most profoundly religious statement of all. Thank you.

Technology's long tail

Chris Anderson

{0: 'Chris Anderson'}

{0: ['drone maker']}

{0: 'Chris Anderson is an authority on emerging technologies and the cultures that surround them.'}

2004-02-02

2007-04-27

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'he', 'hu', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['business', 'culture', 'economics', 'entertainment', 'marketing', 'technology']

{319: 'The next 5,000 days of the web', 118: 'The genesis of Google', 216: 'The new power of collaboration', 38: 'The accelerating power of technology', 1375: 'Abundance is our future', 19: 'How technology evolves'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_technology_s_long_tail/

Chris Anderson, then the editor of Wired, explores the four key stages of any viable technology: setting the right price, gaining market share, displacing an established technology and, finally, becoming ubiquitous.

I'd like to speak about technology trends, which is something that many of you follow — but we also follow, for related reasons. Obviously, being a technology magazine, technology trends are something that we write about and need to know about. But also it's part of being any monthly magazine — you live in the future. And we have a long lead-time. We have to plan issues many months in advance; we have to guess at what public appetites are going to be six months, nine months down the road. So we're in the forecasting business. We also, like a lot of companies, create a product that's based on technology trends. In this case, ours is about ideas and information, and, if we're lucky, some entertainment. But the concept's quite the same. And so we have to understand not only why tech's important, where it's going, but also, very importantly, when — the timing is everything. And it's interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or Internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or Internet advertising, they were all right — they were just wrong in time. Almost every one of those has come true just a few years later. But the difference of a few years on stock-market valuations is obviously extreme. And that's why timing is everything. You've probably seen something like this before. This is the classic Gartner Hype Curve, which talks about kind of the trajectory of a technology's lifespan. And just for fun, we put a bunch of technologies on it, to show whether they were kind of rising for the first high peak, or whether they were about to crash into the trough of disillusionment, or rise back in the slope of enlightenment, etc. And this is one way to do technology forecasting: get a sense of where technology is and then anticipate the next upturn. We tend to do any technology that we think is sufficiently important; we'll typically do it twice. Once, we want to do it first. We want to be the first to do it, for the geeks who appreciate that, we'll catch it right there at the technology-trigger. You can see in 1997, we put Linux on the cover. But then it comes back. And sufficiently big technologies are going to hit the mainstream, and they're going to burst out. And then it's time to do it again. Last year. And that's one way that we try to time technology trends. I'd like to talk about a way of thinking about technology trends that I call my "grand unified theory of predicting the future," but it's closer to a petite unified theory of predicting the future. It's based on the presumption, the observation even, that all important technologies go through four stages in their life — at least one of the four stages, sometimes all four of the stages. And at each one of these stages, can be seen as a collision — a collision with something else — for example, a critical price-line that changes both the technology and also changes its effect on the world. It's an inflection point. And these are the inflection points that tell you what the next chapter in that technology's life is going to be, and maybe how you can do something about it. The first is the critical price. The first stage in a technology's advance is that it'll fall below a critical price. After it falls below a critical price, it will tend, if it's successful, to rise above a critical mass, a penetration. Many technologies, at that point, displace another technology, and that's another important point. And then finally, a lot of technologies commoditize. Towards the end of their life, they become nearly free. Each one of those is an opportunity to do something about it; it's an opportunity for the technology to change. And even if you missed, you know, the first boom of Wi-Fi — you know, Wi-Fi did the critical price, it did the critical mass, but hasn't done displacement yet, and hasn't done free yet — there's still more opportunity in that. I'd like to demonstrate what I mean by this by telling the story of the DVD, which is a technology which has done all of these. The DVD, as you know, was introduced in the mid-1990s and it was quite expensive. But you can see that by 1998, it had fallen below 400 dollars, and 400 dollars was a psychological threshold. And it started to take off. And you can see that the units started to trend up, the hidden inflection point — it was taking off. The next thing it hit, a year later, was critical mass. In this case, 20 percent is often a good proxy for critical mass in a household. And what's interesting here is that something else took off along with it: home-theater units. Suddenly you have a DVD in the house; you've got high-quality digital video; you have a reason to have a big-screen television; you have a reason for Dolby 5.1 surround-sound. And maybe you have reasons for starting to connect them, and bring the rest of your entertainment in. What's interesting also is — note that Netflix was founded in 1999. Reed Hastings is here. He clearly saw that that was a moment, that was an inflection point that he could do something with. The next phase it hit was displacement. You can see around 2001 it finally out-sold the VCR. And here too, you can see the implications in the world at large. Netflix was right — the Netflix model could capitalize on the DVD in a way that the video-rental stores couldn't. Among the DVD's many assets is that it's very small; you can stick it in the mailer and post it cheaply. That gave an advantage; that was an implication of the technology's rise that wasn't obvious to everybody. And then finally, DVDs are approaching free. There's a company called Apex, a no-name Chinese firm, who has, several times in the past year, been the number-one DVD seller in America. Their average price, for last year, was 48 dollars. You're aware of the perhaps apocryphal Wal-Mart stampede over the 30-dollar DVD. But they're getting very, very cheap, and look at the interesting implication of it. As they get cheaper, the premium brands, the Sonys and such, are losing market share, and the no-names, the Apexes, are gaining them. They're being commodified, and that's what happens when things go to zero. It's a tough market out there. (Laughter) Now they've introduced these four ways of looking at technology, these four stages of technology's life. I'd like to talk about some other technologies out there, just technologies on our radar — and I'll use this lens, these four, as a way to kind of tell you where each one of those technologies is in its development. They're not necessarily the top-10 technologies out there — they're just examples of technologies that are in each one of these periods. But I think that the implications of them approaching these crossovers, these intersections, are interesting to think about. Start with gene sequencing. As you probably know, gene sequencing — in a large part, because it's built on computers — is falling in price at a kind of a Moore's Law-like level. It is now possible — will be possible, and if Craig Venter indeed comes today, he may tell you something about this — to sequence the human genome for 40 million dollars by the end of this year. That's as opposed to billions just a few years ago. You know, our ability to capture the tools of creation is getting closer and closer. What's interesting is that at the same time, the number of genes that we're discovering is rising very quickly. Each one of these genes has potential diagnostic test. There will come a day when you can have hundreds of thousands of tests done, very cheaply, if you want to know. You can learn about your own mosaic. Here's another technology that's approaching a critical price. This is a fascinating research from WHO that shows the effect of generic drugs on anti-retroviral drug compounds and cocktails. In January 2000, the price was 10,000 dollars, or 27 dollars a day. The generics came in, first in Brazil and elsewhere, and the effect was just dramatic on pricing. Today it's less than 50 cents a day. And what's interesting is if you look at the price elasticity, if you look at the correlation between these two, as the anti-retrovirals come down, the number of people you can treat goes radically up. And the Clinton Foundation and WHO believe that they can treat three million people worldwide by 2005 — two million in sub-Saharan Africa. And the falling price of drugs has a lot to do with that. Linux is another good example. Now we've switched to critical mass. These are now technologies that are hitting critical mass. If you look here, here's Linux in red, and it's hit 20 percent. Interestingly, it's done a crossover before, but not the crossovers that matter. The crossover that's going to matter is the one with the blue. But you can look and see the direction those lines are going, you can see that at the 20 percent, it's now taken seriously. It's not just for the geeks any more. That is, I imagine, what people in Redmond wake up in the middle of the night thinking about. (Laughter) Another technology that we see all around us out here is hybrid cars. I don't know whether anybody has a Prius 2004, but they're fantastic. And if you look at the trends here, by about 2008 — and I don't think this is a crazy forecast — they'll be two percent of auto sales. Two percent isn't 20 percent, but in the car business, which is slow moving, that's huge; that's arrival. At two percent, you start seeing them on the roads everywhere. And what's interesting about the hybrids taking off is you've now introduced electric motors to the automobile industry. It's the first radical change in automobile technology in 100 years. And once you have electric motors, you can do anything: you can change the structure of the car in any way you want. You can have regenerative braking; you can have drive-by-wire; you can have replaceable body shapes — it's a little thing that starts with a hybrid, but it can lead to a whole new era of the car. Voice Over IP is something you may have heard something about. Again, it's kind of coming out of nowhere; it's a little hard to use right now. There's a company created by the Kazaa founders called Skype. Look at these numbers. They launched it in August of last year; they already have nearly four million registered users — that's critical mass. And the same thing's happening on the carrier side. You're looking at IP taking over from some of the traditional telecom standards. This is a tipping point — if Malcolm's here, forgive me — and it's going to change the economics, and the speed, and the players in the industry. It's going to look a little bit like that. And finally, free. Free is really, really interesting. Free is something that comes with digital, because the reproduction costs are essentially free. It comes with IP, because it's such an efficient protocol. It comes with fiber optics, because there's so much bandwidth. Free is really, you know, the gift of Silicon Valley to the world. It's an economic force; it's a technical force. It's a deflationary force, if not handled right. It is abundance, as opposed to scarcity. Free is probably the most interesting thing. And here you have just the number of songs that can be stored on a hard drive. You know, there could be a film's [unclear] there, but it's basically, every song ever made could be stored on 400 dollars worth of storage by 2008. It takes that entire element, the physical element, of songs off the table. And you've seen the numbers. I mean, you know, the music industry is imploding in front of our very eyes, and Hollywood's worried as well. They're facing a force that they haven't faced before. And their response is draconian, and not necessarily the one that's going to get them out of this. And finally, I'll give you one last example of free — perhaps the most powerful of all. I mentioned fiber optics — their abundance tends to make things free. This is the price of a phone call to India per minute. And what's interesting is that it was just 1990 when it was more than two dollars a minute. India had, still has, a regulated phone system and so did we. It was surprisingly non-innovative, moved very slowly, but then there was just so much fiber out there, you couldn't hold back, and look how quickly the price fell. It's seven cents a minute, in many cases. And the consequence of cheap phone calling, free phone calling, to India, is the pissed-off programmer, is the outsourcing. It is probably one of the most dramatic shifts in globalization and one of the most powerful economic tools that we're seeing in our world today. The force of India, and then China, and any other country that can contact our markets and will work with our companies — because the communications are free — is just beginning to be felt. And I think that's probably one of the most important technology trends that we're looking at today. Thank you.

Cape Breton fiddling in reel time

Natalie MacMaster

{0: 'Natalie MacMaster', 1: 'Thomas Dolby'}

{0: ['fiddler'], 1: ['electronic music pioneer']}

{0: 'Natalie MacMaster is a star of Cape Breton fiddling, a Canadian tradition with Scottish roots. Her energetic style and virtuoso talent has brought her star billing on the international folk circuit.', 1: 'Thomas Dolby has spent his career at the intersection of music and technology. He was an early star on MTV, then moved to Silicon Valley, then went back on the road with his album, "A Map of the Floating City."'}

2002-02-02

2007-05-01

TED2002

en

['ar', 'bg', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hr', 'hu', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'ku', 'lv', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sq', 'sr', 'th', 'tr', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['entertainment', 'history', 'music', 'performance', 'violin', 'live music']

{45: "An 11-year-old's magical violin", 296: '"Mother of Pearl," "If I Had You"', 138: 'A string quartet plays "Blue Room"', 2424: 'The boiling river of the Amazon', 2814: "What rivers can tell us about the earth's history", 2064: 'How I brought a river, and my city, back to life'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_macmaster_cape_breton_fiddling_in_reel_time/

Violinist Natalie MacMaster and TED Musical Director Thomas Dolby play Dolby's original song "Blue Is a River" in this ethereal duet -- with a little dancing.

♫ Like the heather ♫ ♫ on the hillside ♫ ♫ as they drove us ♫ ♫ from the Highlands ♫ ♫ Like the ice flow ♫ ♫ from the Arctic ♫ ♫ where we landed ♫ ♫ in Newfoundland ♫ ♫ There's a color ♫ ♫ to my sorrow ♫ ♫ There's a name for ♫ ♫ all this sadness ♫ ♫ Like the ocean ♫ ♫ in between us ♫ ♫ I am blue ♫ ♫ Blue is a river ♫ ♫ Blue remembered ♫ ♫ Blue water ♫ ♫ running clear ♫ ♫ Blue like a planet ♫ ♫ to a spaceman ♫ ♫ Blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ (Fiddle and synthesizer) ♫ So I came here ♫ ♫ to the city ♫ ♫ where the dream burns ♫ ♫ like a furnace ♫ ♫ And I dazzled ♫ ♫ in these dark streets ♫ ♫ like a diamond ♫ ♫ in a coalface ♫ ♫ Then the cold wind ♫ ♫ from the islands ♫ ♫ blew a storm cloud ♫ ♫ across the new moon ♫ ♫ Like the gun smoke ♫ ♫ above the houses ♫ ♫ in my home ♫ ♫ Blue is a river ♫ ♫ Blue remembered ♫ ♫ Blue water ♫ ♫ running clear ♫ ♫ Blue like a planet ♫ ♫ to a spaceman ♫ ♫ Blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ ♫ Blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ (Fiddle and synthesizer) (Applause)

The genesis of Google

Sergey Brin

{0: 'Sergey Brin', 1: 'Larry Page'}

{0: ['computer scientist', 'entrepreneur and philanthropist'], 1: ['ceo of google']}

{0: 'Sergey Brin is half of the team that founded Google.', 1: 'Larry Page is the CEO and cofounder of Google, making him one of the ruling minds of the web. '}

2004-02-02

2007-05-03

TED2004

en

['ar', 'bg', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'fa', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hr', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ko', 'lv', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sq', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Google', 'business', 'collaboration', 'culture', 'design', 'technology', 'web']

{319: 'The next 5,000 days of the web', 1109: "Google's driverless car", 1113: 'Everyday compassion at Google', 362: 'The Web as a city', 1091: 'Beware online "filter bubbles"', 1953: "Where's Google going next?"}

https://www.ted.com/talks/sergey_brin_larry_page_the_genesis_of_google/

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin offer a peek inside the Google machine, sharing tidbits about international search patterns, the philanthropic Google Foundation, and the company's dedication to innovation and employee happiness.

Sergey Brin: I want to discuss a question I know that's been pressing on many of your minds. We spoke to you last several years ago. And before I get started today, since many of you are wondering, I just wanted to get it out of the way. The answer is boxers. Now I hope all of you feel better. Do you know what this might be? Does anyone know what that is? Audience: Yes. SB: What is it? Audience: It's people logging on to Google around the world. SB: Wow, OK. I didn't really realize what it was when I first saw it. But this is what helped me see it. This is what we run at the office, that actually runs real time. Here it's slightly logged. But here you can see around the world how people are using Google. And every one of those rising dots represents probably about 20, 30 searches, or something like that. And they're labeled by color right now, by language. So you can see: here we are in the U.S., and they're all coming up red. There we are in Monterey — hopefully I can get it right. You can see that Japan is busy at night, right there. We have Tokyo coming in in Japanese. There's a lot of activity in China. There's a lot of activity in India. There's some in the Middle East, the little pockets. And Europe, which is right now in the middle of the day, is going really strong with a whole wide variety of languages. Now you can also see, if I turn this around here — hopefully I won't shake the world too much. But you can also see, there are places where there's not so much. Australia, because there just aren't very many people there. And this is something that we should really work on, which is Africa, which is just a few trickles, basically in South Africa and a few other urban cities. But basically, what we've noticed is these queries, which come in at thousands per second, are available everywhere there is power. And pretty much everywhere there is power, there is the Internet. And even in Antarctica — well, at least this time of year — we from time to time will see a query rising up. And if we had it plotted correctly, I think the International Space Station would have it, too. So this is some of the challenge that we have here, is you can see that it's actually kind of hard to get the — there we go. This is how we have to move the bits around to actually get the people the answers to their questions. You can see that there's a lot of data running around. It has to go all over the world: through fibers, through satellites, through all kinds of connections. And it's pretty tricky for us to maintain the latencies as low as we try to. Hopefully your experience is good. But you can see also, once again — so some places are much more wired than others, and you can see all the bandwidth across the U.S., going up over to Asia, Europe in the other direction, and so forth. Now what I would like to do is just to show you what one second of this activity would look like. And if we can switch to slides — all right, here we go. So this is slowed down. This is what one second looks like. And this is what we spend a lot of our time doing, is just making sure that we can keep up with this kind of traffic load. Now, each one of those queries has an interesting life and tale of its own. I mean, it could be somebody's health, it could be somebody's career, something important to them. And it could potentially be something as important as tomato sauce, or in this case, ketchup. So this is a query that we had — I guess it's a popular band that was more popular in some parts of the world than others. You can see that it got started right here. In the U.S. and Spain, it was popular at the same time. But it didn't have quite the same pickup in the U.S. as it did in Spain. And then from Spain, it went to Italy, and then Germany got excited, and maybe right now the U.K. is enjoying it. And so I guess the U.S. finally, finally started to like it, too. And I just wanted to play it for you. Anyway, you can all enjoy it for yourselves — hopefully that search will work. As a part of — you know, part of what we want to do to grow our company is to have more searches. And what that means is we want to have more people who are healthy and educated. More animals, if they start doing searches as well. But partly, we want to make the world a better place, and so one thing that we're embarking upon is the Google Foundation, and we're in the process of setting that up. We also have a program already called Google Grants that now serves over 150 different charities around the world, and these are some of the charities that are on there. And it's something I'm very excited to be a part of. In fact, many of the organizations that are here — the Acumen Fund, I think ApproTEC we have running, I'm not sure if that one's up yet — and many of the people who have presented here are running through Google Grants. They run Google ads, and we just give them the ad credit so they can let organizations know. One of the earlier results that we got — we have a Singaporean businessman who is now sponsoring a village of 25 Vietnamese girls for their education, and that was one of the earliest results. And as I said, now there have been many, many stories that have come in, because we do have hundreds of charities in there, and the Google Foundation will be an even broader endeavor. Now does anybody know who this is? A-ha! Audience: Orkut. SB: Yes! Somebody got it. This is Orkut. Is anybody here on Orkut? Do we have any? Okay, not very many people know about it. I'll explain it in a second. This is one of our engineers. We find that they work better when they're submerged and covered with leaves. That's how we churn those products out. Orkut had a vision to create a social network. I know all of you are thinking, "Yet another social network." But it was a dream of his, and we, basically, when people really want to do something, well, we generally let them. So this is what he built. We just released it in a test phase last month, and it's been taking off. This is our VP of Engineering. You can see the red hair, and I don't know if you can see the nose ring there. And these are all of his friends. So this is how — we just deployed it — we just decided that people would send each other invitations to get into the service, and so we just had the people in our company initially send them out. And now we've grown to over 100,000 members. And they spread, actually, very quickly, even outside the U.S. You can see, even though the U.S. is still the majority here — though, by the way, search-wise, it's only about 30 percent of our traffic — but it's already going to Japan, and the U.K., and Europe, and all the rest of the countries. So it's a fun little project. There are a variety of demographics. I won't bore you with these. But it's just the kind of thing that we just try out for fun and see where it goes. And — well, I'll leave you in suspense. Larry, you can explain this one. Larry Page: Thank you, Sergey. So one of the things — both Sergey and I went to a Montessori school, and I think, for some reason, this has been incorporated in Google. And Sergey mentioned Orkut, which is something that, you know, Orkut wanted to do in his time, and we call this — at Google, we've embodied this as "the 20 percent time," and the idea is, for 20 percent of your time, if you're working at Google, you can do what you think is the best thing to do. And many, many things at Google have come out of that, such as Orkut and also Google News. And I think many other things in the world also have come out of this. Mendel, who was supposed to be teaching high-school students, actually, you know, discovered the laws of genetics — as a hobby, basically. So many, many useful things come out of this. And News, which I just mentioned, was started by a researcher. And he just — he — after 9/11, he got really interested in the news. And he said, "Why don't I look at the news better?" And so he started clustering it by category, and then he started using it, and then his friends started using it. And then, besides just looking cute on a baby's bottom, we made it a Googlette, which is basically a small project at Google. So it'd be like three people, or something like that, and they would try to make a product. And we wouldn't really be sure if it's going to work or not. And in News' case, you know, they had a couple of people working on it for a while, and then more and more people started using it, and then we put it out on the Internet, and more and more people started using it. And now it's a real, full-blown project with more people on it. And this is how we keep our innovation running. I think usually, as companies get bigger, they find it really hard to have small, innovative projects. And we had this problem, too, for a while, and we said, "Oh, we really need a new concept." You know, the Googlettes — that's a small project that we're not quite sure if it's going to work or not, but we hope it will, and if we do enough of them, some of them will really work and turn out, such as News. But then we had a problem because then we had over 100 projects. And I don't know about all of you, but I have trouble keeping 100 things in my head at once. And we found that if we just wrote all of them down and ordered them — and these are kind of made up. Don't really pay attention to them. For example, the "Buy Iceland" was from a media article. We would never do such a crazy thing, but — in any case, we found if we just basically wrote them all down and ordered them, that most people would actually agree what the ordering should be. And this was kind of a surprise to me, but we found that as long as you keep the 100 things in your head, which you did by writing them down, that you could do a pretty good job deciding what to do and where to put your resources. And so that's basically what we've done since we instituted that a few years ago, and I think it has really allowed us to be innovative and still stay reasonably well-organized. The other thing we discovered is that people like to work on things that are important, and so naturally, people sort of migrate to the things that are high priorities. I just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are new, or you might not know about. And the top thing, actually, is the Deskbar. So this is a new — how many of you use the Google Toolbar? Raise your hands. How many of you use the Deskbar? All right, see? You guys should try it out. But if you go to our site and search for "Deskbar," you'll get this. And the idea is, instead of a toolbar, it's just present all the time on your screen on the bottom, and you can do searches really easily. And it's sort of like a better version of the toolbar. Thank you, Sergey. This is another example of a project that somebody at Google was really passionate about, and they just, they got going, and it's really, really a great product, and really taking off. Google Answers is something we started, which is really cool, which lets you — for five to 100 dollars, you can type a question in, and then there's a pool of researchers that go out and research it for you, and it's guaranteed and all that, and you can get actually very good answers to things without spending all that time yourself. Froogle lets you search shopping information, and Blogger lets you publish things. But all of these — well, these were all sort of innovative things that we did that — you know, we try many, many different things in our company. We also like to innovate in our physical space, and we noticed in meetings, you know, you have to wait a long time for projectors to turn on and off, and they're noisy, so people shut them off. And we didn't like that, so we actually, in maybe a couple of weeks, we built these little enclosures that enclosed the projectors, and so we can leave them on all the time and they're completely silent. And as a result, we were able to build some software that also lets us manage a meeting, so when you walk into a meeting room now, it lists all the meetings that are happening, you can very easily take notes, and they just get emailed automatically to all the people that were present in the meeting. And as we become more of a global company, we find these things really affect us — you know, can we work effectively with people who aren't in the room? And things like that. And simple things like this can really make a big difference. We also have a lot of engineers in those meetings, and they don't always do their laundry as much as they should. And so we found it was pretty helpful to have laundry machines, for our younger employees especially, and ... we also allow dogs and things like that, and we've had, I think, a really fun culture at our company, which helps people work and enjoy what they're doing. This is actually our "cult picture." I just wanted to show quickly. We had this on our website for a while, but we found that after we put it on our website, we didn't get any job applications anymore. But anyway, every year we've taken the whole company on a ski trip. A lot of work happens in companies from people knowing each other, and informally. And I think we've done a good job encouraging that. It makes it a really fun place to work. Along with our logos, too, which I think really embody our culture when we change things. In the early days, we were actually advised we should never change our logo because we should establish our brand, you know, because, you know, you'd never want to change your logo. You want it to be consistent. And we said, "Well, that doesn't sound so much fun. Why don't we try changing it every day?" One of the things that really excites me about what we're doing now is we have this thing called AdSense, and this is a little bit foreshadowing — this is from before Dean dropped out. But the idea is, like, on a newspaper, for example, we show you relevant ads. And this is hard to read, but this says "Battle for New Hampshire: Howard Dean for President" — articles on Howard Dean. And these ads are generated automatically — like in this case, on the Washington Post — from the content on the site. And so we use our over 150,000 advertisers and millions of advertisements, so we pick the one that's most relevant to what you're actually looking at, much as we do on search. So the idea is we can make advertising useful, not just annoying, right? And the nice thing about this, we have a self-serve program, and many thousands of websites have signed up, and this let's them really make money. And I — you know, there's a number of people I met — I met this guy who runs a conservation site at a party, and he said, "You know, I wasn't making any money. I just put this thing on my site and I'm making 10,000 dollars a month. And, you know, thank you. I don't have to do my other job now." And I think this is really important for us, because it makes the Internet work better. It makes content get better, it makes searching work better, when people can really make their livelihood from producing great content. So this session is supposed to be about the future, so I'd thought I'd talk at least briefly about it. And the idea behind this is to do the perfect job doing search, you really have to be smart. Because you can type, you know, any kind of thing into Google, and you expect an answer back, right? But finding things is tricky, and so you really want intelligence. And in fact, the ultimate search engine would be smart. It would be artificial intelligence. And so that's something we work on, and we even have some people who are excited enough and crazy enough to work on it now, and that's really their goal. So we always hope that Google will be smart, but we're always surprised when other people think that it is. And so I just wanted to give a funny example of this. This is a blog from Iraq, and it's not really what I'm going to talk about, but I just wanted to show you an example. Maybe, Sergey, you can highlight this. So we decided — actually, the highlight's right there. Oh, thank you. So, "related searches," right there. You can't see it that well, but we decided we should put in this feature into our AdSense ads, called "related searches." And so we'd say, you know, "Did you mean 'search for'" — what is this, in this case, "Saddam Hussein," because this blog is about Iraq — and you know, in addition to the ads, and we thought this would be a great idea. And so there is this blog of a young person who was kind of depressed, and he said, "You know, I'm sleeping a lot." He was just kind of writing about his life. And our algorithms — not a person, of course, but our algorithms, our computers — read his blog and decided that the related search was, "I am bored." And he read this, and he thought a person had decided that he was boring, and it was very unfortunate, and he said, "You know, what are these, you know, bastards at Google doing? Why don't they like my blog?" And so then we read his blog, which was getting — you know, sort of going from bad to worse, and we said the related search was, "Retards." And then, you know, he got even more mad, and he wrote — like, started swearing and so on. And then we produced "You suck." And finally, it ended with "Kiss my ass." And so basically, he thought he was dealing with something smart, and of course, you know, we just sort of wrote this program and we tried it out, and it didn't quite work, and we don't have this feature anymore. So with that, maybe I can switch back to the world. I wanted to end just by saying that there's a couple things that really make me excited to be involved with Google, and one of those is that we're able to make money largely through advertising, and one of the benefits that I didn't expect from that was that we're able to serve everyone in the world without worrying about, you know, places that don't have as much money. So we don't have to worry about our products being sold, for example, for less money in places that are poor, and then they get re-imported into the U.S. — for example, with the drug industry. And I think we're really lucky to have that kind of business model because everyone in the world has access to our search, and I think that's a tremendous, tremendous benefit. The other thing I wanted to mention just briefly is that we have a tremendous ability and responsibility to provide people the right information, and we view ourselves like a newspaper or a magazine — that we should provide very objective information. And so in our search results, we never accept payment for our search results. We accept payment for advertising, and we mark it as such. And that's unlike many of our competitors. And I think decisions we're able to make like that have a tremendous impact on the world, and it makes me really proud to be involved with Google. So thank you.