(Laughter) I flew on Air Force Two for eight years.
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.
(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.
(Laughter) You've heard of phantom limb pain?
Low-cost family restaurant chain, for those of you who don't know it.
And she said "Yes, that's former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper."
And I began the speech by telling them the story of what had just happened the day before in Nashville.
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.
(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.
Just in the last two days, we got the new temperature records in January.
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.
Other transportation efficiency is as important as cars and trucks.
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.
Consider this: Make a decision to live a carbon-neutral life.
It is easier than you think.
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.
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.
We have to change the minds of the American people.
You have more influence than some of us who are Democrats do.
We are one.
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.
I have a doppelganger.
(Laughter) Dr. Gero is a brilliant but slightly mad scientist in the "Dragonball Z: Android Saga."
If you look very carefully, you see that his skull has been replaced with a transparent Plexiglas dome so that the workings of his brain can be observed and also controlled with light.
I control the brain in order to understand how it works.
Many neuroscientists agree with this view and think that understanding will come from more detailed observation and analysis.
They say, "If we could record the activity of our neurons, we would understand the brain."
Take a look at what brain activity might look like.
There's 10,000 neurons here.
So you're looking at roughly one percent of the brain of a cockroach.
Your brains are about 100 million times more complicated.
We don't understand the code used by the brain.
But how?
In other words, instead of recording the activity of neurons, we need to control it.
Now, I'm by no means the first person to realize how powerful a tool intervention is.
It dates back at least 200 years, to Galvani's famous experiments in the late 18th century and beyond.
This experiment revealed the first, and perhaps most fundamental, nugget of the neural code: that information is written in the form of electrical impulses.
It's hard to do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously.
As we zoom in on one of these purple neurons, we see that its outer membrane is studded with microscopic pores.
Pores like these conduct electrical current and are responsible for all the communication in the nervous system.
They are coupled to light receptors similar to the ones in your eyes.
Whenever a flash of light hits the receptor, the pore opens, an electrical current is switched on, and the neuron fires electrical impulses.
Because the light-activated pore is encoded in DNA, we can achieve incredible precision.
This is because, although each cell in our bodies contains the same set of genes, different mixes of genes get turned on and off in different cells.
So in this cartoon, the bluish white cell in the upper-left corner does not respond to light because it lacks the light-activated pore.
The approach works so well that we can write purely artificial messages directly to the brain.
It was done six or seven years ago by my then graduate student, Susana Lima.
Susana had engineered the fruit fly on the left so that just two out of the 200,000 cells in its brain expressed the light-activated pore.
Since we took these first steps, the field of optogenetics has exploded.
We cope with this pressure by having brains, and within our brains, decision-making centers that I've called here the "Actor."
Now to put some neurobiological meat on this abstract model, we constructed a simple one-dimensional world for our favorite subject, fruit flies.
You can think of this nagging inner voice as sort of the brain's equivalent of the Catholic Church, if you're an Austrian like me, or the super-ego, if you're Freudian, or your mother, if you're Jewish.
(Laughter) Now obviously, the Critic is a key ingredient in what makes us intelligent.
So we set out to identify the cells in the fly's brain that played the role of the Critic.
In other words, the fly should learn from mistakes that it thought it had made but, in reality, it had not made.
So we bred flies whose brains were more or less randomly peppered with cells that were light addressable.
What's common among these groups of cells is that they all produce the neurotransmitter dopamine.
But the identities of the individual dopamine-producing neurons are clearly largely different on the left and on the right.
But the behavior of the fly on the left is very different.
Through many such experiments, we were able to narrow down the identity of the Critic to just 12 cells.
These 12 cells, as shown here in green, send the output to a brain structure called the "mushroom body," which is shown here in gray.
Based on everything we know about the mushroom bodies, this makes perfect sense.
These LED's are wired to sensors that detect the presence of odorous molecules in the air.
Each odor activates a different combination of sensors, which in turn activates a different odor detector in the mushroom body.
So the pilot in the cockpit of the fly, the Actor, can tell which odor is present simply by looking at which of the blue LEDs lights up.
We have created such a situation, artificially, by turning on the critic with a flash of light.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Music) ♫ When I wake up ♫ ♫ in the morning ♫ ♫ I pour the coffee ♫ ♫ I read the paper ♫ ♫ And then I slowly ♫ ♫ and so softly ♫ ♫ do the dishes ♫ ♫ So feed the fishes ♫ ♫ You sing me happy birthday ♫ ♫ Like it's gonna be ♫ ♫ your last day ♫ ♫ here on Earth ♫ (Applause) All right.
So, I wanted to do something special today.
And there's few things more thrilling than playing a song for the first time in front of an audience, especially when it's half-finished.
And in the audio world that's when the microphone gets too close to its sound source, and then it gets in this self-destructive loop that creates a very unpleasant sound.
(Laughter) It's impossible, of course, for your eyes to see themselves, but they seem to be trying.
Or ears being able to hear themselves -- it's just impossible.
(Music) ♫ Go ahead and congratulate yourself ♫ ♫ Give yourself a hand, the hand is your hand ♫ ♫ And the eye that eyes itself is your eye ♫ ♫ And the ear that hears itself is near ♫ ♫ 'Cause it's your ear, oh oh ♫ ♫ You've done the impossible now ♫ ♫ Took yourself apart ♫ ♫ You made yourself invulnerable ♫ ♫ No one can break your heart ♫ ♫ So you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you wring it out ♫ ♫ And you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own ♫ (Applause) Thanks.
(Applause) All right.
It's kind of cool. Songwriters can sort of get away with murder.
But, you know, I think reckless curiosity would be what the world needs now, just a little bit.
(Music) ♫ Quiet ♫ ♫ Quiet down, she said ♫ ♫ Speak into the back of his head ♫ ♫ On the edge of the bed, I can see your blood flow ♫ ♫ I can see your ♫ ♫ cells grow ♫ ♫ Hold still awhile ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ Some things you say ♫ ♫ are not for sale ♫ ♫ I would hold it where ♫ ♫ our free agents of some substance are ♫ ♫ scared ♫ ♫ Hold still a while ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ Thanks.
(Applause)
So this is Bertie County, North Carolina, USA.
To give you an idea of the "where:" So here's North Carolina, and if we zoom in, Bertie County is in the eastern part of the state.
It's the dependence on farm subsidies and under-performing schools and higher poverty rates in rural areas than in urban.
And Bertie County is no exception to this.
So Bertie County is not only very rural; it's incredibly poor.
It is the poorest county in the state.
It has one in three of its children living in poverty, and it's what is referred to as a "rural ghetto."
The biggest employer is the Purdue chicken processing plant.
There are more buildings that are empty or in disrepair than occupied and in use.
Racially, the county is about 60 percent African-American, but what happens in the public schools is most of the privileged white kids go to the private Lawrence Academy.
So the public school students are about 86 percent African-American.
So to say that the public education system in Bertie County is struggling would be a huge understatement.
The biggest asset, in my opinion, one of the biggest assets in Bertie County right now is this man: This is Dr. Chip Zullinger, fondly known as Dr. Z.
He was brought in in October 2007 as the new superintendent to basically fix this broken school system.
He started some of the country's first charter schools in the late '80s in the U.S.
And he invited us in particular because we have a very specific type of design process -- one that results in appropriate design solutions in places that don't usually have access to design services or creative capital.
So at the time of being invited down there, we were based in San Francisco, and so we were going back and forth for basically the rest of 2009, spending about half our time in Bertie County.
And when I say we, I mean Project H, but more specifically, I mean myself and my partner, Matthew Miller, who's an architect and a sort of MacGyver-type builder.
Over the course of this year that we spent flying back and forth, we realized we had fallen in love with the place.
And so we saw an opportunity to bring design as this untouched tool, something that Bertie County didn't otherwise have, and to be sort of the -- to usher that in as a new type of tool in their tool kit.
But beyond that, we recognized that Bertie County, as a community, was in dire need of a fresh perspective of pride and connectedness and of the creative capital that they were so much lacking.
So the first of the three is design for education.
So this game that the kids are playing here -- in this case they were learning basic multiplication through a game called Match Me.
(Laughter) So the second approach is redesigning education itself.
And then the third approach, which is what I'm most excited about, which is where we are now, is: design as education.
So "design as education" means that we could actually teach design within public schools, and not design-based learning -- not like "let's learn physics by building a rocket," but actually learning design-thinking coupled with real construction and fabrication skills put towards a local community purpose.
It also means that designers are no longer consultants, but we're teachers, and we are charged with growing creative capital within the next generation.
And what design offers as an educational framework is an antidote to all of the boring, rigid, verbal instruction that so many of these school districts are plagued by.
It's hands-on, it's in-your-face, it requires an active engagement, and it allows kids to apply all the core subject learning in real ways.
It's a vocational training path.
So the first project, which will be built next summer, is an open-air farmers' market downtown, followed by bus shelters for the school bus system in the second year and home improvements for the elderly in the third year.
So I want you to meet three of our students.
She loves agriculture and wants to be a high school teacher.
He is really into dirtbike racing, and he wants to be an architect.
So for him, Studio H offers him a way to develop the skills he will need as an architect, everything from drafting to wood and metal construction to how to do research for a client.
What design and building really offers to public education is a different kind of classroom.
So we recognize that Studio H, especially in its first year, is a small story -- 13 students, it's two teachers, it's one project in one place.
Ultimately, design itself is a process of constant education for the people that we work with and for and for us as designers.
So while this is a very small story, we hope that it represents a step in the right direction for the future of rural communities and for the future of public education and hopefully also for the future of design.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Today I want to talk to you about ethnic conflict and civil war.
Three things stand out: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design.
Civil wars have made news headlines for many decades now, and ethnic conflicts in particular have been a near constant presence as a major international security threat.
In Georgia, after years of stalemate, we saw a full-scale resurgence of violence in August, 2008.
This quickly escalated into a five-day war between Russia and Georgia, leaving Georgia ever more divided.
In Kenya, contested presidential elections in 2007 -- we just heard about them -- quickly led to high levels of inter-ethnic violence and the killing and displacement of thousands of people.
In Sri Lanka, a decades-long civil war between the Tamil minority and the Sinhala majority led to a bloody climax in 2009, after perhaps as many as 100,000 people had been killed since 1983.
In Kyrgyzstan, just over the last few weeks, unprecedented levels of violence occurred between ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks.
Hundreds have been killed, and more than 100,000 displaced, including many ethnic Uzbeks who fled to neighboring Uzbekistan.
And in Iraq, finally, violence is on the rise again, and the country has yet to form a government four months after its last parliamentary elections.
Over the past two decades, since the end of the Cold War, there has been an overall decline in the number of civil wars.
The number of people killed in civil wars also is much lower today than it was a decade ago or two.
The highest level of deaths on the battlefield was recorded between 1998 and 2001, with about 80,000 soldiers, policemen and rebels killed every year.
The lowest number of combatant casualties occurred in 2003, with just 20,000 killed.
This decline would be even more obvious if we factored in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
But then 800,000 civilians were slaughtered in a matter of just a few months.
To put it differently, for the civilians that suffer the consequences of ethnic conflict and civil war, there is no good war and there is no bad peace.
So, we have fewer conflicts today in which fewer people get killed.
The defeat of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is perhaps the most recent example of this, but we have seen similar so-called military solutions in the Balkans, in the South Caucasus and across most of Africa.
Take the example of Northern Ireland.
Despite centuries of animosity, decades of violence and thousands of people killed, 1998 saw the conclusion of an historic agreement.
Crucially, for the long-term success of the peace process in Northern Ireland, he imposed very clear conditions for the participation and negotiations.
Subsequent revisions of the agreement were facilitated by the British and Irish governments, who never wavered in their determination to bring peace and stability to Northern Ireland.
The agreement combines a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland with cross-border institutions that link Belfast and Dublin and thus recognizes the so-called Irish dimension of the conflict.
The provisions in the agreement may be complex, but so is the underlying conflict.
Who ever could have imagined Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness jointly governing Northern Ireland as First and Deputy First Minister?
But then, is Northern Ireland a unique example, or does this kind of explanation only hold more generally in democratic and developed countries?
The ending of Liberia's long-lasting civil war in 2003 illustrates the importance of leadership, diplomacy and institutional design as much as the successful prevention of a full-scale civil war in Macedonia in 2001, or the successful ending of the conflict in Aceh in Indonesia in 2005.
The hopes that were vested in the Oslo Accords did not lead to an end of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Not all the issues that needed to be resolved were actually covered in the agreements.
Yet instead of grasping this opportunity, local and international leaders soon disengaged and became distracted by the second Intifada, the events of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The comprehensive peace agreement for Sudan signed in 2005 turned out to be less comprehensive than envisaged, and its provisions may yet bear the seeds of a full-scale return to war between north and south.
A final example: Kosovo.
The failure to achieve a negotiated solution for Kosovo and the violence, tension and de facto partition that resulted from it have their reasons in many, many different factors.
A cold war is not as good as a cold peace, but a cold peace is still better than a hot war.
So what then distinguishes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from that in Northern Ireland, or the civil war in Sudan from that in Liberia?
Both successes and failures teach us several critically important things that we need to bear in mind if we want the good news to continue.
First, leadership.
In the same way in which ethnic conflict and civil war are not natural but man-made disasters, their prevention and settlement does not happen automatically either.
Leadership needs to be capable, determined and visionary in its commitment to peace.
Second, diplomacy.
Third, institutional design.
Yet, no amount of diplomacy or institutional design can make up for local failures and the consequences that they have.
Therefore, we must invest in developing leaders, leaders that have the skills, vision and determination to make peace.
A final thought: Ending civil wars is a process that is fraught with dangers, frustrations and setbacks.
It often takes a generation to accomplish, but it also requires us, today's generation, to take responsibility and to learn the right lessons about leadership, diplomacy and institutional design, so that the child soldiers of today can become the children of tomorrow.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm here today to show my photographs of the Lakota.
Many of you may have heard of the Lakota, or at least the larger group of tribes, called the Sioux.
The Lakota are one of many tribes that were moved off their land to prisoner-of-war camps, now called reservations.
It is sometimes referred to as Prisoner of War Camp Number 334, and it is where the Lakota now live.
Now, if any of you have ever heard of AIM, the American Indian Movement, or of Russell Means, or Leonard Peltier, or of the standoff at Oglala, then you know Pine Ridge is ground zero for Native issues in the US.
So I've been asked to talk a little bit today about my relationship with the Lakota, and that's a very difficult one for me, because, if you haven't noticed from my skin color, I'm white, and that is a huge barrier on a Native reservation.
But on Pine Ridge, I will always be what is called "wasichu."
"Wasichu" is a Lakota word that means "non-Indian," but another version of this word means "the one who takes the best meat for himself."
We are at a private school in the American West, sitting in red velvet chairs with money in our pockets.
On this piece of paper is the history the way I learned it from my Lakota friends and family.
1851: The first treaty of Fort Laramie was made, clearly marking the boundaries of the Lakota Nation.
The Homestead Act, signed by President Lincoln, unleashed a flood of white settlers into Native lands.
1863: An uprising of Santee Sioux in Minnesota ends with the hanging of 38 Sioux men, the largest mass execution in US history.
The execution was ordered by President Lincoln, only two days after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
1866: The beginning of the Transcontinental Railroad -- a new era.
In response, three tribes led by the Lakota chief Red Cloud attacked and defeated the US army, many times over.
1868: The second Fort Laramie Treaty clearly guarantees the sovereignty of the Great Sioux Nation and the Lakotas' ownership of the sacred Black Hills.
The government also promises land and hunting rights in the surrounding states.
The treaty seemed to be a complete victory for Red Cloud and the Sioux.
In fact, this is the only war in American history in which the government negotiated a peace by conceding everything demanded by the enemy.
1869: The Transcontinental Railroad was completed.
It began carrying, among other things, large numbers of hunters, who began the wholesale killing of buffalo, eliminating a source of food, clothing and shelter for the Sioux.
In addition, the military issued orders forbidding western Indians from leaving reservations.
1874: General George Custer announced the discovery of gold in Lakota territory, specifically the Black Hills.
The news of gold creates a massive influx of white settlers into Lakota Nation.
1875: The Lakota war begins over the violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty.
1876: On July 26th, on its way to attack a Lakota village, Custer's 7th Cavalry was crushed at the battle of Little Big Horn.
1877: The great Lakota warrior and chief named Crazy Horse surrendered at Fort Robinson.
He was later killed while in custody.
1877 is also the year we found a way to get around the Fort Laramie Treaties.
A new agreement was presented to Sioux chiefs and their leading men, under a campaign known as "Sell or Starve" -- sign the paper, or no food for your tribe.
Only 10 percent of the adult male population signed.
Reservations are cut up into 160-acre sections, and distributed to individual Indians with the surplus disposed of.
The move destroyed the reservations, making it easier to further subdivide and to sell with every passing generation.
Most of the surplus land and many of the plots within reservation boundaries are now in the hands of white ranchers.
This is the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre.
On December 29, US troops surrounded a Sioux encampment at Wounded Knee Creek, and massacred Chief Big Foot and 300 prisoners of war, using a new rapid-fire weapon that fired exploding shells, called a Hotchkiss gun.
For this so-called "battle," 20 Congressional Medals of Honor for Valor were given to the 7th Cavalry.
To this day, this is the most Medals of Honor ever awarded for a single battle.
More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War One, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.
The Wounded Knee Massacre is considered the end of the Indian wars.
Whenever I visit the site of the mass grave at Wounded Knee, I see it not just as a grave for the Lakota or for the Sioux, but as a grave for all indigenous peoples.
And it was a beautiful dream."
With this event, a new era in Native American history began.
Everything can be measured before Wounded Knee and after, because it was in this moment, with the fingers on the triggers of the Hotchkiss guns, that the US government openly declared its position on Native rights.
1980: The longest-running court case in US history, the Sioux Nation versus the United States, was ruled upon by the US Supreme Court.
The court stated that the Black Hills were illegally taken, and that the initial offering price, plus interest, should be paid to the Sioux Nation.
As payment for the Black Hills, the court awarded only 106 million dollars to the Sioux Nation.
The Sioux refused the money with the rallying cry, "The Black Hills are not for sale."
Many are homeless, and those with homes are packed into rotting buildings with up to five families.
Thirty-nine percent of homes on Pine Ridge have no electricity.
At least 60 percent of the homes on the reservation are infested with black mold.
More than 90 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line.
The tuberculosis rate on Pine Ridge is approximately eight times higher than the US national average.
The infant mortality rate is the highest on this continent, and is about three times higher than the US national average.
Cervical cancer is five times higher than the US national average.
The school dropout rate is up to 70 percent.
Teacher turnover is eight times higher than the US national average.
Frequently, grandparents are raising their grandchildren because parents, due to alcoholism, domestic violence and general apathy, cannot raise them.
Fifty percent of the population over the age of 40 suffers from diabetes.
The life expectancy for men is between 46 and 48 years old -- roughly the same as in Afghanistan and Somalia.
This is how we came to own these United States.
Prisoners are still born into prisoner of war camps, long after the guards are gone.
These are the bones left after the best meat has been taken.
As removed as we, the dominant society, may feel from a massacre in 1890, or a series of broken treaties 150 years ago, I still have to ask you the question: How should you feel about the statistics of today?
What is the connection between these images of suffering and the history that I just read to you?
There must be some call to action.
Because for so long, I've been standing on the sidelines, content to be a witness, just taking photographs.
The suffering of indigenous peoples is not a simple issue to fix.
The United States continues on a daily basis to violate the terms of the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties with the Lakota.
The call to action I offer today -- my TED wish -- is this: Honor the treaties.
Give back the Black Hills.
(Applause)
One man died after working a 36-hour shift.
We all love chocolate.
Eighty percent of the cocoa comes from Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana and it's harvested by children.
Cote d'Ivoire, we have a huge problem of child slaves.
Children have been trafficked from other conflict zones to come and work on the coffee plantations.
Cotton: Uzbekistan is the second biggest exporter of cotton on Earth.
Every year when it comes to the cotton harvest, the government shuts down the schools, puts the kids in buses, buses them to the cotton fields to spend three weeks harvesting the cotton.
You want to see the classic sweatshop, meet me at Madison Square Garden, I'll take you down the street, and I'll show you a Chinese sweatshop.
But take the example of heparin.
It's a pharmaceutical product.
The problem is that the active ingredient in there -- as I mentioned earlier -- comes from pigs.
The main American manufacturer of that active ingredient decided a few years ago to relocate to China because it's the world's biggest supplier of pigs.
So a couple of years ago, we had a scandal which killed about 80 people around the world, because of contaminants that crept into the heparin supply chain.
This substitute cost nine dollars a pound, whereas real heparin, the real ingredient, cost 900 dollars a pound.
How did the Chinese State Agency for Food and Drugs allow this to happen?"
There are 500 of these facilities producing active ingredients in China alone.
We don't have a system to ensure that human rights, basic dignity, are ensured.
So governments who are failing, who are dropping the ball at a national level, have even less ability to get their arms around the problem at an international level.
So, if we're going to ensure the delivery of the key public goods at an international level -- in this case, in the global supply chain -- we have to come up with a different mechanism.
Fortunately, we have some examples.
In the 1990s, there were a whole series of scandals concerning the production of brand name goods in the U.S. -- child labor, forced labor, serious health and safety abuses.
And eventually President Clinton, in 1996, convened a meeting at the White House, invited industry, human rights NGOs, trade unions, the Department of Labor, got them all in a room and said, "Look, I don't want globalization to be a race to the bottom.
So they formed a White House task force, and they spent about three years arguing about who takes how much responsibility in the global supply chain.
Companies didn't feel it was their responsibility.
So they agreed, "Okay, what we'll do is we agree on a common set of standards, code of conduct.
We'll apply that throughout our global supply chain regardless of ownership or control.
Now of course, this doesn't come naturally to multinational companies.
You need a safe space.
You need a place where people can come together, sit down without fear of judgment, without recrimination, to actually face the problem, agree on the problem and come up with solutions.
The problem is the lack of trust, the lack of confidence, the lack of partnership between NGOs, campaign groups, civil society organizations and multinational companies.
You'll say, "How can we trust them?"
You can call yourself responsible, but responsibility without accountability often doesn't work.
You don't need to believe me. You shouldn't believe me.
Go to the website. Look at the audit results.
Ask yourself, is this company behaving in a socially responsible way?
I hate the idea that governments are not protecting human rights around the world.
Just look at pandemics -- swine flu, bird flu, H1N1.
What they lack is that safe space to come together, agree and move to action.
There are thousands of suppliers in there."
But there are companies.
Some of them are very, very large companies.
But we break it down to some basic realities.
It starts with just giving people back their dignity.
I was sitting in a slum outside Gurgaon just next to Delhi, one of the flashiest, brightest new cities popping up in India right now, and I was talking to workers who worked in garment sweatshops down the road, and I asked them what message they would like me to take to the brands.
They didn't say money.
They said, "The people who employ us treat us like we are less than human, like we don't exist.
Please ask them to treat us like human beings."
So I appeal to you.
Thank you very much.
Do you ever feel completely overwhelmed when you're faced with a complex problem?
I'm an ecologist, and I study complexity. I love complexity.
And I study that in the natural world, the interconnectedness of species.
So here's a food web, or a map of feeding links between species that live in Alpine Lakes in the mountains of California.
So I want to share with you a couple key insights about complexity we're learning from studying nature that maybe are applicable to other problems.
For example, you could plot the flow of carbon through corporate supply chains in a corporate ecosystem, or the interconnections of habitat patches for endangered species in Yosemite National Park.
So let's switch gears and look at a really complex problem courtesy of the U.S. government.
This is a diagram of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
It was front page of the New York Times a couple months ago.
And the stated goal was to increase popular support for the Afghan government.
Most are non-violent and they fall into two broad categories: active engagement with ethnic rivalries and religious beliefs and fair, transparent economic development and provisioning of services.
We're discovering in nature that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So to explain that, let me first talk a bit about what math looks like in the real world and what it looks like in education.
It's done by geologists, engineers, biologists, all sorts of different people -- modeling and simulation.
So the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem.
But in the last few decades that has totally changed.
It's the chore.
I estimated that, just today, across the world, we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand.
For example: mental arithmetic.
One thing I often ask about is ancient Greek and how this relates.
I was somewhat interested in ancient Greek, but I don't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient Greek.
You shouldn't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject.
But automation in cars allowed that to separate, so driving is now a quite separate subject, so to speak, from engineering of the car or learning how to service it.
So just because paper was invented before computers, it doesn't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics.
I don't think so.
Just to be clear, I think computers can really help with this problem, actually make it more conceptual.
And think of the outside world.
Do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually gotten reduced by using computers?
So if you go through lots of examples, you can get the answer, you can understand how the basics of the system work better.
Programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days, and it's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand.
So to be clear, what I really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual, simultaneously.
This was an example I built for my daughter.
And very, very simple.
We were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number.
Very simple example.
And the country that does this first will, in my view, leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even, an improved economy, an improved outlook.
And let's understand: this is not an incremental sort of change.
We're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real-world math.
(Applause)
Delighted to be here and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart, which is beauty.
I try to figure out intellectually, philosophically, psychologically, what the experience of beauty is, what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it.
I mean just think of the sheer variety -- a baby's face, Berlioz's "Harold in Italy," movies like "The Wizard of Oz" or the plays of Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, "Der Rosenkavalier," a stunning match-winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh's "Starry Night," a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen.
I can, however, give you at least a taste of what I regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have.
Of course, a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question, "What is beauty?"
Or, as some people, especially academics prefer, beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder.
Beethoven is adored in Japan.
Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints.
Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in British museums, while Shakespeare is translated into every major language of the Earth.
How can we explain this universality?
And it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries.
The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations.
Beauty is an adaptive effect, which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment.
As many of you will know, evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms.
The other great principle of evolution is sexual selection, and it operates very differently.
The peacock's magnificent tail is the most famous example of this.
Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind, we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction.
Beauty is nature's way of acting at a distance, so to speak.
Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure, the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes.
This landscape shows up today on calendars, on postcards, in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from New York to New Zealand.
It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees.
The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally -- get this -- a path or a road, perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it.
This landscape type is regarded as beautiful, even by people in countries that don't have it.
The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience.
It is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are the stupendously skillful cave paintings that we all know from Lascaux and Chauvet.
Chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old, along with a few small, realistic sculptures of women and animals from the same period.
Beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you'd see at an arts and crafts fair, as well as ochre body paint, have been found from around 100,000 years ago.
But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this.
These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what are to our eyes an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form.
Their symmetry, their attractive materials and, above all, their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes, even today.
(Laughter) Except, of course, what's interesting about this is that we can't be sure how that idea was conveyed, because the Homo erectus that made these objects did not have language.
It's hard to grasp, but it's an incredible fact.
For us moderns, virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, to express intense emotions with music, painting and dance.
We find beauty in something done well.
So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone, don't be so sure it's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful.
Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it, even before they could put their love into words.
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?
It's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors.
Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists.
(Applause)
And I would say, "Relax, Alex.
And you look down at Yokneam; everything is so small and tiny.
We walked 120 kilometers until we reached Sudan.
Now I remember, when he said it, I felt goosebumps on my body, because he said it overlooking the Moab Mountains here in the background.
That's where Joshua descended and crossed the Jordan and led the people of Israel into the land of Canaan 3,000 years ago in this final leg of the journey from Africa.
We visit Kibbutzim that were established by Holocaust survivors.
And we go through numerous remnants of Jewish settlements, Nabatic settlements, Canaanite settlements -- three-, four, five-thousand years old.
And by appreciating complexity, they become more tolerant, and tolerance leads to hope.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you very much.
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."
(Applause) This song is called "Farther than the Sun."
It ruined my life -- (Laughter) "The Inconvenient Truth" and Mr. Gore.
And here it is: it's called the Green School.
The classrooms have no walls.
The teacher is writing on a bamboo blackboard.
And we practice holism.
Our children spend 181 days going to school in a box.
The people that built my school also built the prison and the insane asylum out of the same materials.
When the turbine drops in, it will produce 8,000 watts of electricity, day and night.
And you know what these are.
How many people times how much water.
These are compost toilets, and nobody at the school wanted to know about them, especially the principal.
He said, "I've been on an airplane for 24 hours."
In August I'm bringing my sons."
These are volcanic stones laid by hand.
And when the kindergarten kids recently moved their gate, they found out the fence was made out of tapioca.
They took the tapioca roots up to the kitchen, sliced them thinly and made delicious chips.
Green School is going into its third year with 160 children.
(Laughter) We've done a lot of outrageous things in our lives, and we said, okay, local, what does "local" mean?
Local means that 20 percent of the population of the school has to be Balinese, and this was a really big commitment.
But what's happening, our learning-different kids -- dyslexic -- we've renamed them prolexic -- are doing well in these beautiful, beautiful classrooms.
It's as strong and dense as teak and it will hold up any roof.
The yellow box was called the administration complex.
It's a double helix.
And the problem of building it -- when the Balinese workers saw long reams of plans, they looked at them and said, "What's this?"
So we built big models.
And Balinese carpenters like this measured them with their bamboo rulers, selected the bamboo and built the buildings using age-old techniques, mostly by hand.
It was chaos.
The heart of school has seven kilometers of bamboo in it.
It may not be the biggest bamboo building in the world, but many people believe that it's the most beautiful.
Green School is a model we built for the world.
You ruined my life, but you gave me an incredible future.
(Applause)
We are talking about the high seas.
The "high seas" is a legal term, but in fact, it covers 50 percent of the planet.
And then finally, we're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that's rooted in ocean-basin-wide conservation, but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect.
It's unbelievable.
So within three years, from 2003 to 2006, we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling.
In 2009, when the U.N. reviewed progress, they discovered that almost 100 million square-kilometers of seabed had been protected.
It's also known as the spawning ground for eels from Northern European and Northern American rivers that are now so dwindling in numbers that they've actually stopped showing up in Stockholm, and five showed up in the U.K. just recently.
The captain of a New Zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the Ross Sea killer whales, who are directly dependent on the Antarctic toothfish as their main source of food.
Coming closer to here, the Costa Rica Dome is a recently discovered area -- potentially year-round habitat for blue whales.
But what's unusual about the Costa Rica Dome is, in fact, it's not a permanent place.
So, in fact, it's not permanently in the high seas.
We've heard about the Tagging of Pacific Predators project, one of the 17 Census of Marine Life projects.
So stay tuned for further information.
We can also tag and track fishing vessels.
But we need to think broad-scale. We need to think globally.
So with that, I would just like to sincerely thank and honor Sylvia Earle for her wish, for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist: I had a baby.
Sorry, TED.
It's not that you're more neurotic than everyone else; it's just that you're more honest about how neurotic you are."
So my baby, Vander, is eight years old now.
In fact, more than four million people sustain a concussion every year, and these data are just among kids under 14 who were seen in emergency rooms.
In fact, high-school athletes are three times more likely to sustain catastrophic injuries relative even to their college-age peers, and it takes them longer to return to a symptom-free baseline.
What you may not be familiar with is that this research was spearheaded by NFL wives who said, "Isn't it weird that my 46-year-old husband is forever losing his keys?"
I may have forgotten to mention that my son is an only child.
HEADS UP is specific to concussion in kids.
This is a great resource for student athletes, teachers, parents, professionals, athletic and coaching staff.
What's the budget for protective equipment?
Wear a helmet.
Recently, one of my graduate students, Tom, said, "Kim, I've decided to wear a bike helmet on the way to class."
Thank you.
(Applause)
I do not remember what time it was.
Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart, my windows, my bed, everything.
I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night.
Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister.
His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything.
This is not a story of a nameless survivor of war, and nameless refugees, whose stereotypical images we see in our newspapers and our TV with tattered clothes, dirty face, scared eyes.
You see, I grew up in war-torn Iraq, and I believe that there are two sides of wars and we've only seen one side of it.
We only talk about one side of it.
But there's another side that I have witnessed as someone who lived in it and someone who ended up working in it.
I grew up with the colors of war -- the red colors of fire and blood, the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile, so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it.
I grew up with the sounds of war -- the staccato sounds of gunfire, the wrenching booms of explosions, ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens.
I have since left Iraq and founded a group called Women for Women International that ends up working with women survivors of wars.
A Palestinian woman once told me, "It is not about the fear of one death," she said, "sometimes I feel I die 10 times in one day," as she was describing the marches of soldiers and the sounds of their bullets.
Eighty percent of refugees around the world are women and children. Oh.
Ninety percent of modern war casualties are civilians.
How interesting.
Oh, half a million women in Rwanda get raped in 100 days.
Or, as we speak now, hundreds of thousands of Congolese women are getting raped and mutilated.
Checkmate.
We are missing stories of women who are literally keeping life going in the midst of wars.
There are two sides of war.
There is a side that fights, and there is a side that keeps the schools and the factories and the hospitals open.
And in order for us to understand how do we build lasting peace, we must understand war and peace from both sides.
In order for us to understand what actually peace means, we need to understand, as one Sudanese woman once told me, "Peace is the fact that my toenails are growing back again."
She grew up in Sudan, in Southern Sudan, for 20 years of war, where it killed one million people and displaced five million refugees.
Many women were taken as slaves by rebels and soldiers, as sexual slaves who were forced also to carry the ammunition and the water and the food for the soldiers.
So that woman walked for 20 years, so she would not be kidnapped again.
We need to understand that we cannot actually have negotiations of ending of wars or peace without fully including women at the negotiating table.
There is no way we can talk about a lasting peace, building of democracy, sustainable economies, any kind of stabilities, if we do not fully include women at the negotiating table.
And last, but not least, we need to invest in peace and women, not only because it is the right thing to do, not only because it is the right thing to do, for all of us to build sustainable and lasting peace today, but it is for the future.
She was earning 450 dollars. She was doing okay.
We need to invest in women, because that's our only chance to ensure that there is no more war in the future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
But let's sort of start at the beginning.
So, we have companies and non-profits and charities and all these groups that have employees or volunteers of some sort.
I was at work. I sat at my desk. I used my expensive computer.
How about seven hours?
I mean, is this China? What the hell is going on here?
The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings.
And meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous things during the day at work.
So meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today, especially at offices.
So I have some suggestions to remedy the situation.
And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work gets done when no one talks to each other.
Another thing you can try, is switching from active communication and collaboration, which is like face-to-face stuff -- tapping people on the shoulder, saying hi to them, having meetings, and replace that with more passive models of communication, using things like email and instant messaging, or collaboration products, things like that.
And the last suggestion I have is that, if you do have a meeting coming up, if you have the power, just cancel it.
(Applause)
(Applause) Thank you very much.
This is the first house I built.
Everything in the kitchen was salvaged.
It looks a little phallic, but after all, it's a bathroom.
(Laughter) This is a house based on a Budweiser can.
(Laughter) The shower is intended to simulate a glass of beer.
And then the faucet is a beer tap.
(Laughter) This little house here, those branches there are made out of Bois d'arc or Osage orange.
So I can show you an object you've never seen before.
But you've never seen this one before.
That's one of those new chocolate cell phones."
Repetition creates pattern.
That causes a lot of waste in the building industry.
The second cause is, Friedrich Nietzsche, along about 1885, wrote a book titled "The Birth of Tragedy."
And in there, he said cultures tend to swing between one of two perspectives: on the one hand, we have an Apollonian perspective, which is very crisp and premeditated and intellectualized and perfect.
The third thing is arguably -- The Industrial Revolution started in the Renaissance with the rise of humanism, then got a little jump start along about the French Revolution.
So now we have standardized materials.
Well, that's just a myth.
But right now, I'm saving you five dollars a minute.
The walls are this thick.
One is that all the professionals, all the tradesmen, vendors, inspectors, engineers, architects all think like this.
That's why all subdivisions look the same.
Human beings are a social species.
And what we need to do is reconnect with those really primal parts of ourselves and make some decisions and say, "You know, I think I would like to put CDs across the wall there.
It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids, like me, to get their parents to buy stuff that really isn't good for us or the planet.
Little kids, especially, are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys.
(Laughter) The seeds are then planted, then grown.
Yet almost all the corn we eat has been altered genetically in some way.
And let me tell you, corn is in everything.
Next, more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables, like pesticides and herbicides, to kill weeds and bugs.
Then they irradiate our food, trying to make it last longer, so it can travel thousands of miles from where it's grown to the supermarkets.
Now a while back, I wanted to be an NFL football player.
(Applause) Thank you.
This man, this "lunatic farmer," doesn't use any pesticides, herbicides, or genetically modified seeds.
Sometimes I go to Bill's farm and volunteer, so I can see up close and personal where the meat I eat comes from.
So next time you're at the grocery store, think local, choose organic, know your farmer and know your food.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Well, the subject of difficult negotiation reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the Middle East, of a man who left to his three sons, 17 camels.
The wise old woman thought about their problem for a long time, and finally she came back and said, "Well, I don't know if I can help you, but at least, if you want, you can have my camel."
(Laughter) Now, if you think about that story for a moment, I think it resembles a lot of the difficult negotiations we get involved in.
Finding that 18th camel in the world's conflicts has been my life passion.
I basically see humanity a bit like those three brothers.
We're all one family.
It's not easy, but it's simple.
Because if you think about it, normally when we think of conflict, when we describe it, there's always two sides -- it's Arabs versus Israelis, labor versus management, husband versus wife, Republicans versus Democrats.
But what we don't often see is that there's always a third side, and the third side of the conflict is us, it's the surrounding community, it's the friends, the allies, the family members, the neighbors.
And we can play an incredibly constructive role.
Some years ago, I was involved as a facilitator in some very tough talks between the leaders of Russia and the leaders of Chechnya.
And we met in the Hague, in the Peace Palace, in the same room where the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal was taking place.
And then he turned to me and said, "You're an American.
We're here to see if we can figure out a way to stop the suffering and the bloodshed in Chechnya."
How many of you in the last years have ever found yourself worrying about the Middle East and wondering what anyone could do?
And here, it's so far away.
Why do we pay so much attention to this conflict?
Is it the number of deaths?
Stories matter; as an anthropologist, I know that.
Stories are what we use to transmit knowledge.
Now, as anthropologists, we know that every culture has an origin story.
What's the origin story of the Middle East?
That man, of course, was Abraham.
Today, we face the scourge of terrorism.
What is terrorism?
Terrorism is basically taking an innocent stranger and treating them as an enemy whom you kill in order to create fear.
And that's what comes to the first step here.
Because walking has a real power.
Then we crossed the border into Syria, went to Aleppo, which, turns out, is named after Abraham.
We went to Damascus, which has a long history associated with Abraham.
We then came to Northern Jordan, to Jerusalem -- which is all about Abraham -- to Bethlehem, and finally, to the place where he's buried, in Hebron.
Men, women, young people, old people -- more women than men, actually, interestingly.
Last month, there was a piece in the Manchester Guardian about it, two whole pages.
And they quoted a villager who said, "This walk connects us to the world."
He said, "It was like a light that went on in our lives -- it brought us hope."
Because as people walk, they spend money.
And this woman right here, Um Ahmad, is a woman who lives on the path in Northern Jordan.
The potential is basically to change the game.
And to change the game, you have to change the frame, the way we see things -- to change the frame from hostility to hospitality, from terrorism to tourism.
Now, the acorn is associated with the oak tree, of course -- grows into an oak tree, which is associated with Abraham.
So my question is, if it can be done in Europe, why not in the Middle East?
It's not easy, of course.
But it's possible.
Just go up to someone who's from a different culture, a different country, a different ethnicity -- some difference -- and engage them in a conversation.
After a TED Talk, why not a TED Walk?
Each of us, with a single step, can take the world, can bring the world a step closer to peace.
If we're able to unite our third-side webs of peace, we can even halt the lion of war.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So, what is capitalism?
In my view, capitalism should not be thought of as an ideology, but instead should be thought of as an operating system.
Apps and hardware.
It needs to be patched, it needs to be updated, new releases have to happen.
But even if you go to the constitution, you'll notice, before the founders even got to the First Amendment -- with free speech, free religion, free press, they thought about patents and copyright.
And indeed, that's exactly what happened.
A few years after the Wright brothers figured out flight, human beings started using more and more cars.
And all of a sudden, the regulatory system -- the operating system -- had to be patched to all of a sudden address the safety of consumers.
And all of a sudden, the drivers of these automobiles had to have driver's licenses, eye exams, registered motor vehicles, speed limits, rules of the road, so that horses, pedestrians, could coexist with cars.
Similarly, five or ten years from now, we're going to see the same thing with self-driving cars -- coexisting with human-driven cars.
The reason why this is important, is in 10 years, another thing is going to happen beyond drones and self-driving cars, but you're going to see the most valuable economy in the world -- the largest economy in the world -- is going to be a country run by communists.
And this is going to have fundamental problems and present an identity crisis for the United States.
And this is why it's very important to think of American capitalism as an operating system and not as an ideology.
And I ask policymakers to think about -- decoupling ideology from economics, and think about how good policy can ultimately become good politics.
Thank you.
(Applause)
There's six million species of insects on this planet, six million species.
It was 80 billion U.S. dollars.
Small animals eat insects.
But the small animals that eat insects are being eaten by larger animals, still larger animals.
If you go out for dinner, like in a fish restaurant, where you can select which fish you want to eat, you can select which insects you would like to eat.
There's more than 1,000 species of insects that are being eaten all around the globe.
(Laughter) In fact, all our processed foods contain more proteins than we would be aware of.
One gram of cochineal costs about 30 euros.
Where, at the moment, we have something between six and seven billion people, it will grow to about nine billion in 2050.
How are we going to feed this world?
And we eat quite a lot of it.
So if a third of the world population is going to increase its meat consumption from 25 to 80 on average, and a third of the world population is living in China and in India, we're having an enormous demand on meat.
Now to start with, I should say that we are eating way too much meat in the Western world.
But then there's a lot of problems that come with meat production, and we're being faced with that more and more often.
So if you would be an entrepreneur, what would you do?
If you produce insects, you have less manure per kilogram of meat that you produce.
Furthermore, per kilogram of manure, you have much, much less ammonia and fewer greenhouse gases when you have insect manure than when you have cow manure.
In fact, it's comparable to anything we eat as meat at the moment.
And even in terms of calories, it is very good.
And then 80 percent of the world already eats insects, so we are just a minority -- in a country like the U.K., the USA, the Netherlands, anywhere.
(Applause)
Africa was truly fascinating for me.
I became an industrial engineer, engineer in product development, and I focused on appropriate detection technologies, actually the first appropriate technologies for developing countries.
I started working in the industry, but I wasn't really happy to contribute to a material consumer society in a linear, extracting and manufacturing mode.
I quit my job to focus on the real world problem: landmines.
Princess Diana is announcing on TV that landmines form a structural barrier to any development, which is really true.
We chose rats.
Why would you choose rats?
Very sustainable in this environment.
Now why would you use rats?
Rats have been used since the '50s last century, in all kinds of experiments.
A clicker, which makes a particular sound with which you can reinforce particular behaviors.
This is our team in Mozambique: one Tanzanian trainer, who transfers the skills to these three Mozambican fellows.
We have a demonstration site in Mozambique.
And there's about 6,000 people last year that walked on a landmine, but worldwide last year, almost 1.9 million died from tuberculosis as a first cause of infection.
Microscopy, the standard WHO procedure, reaches from 40 to 60 percent reliability.
is "tering," which, etymologically, refers to the smell of tar.
So what we did is we collected some samples -- just as a way of testing -- from hospitals, trained rats on them and see if this works, and wonder, well, we can reach 89 percent sensitivity, 86 percent specificity using multiple rats in a row.
This is a positive sample.
A cage like this -- (Applause) A cage like this -- provided that you have rats, and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats -- a cage like this, operating throughout the day, can process 1,680 samples.
Here is a first prototype of our camera rat, which is a rat with a rat backpack with a camera that can go under rubble to detect for victims after earthquake and so on.
This is in a prototype stage.
It is about empowering vulnerable communities to tackle difficult, expensive and dangerous humanitarian detection tasks, and doing that with a local resource, plenty available.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I've been tailoring and making my own clothes from scratch ever since, so everything in my closet is uniquely my own.
But as I was sorting through the endless racks of clothes at these thrift stores, I started to ask myself, what happens to all the clothes that I don't buy?
I did some research and I pretty quickly found a very scary supply chain that led me to some pretty troubling realities.
In the US, only 15 percent of the total textile and garment waste that's generated each year ends up being donated or recycled in some way, which means that the other 85 percent of textile and garment waste end up in landfills every year.
This averages out to be roughly 200 T-shirts per person ending up in the garbage.
In Canada, we throw away enough clothing to fill the largest stadium in my home town of Toronto, one that seats 60,000 people, with a mountain of clothes three times the size of that stadium.
Now, even with this, I still think that Canadians are the more polite North Americans, so don't hold it against us.
(Laughter) What was even more surprising was seeing that the fashion industry is the second-largest polluter in the world behind the oil and gas industry.
I don't want to defend the oil and gas industry but I'd be lying if I said I was surprised to hear they were the number one polluter.
Because maintaining that status quo is the opposite of what the fashion industry stands for.
The unfortunate reality is, not only do we waste a lot of the things we do consume, but we also use a lot to produce the clothes that we buy each year.
On average, a household's purchase of clothing per year requires 1,000 bathtubs of water to produce.
It's modular in its nature.
Take this motorcycle jacket as an example.
It's a pretty standard jacket with its buttons, zippers and trim.
But in order for us to efficiently recycle a jacket like this, we need to be able to easily remove these items and quickly get down to just the fabric.
So in many cases it requires more time or more money to disassemble a jacket like this.
In some cases, it's just more cost-effective to throw it away rather than recycle it.
For most of the types of clothes we have in our closet the average lifespan is about three years.
Because being able to extend the life of a garment by even only nine months reduces the waste and water impact that that garment has by 20 to 30 percent.
Which means that styles are always going to change and you're probably going to be wearing something different than you were today eight seasons from now, no matter how environmentally friendly you want to be.
Currently, 10 to 20 percent of the harsh chemical dye that we use end up in water bodies that neighbor production hubs in developing nations.
It's these harsh chemicals that keep that bright red dress bright red for so many years.
What if we were able to use spices and herbs to dye our clothes?
Fashion today is all about individuality.
But what could be more personalized, more unique, than clothes that change color over time?
So it's unique, but more importantly, it's naturally dyed.
But if we were able to apply this or a similar process on a commercial scale, then our need to rely on these harsh chemical dyes for our clothes could be easily reduced.
The 2.4-trillion-dollar fashion industry is fiercely competitive.
The fashion industry is the perfect industry to experiment with and embrace change that can one day get us to the sustainable future we so desperately need.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(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.
(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."
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.
It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that.
We heard the other day that everybody's got a strong opinion about video games.
But they don't consider themselves experts on video games; they've just got strong opinions.
But they probably don't think of these opinions as expertise.
But with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert.
And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is!
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.
There's a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if you follow it along, you learn a lot about this man.
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."
"'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.
(Laughter) Now, that's the way a lot of people feel about consciousness.
(Laughter) Real consciousness is not a bag of tricks.
But I'm not going to explain it all to you.
Here's how a philosopher explains the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick.
(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.
And the same is true of consciousness.
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.
It's a feature-length documentary on consciousness.
How many of you noticed that every one of those squares changed color?
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.
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.
Now, how can it be that there are all those changes going on, and that we're not aware of them?
And where your eye isn't looking, you're remarkably impoverished in your vision.
Bellotto was a student of Canaletto's.
And I noticed that on the bridge there, there's a lot of people -- you can just barely see them walking across the bridge.
You will have seen something like this -- this is the reverse effect.
It's the same thing.
Is the shape on the left the same as the shape on the right, rotated?
Yes, it's possible to do that.
But the details of the process are still in significant controversy.
You just know that you have certain beliefs.
And they come in a certain order, at a certain time.
Well, that's where you have to go backstage and ask the magician.
Can you see it?
Well, you know, in effect, the boundary's really there, in a certain sense.
But now, notice there are two ways of seeing the cube, right?
We don't have any trouble seeing the cube, but where does the color change?
The purple-painters and the green-painters fight over who's going to paint that bit behind the curtain? No.
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.
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.
So now we're going to be subjects in the experiment.
Indeed, Rensink's subjects took only a little bit more than a second to press the button.
2.9 seconds.
What's on the roof of that barn?
(Laughter) It's easy.
Is it a bridge or a dock?
This one because it's so large and yet it's pretty hard to see.
Can you see it?
Audience: Yes.
How many engines on the wing of that Boeing?
(Laughter) Right in the middle of the picture!
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.
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)
Restaurants and the food industry in general are pretty much the most wasteful industry in the world.
For every calorie of food that we consume here in Britain today, 10 calories are taken to produce it.
That's a lot.
It's then harvested.
It's then sold and bought, and it's then delivered to me.
There are different types of waste.
There's a waste of time; there's a waste of space; there's a waste of energy; and there's a waste of waste.
This is the restaurant, Acorn House.
Floor: sustainable, recyclable.
Chairs: recycled and recyclable.
I hate waste, especially walls.
And that's a plastic polymer.
And we filter our own water.
This is the kitchen, which is in the same room.
Okay, it's a small kitchen. It's about five square meters.
Three compost bins -- go through about 70 kilos of raw vegetable waste a week -- really good, makes fantastic compost.
And I tried taking the dried food waste, putting it to the worms, going, "There you go, dinner."
(Laughter) What you're seeing here is a water filtration system.
So, water is a very important aspect.
If I could get Waterhouse to be a no-carbon restaurant that is consuming no gas to start with, that would be great.
I managed to do it.
This restaurant looks a little bit like Acorn House -- same chairs, same tables.
The whole thing is electric, the restaurant and the kitchen.
Now it's important to understand that this room is cooled by water, heated by water, filters its own water, and it's powered by water.
It literally is Waterhouse.
And this is an English willow air diffuser, and that's softly moving that air current through the room.
I have no idea how it works, but I paid a lot of money for it.
He's growing all his own fruit, and that's fantastic.
In fact, I'm trying and I'm going to make this the most sustainable supermarket in the world.
I think it's important.
Of course, my job is all about listening.
And it sounds quite simple, but actually, it's quite a big, big job.
Now, I don't mean just the sound; I mean really listen to that thunder within yourselves.
Listen, listen, listen.
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.
But I can surely tell you that in my country, much like on Wall Street and the city of London and elsewhere, men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector, and that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems.
What does that mean?
It was also about a business opportunity.
Will government change?
(Applause) Einstein said that this was the definition of insanity -- to do the same things over and over again, hoping for a different outcome.
We have a long history of strong, courageous, independent women, ever since the Viking age.
And I want to tell you when I first realized that women matter to the economy and to the society, I was seven -- it happened to be my mother's birthday -- October 24, 1975.
For me it was the start of a long journey, but I decided that day to matter.
Five years later, Iceland elected Vigdis Finnbogadottir as their president -- first female to become head of state, single mom, a breast cancer survivor who had had one of her breasts removed.
(Applause) So I've had incredibly many women role models that have influenced who I am and where I am today.
That's how we change the world. That's the only sustainable future.
(Applause)
I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx.
Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man.
We lived in the Bronx at the time, and the burial was in a place called Long Island, it was about two hours outside of the city.
I can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?"
(Applause)
It's an Indian story about an Indian woman and her journey.
Because all of my best school friends were getting dolled up to get married with a lot of dowry, and here I was with a tennis racket and going to school and doing all kinds of extracurricular activities.
For me the policing stood for power to correct, power to prevent and power to detect.
That's the reason, as a woman, I joined the Indian Police Service.
This is about tough policing, equal policing.
I said, "Do you pray? Do you want to pray?"
I prayed for them, and things started to change.
You see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class.
It was the beginning of a change.
Stationery was donated.
You want to know more about this, go and see this film, "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana."
Let me show you the next slide.
This was a magic box.
If you see somebody in the blue -- yeah, this guy -- he was a prisoner, and he was a teacher.
That's a big way we, as a small group of activists, have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of India.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
We are now going through an amazing and unprecedented moment where the power dynamics between men and women are shifting very rapidly, and in many of the places where it counts the most, women are, in fact, taking control of everything.
In my mother's day, she didn't go to college.
And now, for every two men who get a college degree, three women will do the same.
Women, for the first time this year, became the majority of the American workforce.
A few years ago, the Marlboro Man was retired and replaced by this much less impressive specimen, who is a parody of American manhood, and that's what we have in our commercials today.
In American fertility clinics, 75 percent of couples are requesting girls and not boys.
And in places where you wouldn't think, such as South Korea, India and China, the very strict patriarchal societies are starting to break down a little, and families are no longer strongly preferring first-born sons.
If you think about this, if you just open your eyes to this possibility and start to connect the dots, you can see the evidence everywhere.
I myself have a husband and a father and two sons whom I dearly love.
I was reading headlines about the recession just like anyone else, and I started to notice a distinct pattern -- that the recession was affecting men much more deeply than it was affecting women.
The first was that these were no longer just temporary hits that the recession was giving men -- that this was reflecting a deeper underlying shift in our global economy.
Women, a majority of the workplace.
And labor statistics: women take up most managerial jobs.
And look at that last headline -- young women earning more than young men.
That particular headline comes to me from a market research firm.
It was young, single women who were the major purchasers of houses in the neighborhood.
And basically what you'll see is what economists talk about as the polarization of the economy.
It means that the economy is dividing into high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low-wage jobs -- and that the middle, the middle-skill jobs, and the middle-earning jobs, are starting to drop out of the economy.
What it's about is that the economy has changed a lot.
Those two economies require very different skills, and as it happens, women have been much better at acquiring the new set of skills than men have been.
What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills.
And then on top of that, that's created a kind of cascading effect.
To see what's going to happen, you can't just look at the workforce that is now, you have to look at our future workforce.
Why? This is a real mystery.
So for some reason men just don't end up going back to college.
There's been about a decade of research about what people are calling the "boy crisis."
But these college girls had a completely different view of their future.
And the instructor was up there in the class explaining to them all the ways in which they had lost their identity in this new age.
It's happening all over the world.
In India, poor women are learning English faster than their male counterparts in order to staff the new call centers that are growing in India.
But over the '70s and '80s, the South Korea government decided they wanted to rapidly industrialize, and so what they did was, they started to push women into the workforce.
And now look at the chart.
Now because we haven't fully processed this information, it's kind of coming back to us in our pop culture in these kind of weird and exaggerated ways, where you can see that the stereotypes are changing.
Even Helen Mirren can hold a gun these days.
So for a long time in the economic sphere, we've lived with the term "glass ceiling."
It's definitely terrifying to stand at the foot of a high bridge, but it's also pretty exhilarating, because it's beautiful up there, and you're looking out on a beautiful view.
(Applause)
I have been teaching for a long time, and in doing so have acquired a body of knowledge about kids and learning that I really wish more people would understand about the potential of students.
This was different than either generation had experienced before, and it changed the way I interacted with information even at just a small level.
Right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool, I take off from Wisconsin and move to Kansas, small town Kansas, where I had an opportunity to teach in a lovely, small-town, rural Kansas school district, where I was teaching my favorite subject, American government.
They produced flyers. They called offices.
From Kansas, I moved on to lovely Arizona, where I taught in Flagstaff for a number of years, this time with middle school students.
And one opportunity was we got to go and meet Paul Rusesabagina, which is the gentleman that the movie "Hotel Rwanda" is based after.
I teach at the Science Leadership Academy, which is a partnership school between the Franklin Institute and the school district of Philadelphia.
This is Robbie, and this was his first day of voting, and he wanted to share that with everybody and do that.
(Applause)
I started teaching MBA students 17 years ago.
Sometimes I run into my students years later.
Are they of the same race?
Mark Granovetter, the sociologist, had a famous paper "The Strength of Weak Ties," and what he did in this paper is he asked people how they got their jobs.
Your weak ties -- people you just met today -- they are your ticket to a whole new social world.
And I say, "Well, that's really hard, because your networks are so fundamentally predictable."
And so with these social hubs, the paradox is, interestingly enough, to get randomness, it requires, actually, some planning.
In one university that I worked at, there was a mail room on every single floor.
At another university I worked at, there was only one mail room, so all the faculty from all over that building would run into each other in that social hub.
So the real thing that I want you to think about is we've got to fight our filters.
Let me give you an example of that.
A few years ago, I had a very eventful year.
And so in a few weeks, what ended up happening was, I lost my identity as a faculty member, and I got a very stressful new identity as a mother.
What I also got was tons of advice from people.
The lower socioeconomic status people reached inwards.
How can we overcome this?
Look at words like "please," "thank you," "you're welcome" in other languages.
And so, the word "thank you," if you look at it in Spanish, Italian, French, "gracias," "grazie," "merci" in French.
And "kembali" in Indonesian is "Come back to me."
Why not instead think of yourself as an atom, bumping up against other atoms, maybe transferring energy with them, bonding with them a little and maybe creating something new on your travels through the social universe.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
It was in theory, and hopefully in practice, a smart online magazine about sex and culture.
RG: When we lowered the glossy parenting magazine that we were looking at, with these beautiful images, and looked at the scene in our actual living room, it looked a little bit more like this.
RG: So today, what we would love to do is share with you four parenting taboos.
We were in the process of giving birth to our first child.
The nurse was coming at me with this beautiful, beautiful child, and I remember, as she was approaching me, the voices of friends saying, "The moment they put the baby in your hands, you will feel a sense of love that will come over you that is [on] an order of magnitude more powerful than anything you've ever experienced in your entire life."
And instead, when the baby was placed in my hands, it was an extraordinary moment.
This picture is from literally a few seconds after the baby was placed in my hands and I brought him over.
But what I felt towards the child at that moment was deep affection, but nothing like what I feel for him now, five years later.
But I think a lot of men do go through this sense in the early months, maybe their first year, that their emotional response is inadequate in some fashion.
(Laughter) RG: I'm a very affectionate uncle, very affectionate uncle.
RG: The far left. AV: No!
It was a really wonderful experience, but when I got home, I suddenly felt very disconnected and suddenly shut in and shut out, and I was really surprised by those feelings.
And she said -- I'll never forget -- "It's just not something you want to say to a mother that's having a baby for the first time."
RG: And of course, we think it's precisely what you really should be saying to mothers who have kids for the first time.
AV: So taboo number three: you can't talk about your miscarriage -- but today I'll talk about mine.
So after we had Declan, we kind of recalibrated our expectations.
And it was obviously a very difficult time -- really painful.
As I was working through that mourning process, I was amazed that I didn't want to see anybody.
So it was a very difficult time.
And I think, miscarriage is an invisible loss.
And I think, with a death, you have a funeral, you celebrate the life, and there's a lot of community support, and it's something women don't have with miscarriage.
Fifteen to 20 percent of all pregnancies result in miscarriage, and I find this astounding.
In a survey, 74 percent of women said that miscarriage, they felt, was partly their fault, which is awful.
And astoundingly, 22 percent said they would hide a miscarriage from their spouse.
So taboo number four: you can't say that your average happiness has declined since having a child.
This chart is comprised of four completely independent studies.
Basically, there's this precipitous drop of marital satisfaction, which is closely aligned, we all know, with broader happiness, that doesn't rise again until your first child goes to college.
RG: And that's when it's great to be running a website for parents, because we got this incredible reporter to go and interview all the scientists who conducted these four studies.
So this is our guess as to what this baseline of average happiness arguably looks like throughout life.
And then, of course, as you get older, it's almost like age is a form of lithium.
And part of what happens, I think, in your '20s and '30s, is you start to learn to hedge your happiness.
It's great that we have these transcendent moments of joy, but they're sometimes pretty quick.
And so how about that average baseline of happiness?
AV: And we kind of feel that the happiness gap, which we talked about, is really the result of walking into parenting -- and really any long-term partnership for that matter -- with the wrong expectations.
RG + AV: Thank you.
(Applause)
Given a scene like this, a modern computer-vision algorithm can tell you that there's a woman and there's a dog.
It can tell you that the woman is smiling.
I work on this problem thinking about how humans understand and process the world.
The thoughts, memories and stories that a scene like this might evoke for humans.
Maybe you've seen a dog like this one before, or you've spent time running on a beach like this one, and that further evokes thoughts and memories of a past vacation, past times to the beach, times spent running around with other dogs.
One of my guiding principles is that by helping computers to understand what it's like to have these experiences, to understand what we share and believe and feel, then we're in a great position to start evolving computer technology in a way that's complementary with our own experiences.
When was the last time you saw a selfie at a funeral?
And the same blind spot continues even today in how well we can recognize different people's faces in facial recognition technology.
I though about the state of the art in research today, where we tend to limit our thinking to one dataset and one problem.
And that in doing so, we were creating more blind spots and biases that the AI could further amplify.
I realized then that we had to think deeply about how the technology we work on today looks in five years, in 10 years.
Humans evolve slowly, with time to correct for issues in the interaction of humans and their environment.
In contrast, artificial intelligence is evolving at an incredibly fast rate.
And that means that it really matters that we think about this carefully right now -- that we reflect on our own blind spots, our own biases, and think about how that's informing the technology we're creating and discuss what the technology of today will mean for tomorrow.
Stephen Hawking warns that "Artificial intelligence could end mankind."
We have open-source tools for machine learning and intelligence that we can contribute to.
We can share our experiences with technology and how it concerns us and how it excites us.
Are they evil?
In our time right now, we shape the AI of tomorrow.
Technology built on understanding the streaming visual worlds used as technology for self-driving cars.
That means that what we do now will affect what happens down the line and in the future.
If we want AI to evolve in a way that helps humans, then we need to define the goals and strategies that enable that path now.
We choose what the AI of the future will be.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So why do you think the rich should pay more in taxes?
Why did you buy the latest iPhone?
And why did so many people vote for Donald Trump?
So when you say that you prefer George Clooney to Tom Hanks, due to his concern for the environment, is that really true?
So I'm an experimental psychologist, and this is the problem we've been trying to solve in our lab.
So they're experts at creating the illusion of a free choice.
Since I'm a photographer, I like the way it's lit and looks.
Woman 2: No, I did not notice that.
So the strong conclusion to draw from this is that if there are no differences between a real choice and a manipulated choice, perhaps we make things up all the time.
And I like earrings."
So this is the effect we call "choice blindness."
But what you all want to know is of course does this extend also to more complex, more meaningful choices?
So in Sweden, the political landscape is dominated by a left-wing and a right-wing coalition.
And before each elections, the newspapers and the polling institutes put together what they call "an election compass" which consists of a number of dividing issues that sort of separates the two coalitions.
Things like if tax on gasoline should be increased or if the 13 months of paid parental leave should be split equally between the two parents in order to increase gender equality.
So, before the last Swedish election, we created an election compass of our own.
The same way we make mistakes when we try to understand other people.
If, say, you design something and then you ask people, "Why do you think this is good or bad?"
Or if you're a journalist asking a politician, "So, why did you make this decision?"
But if you want to look at it from a positive direction, it could be seen as showing, OK, so we're actually a little bit more flexible than we think.
We can change our minds.
Our attitudes are not set in stone.
Just because I said I liked something a year ago, doesn't mean I have to like it still.
(Applause)
What if I told you there was something that you can do right now that would have an immediate, positive benefit for your brain including your mood and your focus?
And what if I told you that same thing could actually last a long time and protect your brain from different conditions like depression, Alzheimer's disease or dementia.
I am talking about the powerful effects of physical activity.
Simply moving your body, has immediate, long-lasting and protective benefits for your brain.
So what I want to do today is tell you a story about how I used my deep understanding of neuroscience, as a professor of neuroscience, to essentially do an experiment on myself in which I discovered the science underlying why exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today.
The first is the prefrontal cortex, right behind your forehead, critical for things like decision-making, focus, attention and your personality.
The second key area is located in the temporal lobe, shown right here.
You have two temporal lobes in your brain, the right and the left, and deep in the temporal lobe is a key structure critical for your ability to form and retain new long-term memories for facts and events.
And that structure is called the hippocampus.
So I've always been fascinated with the hippocampus.
How could it be that an event that lasts just a moment, say, your first kiss, or the moment your first child was born, can form a memory that has changed your brain, that lasts an entire lifetime?
That's what I want to understand.
I wanted to start and record the activity of individual brain cells in the hippocampus as subjects were forming new memories.
And essentially try and decode how those brief bursts of electrical activity, which is how neurons communicate with each other, how those brief bursts either allowed us to form a new memory, or did not.
But a few years ago, I did something very unusual in science.
Because I encountered something that was so amazing, with the potential to change so many lives that I had to study it.
But when I stuck my head out of my lab door, I noticed something.
(Laughter) I didn't move my body at all.
And actually, it took me many years to realize it, I was actually miserable.
And I went on a river-rafting trip -- by myself, because I had no social life.
And I came back -- (Laughter) thinking, "Oh, my God, I was the weakest person on that trip."
And I came back with a mission.
And that's what made me go to the gym.
I was sitting at my desk, writing a research grant, and a thought went through my mind that had never gone through my mind before.
Maybe all that exercise that I had included and added to my life was changing my brain.
So as a curious neuroscientist, I went to the literature to see what I could find about what we knew about the effects of exercise on the brain.
And the more I learned, the more I realized how powerful exercise was.
And so now, after several years of really focusing on this question, I've come to the following conclusion: that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today for the following three reasons.
Number one: it has immediate effects on your brain.
That is going to increase your mood right after that workout, exactly what I was feeling.
My lab showed that a single workout can improve your ability to shift and focus attention, and that focus improvement will last for at least two hours.
And finally, studies have shown that a single workout will improve your reaction times which basically means that you are going to be faster at catching that cup of Starbucks that falls off the counter, which is very, very important.
And these effects are long-lasting because exercise actually changes the brain's anatomy, physiology and function.
The hippocampus -- or exercise actually produces brand new brain cells, new brain cells in the hippocampus, that actually increase its volume, as well as improve your long-term memory, OK?
Number two: the most common finding in neuroscience studies, looking at effects of long-term exercise, is improved attention function dependent on your prefrontal cortex.
But really, the most transformative thing that exercise will do is its protective effects on your brain.
Here you can think about the brain like a muscle.
The more you're working out, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex gets.
Because the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus are the two areas that are most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases and normal cognitive decline in aging.
So with increased exercise over your lifetime, you're not going to cure dementia or Alzheimer's disease, but what you're going to do is you're going to create the strongest, biggest hippocampus and prefrontal cortex so it takes longer for these diseases to actually have an effect.
That is, get your heart rate up.
And the good news is, you don't have to go to the gym to get a very expensive gym membership.
From going into the innermost workings of the brain, to trying to understand how exercise can improve our brain function, and my goal in my lab right now is to go beyond that rule of thumb that I just gave you -- three to four times a week, 30 minutes.
(Applause) Thank you.
And that is, bringing exercise in your life will not only give you a happier, more protective life today, but it will protect your brain from incurable diseases.
And in this way it will change the trajectory of your life for the better.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
So today I'm going to talk to you about the rise of collaborative consumption.
On our shelves at home, we have a box set of the DVD series "24," season six to be precise.
Now my husband, Chris, and I love this show.
But let's face it, when you've watched it once maybe, or twice, you don't really want to watch it again, because you know how Jack Bauer is going to defeat the terrorists.
I lived in New York for 10 years, and I am a big fan of "Sex and the City."
Now you may have noticed there's a new sector emerging called swap-trading.
Lo and behold, there in Reseda, CA was Rondoron who wanted swap his or her "like new" copy of "Sex and the City" for my copy of "24."
Yet 99 percent of trades on Swaptree happen successfully, and the one percent that receive a negative rating, it's for relatively minor reasons, like the item didn't arrive on time.
So what's happening here?
Namely, that technology is enabling trust between strangers.
We now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face to face, but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before.
So what's actually happening is that social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back.
From the mighty eBay, the grandfather of exchange marketplaces, to car-sharing companies such as GoGet, where you pay a monthly fee to rent cars by the hour, to social lending platforms such as Zopa, that will take anyone in this audience with 100 dollars to lend, and match them with a borrower anywhere in the world, we're sharing and collaborating again in ways that I believe are more hip than hippie.
Now before I dig into the different systems of collaborative consumption, I'd like to try and answer the question that every author rightfully gets asked, which is, where did this idea come from?
And the ubiquitous force of this peer-to-peer revolution means that sharing is happening at phenomenal rates.
I mean, we're monkeys, and we're born and bred to share and cooperate.
But things are changing, and one of the reasons why is the digital natives, or Gen-Y.
We now live in a connected age where we can locate anyone, anytime, in real-time, from a small device in our hands.
A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies, fundamentally changing the way we behave.
Three, pressing unresolved environmental concerns.
These four drivers are fusing together and creating the big shift -- away from the 20th century, defined by hyper-consumption, towards the 21st century, defined by collaborative consumption.
I generally believe we're at an inflection point where the sharing behaviors -- through sites such as Flickr and Twitter that are becoming second nature online -- are being applied to offline areas of our everyday lives.
From morning commutes to the way fashion is designed to the way we grow food, we are consuming and collaborating once again.
The first is redistribution markets.
Redistribution markets, just like Swaptree, are when you take a used, or pre-owned, item and move it from where it's not needed to somewhere, or someone, where it is.
They're increasingly thought of as the fifth 'R' -- reduce, reuse, recycle, repair and redistribute -- because they stretch the life cycle of a product and thereby reduce waste.
I bet, in a couple of years, that phrases like "coworking" and "couchsurfing" and "time banks" are going to become a part of everyday vernacular.
Now, the third system is product-service systems.
That power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime.
So I want to just give you an example of how powerful collaborative consumption can be to change behaviors.
The average car costs 8,000 dollars a year to run.
So this is where car-sharing companies such as Zipcar and GoGet come in.
In 2009, Zipcar took 250 participants from across 13 cities -- and they're all self-confessed car addicts and car-sharing rookies -- and got them to surrender their keys for a month.
Instead, these people had to walk, bike, take the train, or other forms of public transport.
Now as our possessions dematerialize into the cloud, a blurry line is appearing between what's mine, what's yours, and what's ours.
Now all of these systems require a degree of trust, and the cornerstone to this working is reputation.
Let's go back to my first example, Swaptree.
It's a new social currency, so to speak, that could become as powerful as our credit rating.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
On a warm August morning in Harare, Farai, a 24-year-old mother of two, walks towards a park bench.
She looks miserable and dejected.
Now, on the park bench sits an 82-year-old woman, better known to the community as Grandmother Jack.
Farai hands Grandmother Jack an envelope from the clinic nurse.
Grandmother Jack invites Farai to sit down as she opens the envelope and reads.
She says, "Grandmother Jack, I'm HIV-positive.
I've been living with HIV for the past four years.
I have two kids under the age of five.
And Farai continues.
"In the last three weeks, I have had recurrent thoughts of killing myself, taking my two children with me.
I can't take it anymore.
There's an exchange between the two, which lasts about 30 minutes.
And finally, Grandmother Jack says, "Farai, it seems to me that you have all the symptoms of kufungisisa."
The word "kufungisisa" opens up a floodgate of tears.
So, kufungisisa is the local equivalent of depression in my country.
The World Health Organization estimates that more than 300 million people globally, today, suffer from depression, or what in my country we call kufungisisa.
And the World Health Organization also tells us that every 40 seconds, someone somewhere in the world commits suicide because they are unhappy, largely due to depression or kufungisisa.
And most of these deaths are occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
In fact, the World Health Organization goes as far as to say that when you look at the age group between 15 to 29, a leading cause of death now is actually suicide.
But there are wider events that lead to depression and in some cases, suicide, such as abuse, conflict, violence, isolation, loneliness -- the list is endless.
But one thing that we do know is that depression can be treated and suicides averted.
But the problem is we just don't have enough psychiatrists or psychologists in the world to do the job.
In most low- and middle-income countries, for instance, the ratio of psychiatrists to the population is something like one for every one and a half million people, which literally means that 90 percent of the people needing mental health services will not get it.
In my country, there are 12 psychiatrists, and I'm one of them, for a population of approximately 14 million.
One evening while I was at home, I get a call from the ER, or the emergency room, from a city which is some 200 kilometers away from where I live.
And the ER doctor says, "One of your patients, someone you treated four months ago, has just taken an overdose, and they are in the ER department.
Now, I obviously can't get into my car in the middle of the night and drive 200 kilometers.
And we assumed that that would take about a week.
And one day I get a call from Erica's mother, and she says, "Erica committed suicide three days ago.
Now, almost like a knee-jerk reaction, I couldn't help but ask, "But why didn't you come to Harare, where I live?
"We didn't have the 15 dollars bus fare to come to Harare."
Now, suicide is not an unusual event in the world of mental health.
But there was something about Erica's death that struck me at the core of my very being.
And I got into this state of soul-searching, trying to really discover my role as a psychiatrist in Africa.
There are hundreds of them.
So in 2006, I started my first group of grandmothers.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Today, there are hundreds of grandmothers who are working in more than 70 communities.
And in the last year alone, more than 30,000 people received treatment on the Friendship Bench from a grandmother in a community in Zimbabwe.
And -- (Applause) And our results show that six months after receiving treatment from a grandmother, people were still symptom-free: no depression, suicidal ideation completely reduced.
In fact, our results -- this was a clinical trial -- in fact, this clinical trial showed that grandmothers were more effective at treating depression than doctors and -- (Laughter) (Applause) And so, we're now working towards expanding this program.
There are more than 600 million people currently aged above 65 in the world.
And by the year 2050, there will be 1.5 billion people aged 65 and above.
Imagine if we could create a global network of grandmothers in every major city in the world, who are trained in evidence-based talk therapy, supported through digital platforms, networked.
And they will make a difference in communities.
Finally, this is a file photograph of Grandmother Jack.
Today, Farai is employed.
And I'm sure she's in awe when she realizes that something that she helped to pioneer is now spreading to other countries, like Malawi, the island of Zanzibar and coming closer to home here in the Unites States in the city of New York.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheering) (Applause)
Currently, most refugees live in the cities rather than in the refugee camps.
With the majority of refugees living in urban areas, there is a strong need for a paradigm shift and new thinking.
Rather than wasting money on building walls, it would be better to spend on programs to help refugees to help themselves.
If allowed to live a productive life, refugees can help themselves and contribute to the development of their host country.
I was born in the city called Bukavu, South Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I am the fifth-born in a family of 12 children.
My father, a mechanic by profession, worked very hard to send me to school.
Just like other young people, I had a lot of plans and dreams.
I wanted to complete my studies, get a nice job, marry and have my own children and support my family.
War in my homeland forced me to flee to Uganda in 2008, nine years ago.
My family joined a steady exodus of refugees who settled in Uganda's capital, Kampala.
In my country, I lived already in the city, and we felt Kampala was much better than a refugee camp.
In addition to the poverty problem we were confronted with as the local urban poor, we were facing challenges due to our refugee status, such as a language barrier.
In Congo, the official language is French.
But in Uganda, it is English.
We were exposed to harassment, exploitation, intimidation and discrimination.
YARID -- Young African Refugees for Integral Development -- began as a conversation within the Congolese community.
We asked the community how they could organize themselves to solve these challenges.
The free English classes help empower people to engage with the Ugandan community, allowing them to get to know their neighbors and sell wares.
We've seen who no longer needs our help.
As YARID's programs have expanded, it has included an increasing range of nationalities -- Congolese, Rwandan, Burundian, Somalis, Ethiopian, South Sudanese.
Today, YARID has supported over 3,000 refugees across Kampala and continues supporting more.
Give us the support we deserve, and we will pay you back with interest.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
And I know, in the light of human suffering and poverty and even climate change, one would wonder, why worry about a few cats?
Well today we're here to share with you a message that we have learned from a very important and special character -- this leopard.
And right now this is in the Okavango Delta in Botswana.
This elephant, against overwhelming odds, simply gives up hope.
And for us, in many ways, this elephant has become a symbol of inspiration for us, a symbol of that hope as we go forward in our work.
(Applause) Now back to the leopard.
It was like watching a graduation ceremony.
It used to be the time where only kings wore a leopard skin, but now throughout rituals and ceremonies, traditional healers and ministers.
And of course, looking at this lion paw that has been skinned, it eerily reminds me of a human hand, and that's ironic, because their fate is in our hands.
So the 20,000 lion figure that you just saw is actually a red herring, because there may be 3,000 or 4,000 male lions, and they all are actually infected with the same disease.
So we've estimated that between 20 [and] 30 lions are killed when one lion is hanging on a wall somewhere in a far-off place.
There's an 80-billion-dollar-a-year ecotourism revenue stream into Africa.
But what I'm more concerned about in many ways is that, as we de-link ourselves from nature, as we de-link ourselves spiritually from these animals, we lose hope, we lose that spiritual connection, our dignity, that thing within us that keeps us connected to the planet.
(Applause)
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 the question was, were the birds singing?
What is a bird?
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.
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."
The fundamental issue is that, for me, design is the first signal of human intentions.
So the question is, what is the first question for designers?
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.
If the end game is global warming, they're doing great.
And so we call it "cradle to cradle," and our goal is very simple.
This is what I presented to the White House.
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?
Water has been declared a human right by the United Nations.
Is there anybody here who doesn't breathe?
Clean soil is a critical problem -- the nitrification, the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
I don't know if you remember his answer, but it was, "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones."
This is a hospital monitor from Los Angeles, sent to China.
On the other hand, we're working with Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett and Shaw Carpet, the largest carpet company in the world.
Here's where I come from. I grew up in Hong Kong, with six million people in 40 square miles.
I went to Yale for graduate school, studied in a building of this style by Le Corbusier, affectionately known in our business as Brutalism.
That's the Pacific Gyre.
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."
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.
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 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.
We call them biological nutrition and technical nutrition.
Our first product was a textile where we analyzed 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry.
Here's nylon going back to caprolactam back to carpet.
This is obviously a color photograph.
Here it is. It's the world's largest green roof, 10 and a half acres.
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.
They'll have cities with no energy and no food.
This is the site.
This is their plan.
So this is the existing site, so this is what it looks like now, and here's our proposal.
The transportation is all very simple, everybody's within a five-minute walk of mobility.
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.
The solar power of all the factory centers and all the industrial zones with their light roofs powers the city.
(Applause)
We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited.
Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women.
We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment.
A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children.
And so I said, "Did you just move into this office?"
And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom."
When I was in college, my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History.
I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures.
My brother is kind of busy.
And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow."
Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce.
And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors.
But it's not that simple.
There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen.
But that one word made a really big difference.
The bad news was that everyone liked Howard.
And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important.
I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked.
If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does.
I think the cause is more complicated.
(Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate.
I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking -- and I see this all the time -- with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving.
And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child.
The problem is that -- let's say she got pregnant that day, that day -- nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath -- Fast-forward two years, more often -- and as I've seen it -- women start thinking about this way earlier -- when they get engaged, or married, when they start thinking about having a child, which can take a long time.
Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making.
But I'm hopeful that future generations can.
I think a world where half of our countries and our companies were run by women, would be a better world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
She hired seemingly unemployable men and women to care for the bees, harvest the honey and make value-added products that they marketed themselves, and that were later sold at Whole Foods.
Now, I'm going to take you to Los Angeles, and lots of people know that L.A. has its issues.
Currently, 20 percent of California's energy consumption is used to pump water into mostly Southern California.
Because, come to think about it, do you really want air-conditioning, or is it a cooler room that you want?
So a few years ago, L.A. County decided that they needed to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repair the city schools.
When we visited, it gave some of the people we were with this strange little cough after being only there for just a few hours or so -- not just miners, but everybody.
And Judy saw her landscape being destroyed and her water poisoned.
Now mountaintop removal pays very little money to the locals, and it gives them a lot of misery.
Most people are still unemployed, leading to most of the same kinds of social problems that unemployed people in inner cities also experience -- drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy and poor heath, as well.
But just a few months ago, Judy was diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer.
(Applause) But these three people don't know each other, but they do have an awful lot in common.
And there are plenty of other examples like that.
One problem: waste handling and unemployment.
And we know that eco-industrial business, these kinds of business models -- there's a model in Europe called the eco-industrial park, where either the waste of one company is the raw material for another, or you use recycled materials to make goods that you can actually use and sell.
We can create these local markets and incentives for recycled materials to be used as raw materials for manufacturing.
Working-class and poor urban Americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system.
This is smart infrastructure.
Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs.
I'm noticing that it's happening all over the country, and the good news is that it's growing.
Hometown security means rebuilding our natural defenses, putting people to work, restoring our natural systems.
See, my dad was a great, great man in many ways.
And I'm a grown woman now, and I have learned a few things along the way.
To me, charity often is just about giving, because you're supposed to, or because it's what you've always done, or it's about giving until it hurts.
And I think because early on, frankly, my programs were just a little bit ahead of their time.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So I think what I'll do is just call you a storyteller."
(Laughter) I was like, "Let me think about this for a second."
And I thought, you know, I am a storyteller.
I collect stories; that's what I do.
And it turned out to be shame.
My one year turned into six years: Thousands of stories, hundreds of long interviews, focus groups.
What's the theme? What's the pattern?
What they had in common was a sense of courage.
(Laughter) I was like, "What does that mean?"
So I found a therapist.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
(Laughter) "It just is what it is."
And within an hour and a half, I had 150 responses.
This is the world we live in.
I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.
(Laughter) You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions.
So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness.
And it becomes this dangerous cycle.
Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty.
"I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up."
(Laughter) Which just, I hope in 100 years, people will look back and go, "Wow."
We pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people.
We pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people.
(Applause)
Ken and I have been working together for almost 40 years.
(Applause) So there is among many people -- certainly me and most of the people I talk to -- a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working, with the way our institutions run.
And even as we do our own work, all too often, we find ourselves having to choose between doing what we think is the right thing and doing the expected thing, or the required thing, or the profitable thing.
Why? Because bankers are smart people.
Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is.
So Aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked.
And in interactions with people, almost all the time, it is this kind of flexibility that is required.
A wise person knows when to bend the rules.
And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding.
Michael's a young guy.
Then he lost his job.
He panicked about being able to support his family.
It was a toy gun.
The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years, 24 months.
He did after all have a toy gun.
The mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years.
Michael was sentenced to five years in prison.
Now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years.
We know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures, they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward.
And it doesn't have to be this way.
We think, Ken and I, that there are real sources of hope.
These are people who, being forced to operate in a system that demands rule-following and creates incentives, find away around the rules, find a way to subvert the rules.
One in particular is a judge named Robert Russell.
So he started selling marijuana.
And that's because he was in a special court.
Why has the idea spread?
Though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards, the default rate was extremely low.
So there are examples like this in medicine -- doctors at Harvard who are trying to transform medical education, so that you don't get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy, which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training.
Aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness, and he was right.
There's now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy, and the two things that jump out in study after study -- I know this will come as a shock to all of you -- the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work.
Work: engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying.
Indeed, we argue, there is no substitute for wisdom.
My big idea is a very, very small idea that can unlock billions of big ideas that are at the moment dormant inside us.
And I began the journey of rediscovering the value of sleep.
(Applause) And we women are going to lead the way in this new revolution, this new feminist issue.
I was recently having dinner with a guy who bragged that he had only gotten four hours sleep the night before.
Especially here in Washington, if you try to make a breakfast date, and you say, "How about eight o'clock?"
they're likely to tell you, "Eight o'clock is too late for me, but that's OK, I can get a game of tennis in and do a few conference calls and meet you at eight."
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read a book -- as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach, as though God -- and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad -- were just another author on the best-seller list.
My Arabic is reduced by now to wielding a dictionary, so I took four well-known translations and decided to read them side by side, verse by verse, along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century Arabic.
(Laughter) So I read slowly.
The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert.
And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory.
And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic.
Only God knows the true meaning.
(Laughter) Now this may be a way of saying "pure beings," like in angels, or it may be like the Greek "kouros" or "kore," an eternal youth.
There are no 72 virgins in the Koran.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So I am a surgeon who studies creativity, and I have never had a patient tell me, "I really want you to be creative during surgery," and so I guess there's a little bit of irony to it.
I will say though that, after having done surgery a lot, it's similar to playing a musical instrument.
And for me, this deep and enduring fascination with sound is what led me to both be a surgeon and to study the science of sound, particularly music.
Is it possible to study creativity scientifically?
This brings the second question: Why should scientists study creativity?
(Laughter) Well it may be, but I will say that, from a scientific perspective, we talked a lot about innovation today, the science of innovation, how much we understand about how the brain is able to innovate is in its infancy, and truly, we know very little about how we are able to be creative.
I think that we're going to see, over the next 10, 20, 30 years, a real science of creativity that's burgeoning and is going to flourish, Because we now have new methods that can enable us to take this process like complex jazz improvisation, and study it rigorously.
And that's what I do in my lab.
That blood flow causes an increase in local blood to that area with a deoxyhemoglobin change in concentration.
Deoxyhemoglobin can be detected by MRI, whereas oxyhemoglobin can't.
So through this method of inference -- and we're measuring blood flow, not neural activity -- we say that an area of the brain that's getting more blood was active during a particular task, and that's the crux of how fMRI works.
We brought a musician into the scanner, same way, had them memorize this melody then had another musician out in the control room trading back and forth interactively.
So this is a musician, Mike Pope, one of the world's best bassists and a fantastic piano player.
I've always been fascinated by freestyle.
There are a lot of correlates between the two forms of music, I think, in different time periods, in lot of ways, rap serves the same social function that jazz used to serve.
But we want to get at the root of what is creative genius neurologically, and I think, with these methods, we're getting close.
And I think, hopefully in the next 10, 20 years, you'll see real, meaningful studies that say science has to catch up to art, and maybe we're starting now to get there.
(Applause)
There are two groups of women when it comes to screening mammography -- women in whom mammography works very well and has saved thousands of lives and women in whom it doesn't work well at all.
Because the breast has become a very political organ.
I am not a breast cancer survivor.
I'm not a radiologist.
I don't have any patents, and I've never received any money from a medical imaging company, and I am not seeking your vote.
She came to see me after discovering a breast lump.
Her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s.
She and I were both very pregnant at that time, and my heart just ached for her, imagining how afraid she must be.
Fortunately, her lump proved to be benign.
But she asked me a question: how confident was I that I would find a tumor early on her mammogram if she developed one?
So I studied her mammogram, and I reviewed the radiology literature, and I was shocked to discover that, in her case, our chances of finding a tumor early on the mammogram were less than the toss of a coin.
Radiologists were outraged by the guidelines.
But in my view, the radiologists are heroes.
There's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms, and that's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret, and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause.
And that proportion is primarily genetically determined.
Two-thirds of women in their 40s have dense breast tissue, which is why mammography doesn't work as well in them.
Radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram.
So it's easy to see this tumor in the upper part of this fatty breast.
That's why mammograms find over 80 percent of tumors in fatty breasts, but as few as 40 percent in extremely dense breasts.
Now it's bad enough that breast density makes it hard to find a cancer, but it turns out that it's also a powerful predictor of your risk for breast cancer.
It's a stronger risk factor than having a mother or a sister with breast cancer.
There have been surprisingly few innovations, until digital mammography was approved in 2000.
In a study funded by over 25 million taxpayer dollars, digital mammography was found to be no better over all than traditional mammography, and in fact, it was worse in older women.
So digital mammography has been a giant leap forward for manufacturers of digital mammography equipment, but it's been a very small step forward for womankind.
What about ultrasound?
And MRI is exquisitely sensitive for finding tumors, but it's also very expensive.
One MRI scan costs 10 times what a digital mammogram costs.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker on innovation, and he made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual's genius.
Rather, big ideas can be orchestrated, if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things that they don't ordinarily talk about.
It's like the essence of TED.
He quotes one innovator who says, "The only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick."
Now gamma imaging has been around for a long time to image the heart, and it had even been tried to image the breast.
But the problem was that the gamma detectors were these huge, bulky tubes, and they were filled with these scintillating crystals, and you just couldn't get them close enough around the breast to find small tumors.
But the potential advantage was that gamma rays, unlike X-rays, are not influenced by breast density.
If you can find a tumor when it's less than a centimeter, survival exceeds 90 percent, but drops off rapidly as tumor size increases.
But Michael told me about a new type of gamma detector that he'd seen, and this is it.
And I started talking to him about this problem with breast density, and we realized that we might be able to get this detector close enough around the breast to actually find small tumors.
This is an image from our first patient.
But using our new detector, we could begin to see the outline of a tumor.
This is our current detector.
But MBI exploits the different molecular behavior of tumors, and therefore, it's impervious to breast density.
And if you've ever had a mammogram -- if you're old enough to have had a mammogram -- you know what comes next: pain.
(Applause) And the detector then transmits the image to the computer.
So here's an example.
You can see, on the right, a mammogram showing a faint tumor, the edges of which are blurred by the dense tissue.
In this example, although the mammogram found one tumor, we were able to demonstrate three discrete tumors -- one is small as three millimeters.
After we had demonstrated that we could find small tumors, we used these images to submit a grant to the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
And we were elated when they took a chance on a team of completely unknown investigators and funded us to study 1,000 women with dense breasts, comparing a screening mammogram to an MBI.
Of the tumors that we found, mammography found only 25 percent of those tumors.
The digital mammogram was read as normal and shows lots of dense tissue, but the MBI shows an area of intense uptake, which correlated with a two-centimeter tumor.
In this case, a one-centimeter tumor.
And her mammogram showed an area of very dense tissue, but her MBI showed an area of worrisome uptake, which we can also see on a color image.
And this corresponded to a tumor the size of a golf ball.
So now that we knew that this technology could find three times more tumors in a dense breast, we had to solve one very important problem.
So this is not just young women that it's benefiting.
MBI generates four images per breast.
MRI generates over a thousand.
But this is why MBI is so potentially disruptive -- it's as accurate as MRI, it's far less complex to interpret, and it's a fraction of the cost.
Our manuscript was then accepted and will be published later this month in the journal Radiology.
If this technology is widely adopted, I will not benefit financially in any way, and that is very important to me, because it allows me to continue to tell you the truth.
So until something is available for women with dense breasts, there are things that you should know to protect yourself.
The State of Connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram.
I was at a conference of 60,000 people in breast-imaging last week in Chicago, and I was stunned that there was a heated debate as to whether we should be telling women what their breast density is.
And if you don't know, please ask your doctor or read the details of your mammography report.
Second, if you're pre-menopausal, try to schedule your mammogram in the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle, when breast density is relatively lower.
And fourth and most important, the mammography debate will rage on, but I do believe that all women 40 and older should have an annual mammogram.
Mammography isn't perfect, but it's the only test that's been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer.
Some women who develop breast cancer die from it many years later, and most women, thankfully, survive.
So it takes 10 or more years for any screening method to demonstrate a reduction in mortality from breast cancer.
It is time for us to accept both the extraordinary successes of mammography and the limitations.
After undergoing biopsies that further increased her risk for cancer and losing her sister to cancer, she made the difficult decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So the Awesome story: It begins about 40 years ago, when my mom and my dad came to Canada.
My dad left a small village outside of Amritsar, India.
My sister and I grew up here, and we had quiet, happy childhoods.
2006 was a great year.
Under clear blue skies in July in the wine region of Ontario, I got married, surrounded by 150 family and friends.
2007 was a great year.
Here's a picture of me and my friend, Chris, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean.
We actually saw seals out of our car window, and we pulled over to take a quick picture of them and then blocked them with our giant heads.
(Laughter) 2008 and 2009 were a little tougher.
My friend Chris, who I just showed you a picture of, had been battling mental illness for some time.
So I came home from work one night, and I logged onto the computer, and I started up a tiny website called 1000awesomethings.com.
I mean, 50,000 blogs are started a day, and so my blog was just one of those 50,000.
It started getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then I got a phone call, and the voice at the other end of the line said, "You've just won the Best Blog In the World award."
(Laughter) (Applause) Which African country do you want me to wire all my money to?
(Laughter) But it turns out, I jumped on a plane, and I ended up walking a red carpet between Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Fallon and Martha Stewart.
But lately I have had the opportunity to take a step back and ask myself: "What is it over the last few years that helped me grow my website, but also grow myself?"
None of us can predict the future, but we do know one thing about it and that's that it ain't gonna go according to plan.
Your mom could get cancer, your dad could get mean.
I love the way that they'll spend hours picking dandelions in the backyard and putting them into a nice centerpiece for Thanksgiving dinner.
So there was a time when it was your first time ever hitting a string of green lights on the way home from work.
There was the first time you walked by the open door of a bakery and smelt the bakery air, or the first time you pulled a 20-dollar bill out of your old jacket pocket and said, "Found money."
(Laughter) (Applause) It's a great cover.
I don't know what it would feel like coming to a new country when you're in your mid-20s.
I'd like to pause my TEDTalk for about 10 seconds right now, because you don't get many opportunities in life to do something like this, and my parents are sitting in the front row.
(Applause) When I was growing up, my dad used to love telling the story of his first day in Canada.
(Laughter) And this non-profit group had a big welcoming lunch for all the new immigrants to Canada.
There was bread, there was those little, mini dill pickles, there was olives, those little white onions.
There was tuna salad sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches and salmon salad sandwiches.
There was lasagna, there was casseroles, there was brownies, there was butter tarts, and there was pies, lots and lots of pies.
I was eating olives with pie.
(Laughter) When I was five years old, my dad used to take me grocery shopping, and he would stare in wonder at the little stickers that are on the fruits and vegetables.
We're the only ones with jewelry and democracy.
We've got books, buffets and radio waves, wedding brides and rollercoaster rides.
You can go to the movies and get good seats.
The cashiers at your grocery store, the foreman at your plant, the guy tailgating you home on the highway, the telemarketer calling you during dinner, every teacher you've ever had, everyone that's ever woken up beside you, every politician in every country, every actor in every movie, every single person in your family, everyone you love, everyone in this room and you will be dead in a hundred years.
Life is so great that we only get such a short time to experience and enjoy all those tiny little moments that make it so sweet.
Thank you.
It is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives, where these people have enough access to education and health care, so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from fear.
This is called human security.
It is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure, to make the people of the world secure.
and take action to make it happen, unless we begin to believe that all of the things that we've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make human security.
I said, "That's good. That's good.
I think what we need is action."
I spoke with Aung Sun Suu Kyi a couple of days ago.
As most of you know, she's a hero for democracy in her country, Burma.
But I talked to her for a range of issues.
She's my friend, Dr. Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
She is traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections.
When she was planting those trees, I don't think most people understand that, at the same time, she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country.
Working together is what changes our world.
The Million Signatures Campaign of women inside Burma working together to change human rights, to bring democracy to that country.
There was a mother and three children.
And they have been part of what brought peace to Northern Ireland, and they're still working on it, because there's still a lot more to do.
She is now running for president.
One of the things that made this campaign work is because we grew from two NGOs to thousands in 90 countries around the world, working together in common cause to ban landmines.
And if each of us who cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time as we could, we would change this world, we would save this world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When you think about resilience and technology it's actually much easier.
The fort in San Francisco at the time had about 1,300 soldiers.
This is a commercial that was played on the Super Bowl in the year 2000.
And that is, in a gold rush, when it's over, it's over.
And there are a lot of similarities between the Internet and the electric industry.
So the light bulb laid down the heavy infrastructure, and then home appliances started coming into being.
By the way, this is the beginning of the asbestos lawsuit.
But, you know, before I get too far into condemning our ancestors, I thought I'd show you: this is my conference room.
So we really haven't progressed that much since 1908.
And, you know, we think it's getting better, but have you tried to install 802.11 yourself?
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.
My mom hates this picture.
So what's a good definition for cyborg?
So let's look at the concept of traditional anthropology.
Somebody goes to another country, says, "How fascinating these people are, how interesting their tools are, how curious their culture is."
And if you actually lose that information, it means that you suddenly have this loss in your mind, that you suddenly feel like something's missing, except you aren't able to see it, so it feels like a very strange emotion.
So when I was little, my dad would sit me down at night and he would say, "I'm going to teach you about time and space in the future."
He said, "No, no, no. Here's a better way."
He took a piece of paper, drew A and B on one side and the other and folded them together so where A and B touched.
And so, when I went to sleep for the next 10 or 20 years, I was thinking at night, "I want to be the first person to create a wormhole, to make things accelerate faster.
But then what I realized when I went to college is that technology doesn't just get adopted because it works.
So I started studying anthropology.
And when I was writing my thesis on cell phones, I realized that everyone was carrying around wormholes in their pockets.
So over time, time and space have compressed because of this.
These are the people that you have access to right now, in general -- all of these people, all of your friends and family that you can connect to.
And so this is very important.
This is the first time in the entire history of humanity that we've connected in this way.
So that's why I study cyborg anthropology.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And so this magical transformation is what I was trying to get at with my project, which became known as the Toaster Project.
And the situation it describes is the hero of the book -- he's a 20th-century man -- finds himself alone on a strange planet populated only by a technologically primitive people.
So I thought, okay, I'll try and make an electric toaster from scratch.
So, starting with steel: how do you make steel?
He had misheard me and thought I was coming up because I was trying to make a poster, and so wasn't prepared to take me into the mines.
When you study geology, you can see what's happened in the past, and there were terrific changes in the earth.
And of course, it wasn't actually a working mine anymore, because, though Ray was a miner there, the mine had closed and had been reopened as a kind of tourist attraction, because, of course, it can't compete on the scale of operations which are happening in South America, Australia, wherever.
But anyway, I got my suitcase of iron ore and dragged it back to London on the train, and then was faced with the problem: Okay, how do you make this rock into components for a toaster?
So I ended up going to the History of Science Library and looking at this book.
This is the first textbook on metallurgy written in the West, at least.
(Laughter) And that was something that reoccurred throughout the project, was, the smaller the scale you want to work on, the further back in time you have to go.
And so this is after a day and about half a night smelting this iron.
So, my next -- (Applause) The next thing I was trying to get was copper.
It's not anymore, but I found a retired geology professor to take me down, and he said, "Okay, I'll let you have some water from the mine."
And the reason I was interested in getting water is because water which goes through mines becomes kind of acidic and will start picking up, dissolving the minerals from the mine.
And a good example of this is the Rio Tinto, which is in Portugal.
As you can see, it's got lots and lots of minerals dissolved in it.
So my next thing: I was off to Scotland to get mica.
And mica is a mineral which is a very good insulator and very good at insulating electricity.
And the last material I'm going to talk about today is plastic, and, of course, my toaster had to have a plastic case.
And so plastic comes from oil, so I phoned up BP and spent a good half an hour trying to convince the PR office at BP that it would be fantastic for them if they flew me to an oil rig and let me have a jug of oil.
So I looked at other ways of making plastic.
And you can actually make plastic from obviously oils which come from plants, but also from starches.
And it was looking good for a while, but I left it outside, because you had to leave it outside to dry, and unfortunately I came back and there were snails eating the unhydrolyzed bits of potato.
And I went up to Manchester to visit a place called Axion Recycling.
(Music) (Laughter) So there's a picture of my toaster.
So there was 240 volts going through these homemade copper wires, homemade plug.
And for about five seconds, the toaster toasted, but then, unfortunately, the element kind of melted itself.
This room may appear to be holding 600 people, but there's actually so many more, because within each one of us, there is a multitude of personalities.
I have two primary personalities that have been in conflict and conversation within me since I was a little girl.
I call them "the mystic" and "the warrior."
So, looking for answers, I went to Catholic mass; I tagged along with my neighbors.
I read Sartre and Socrates.
(Laughter) And ever since, I've been walking the mystic path, trying to peer beyond what Albert Einstein called the "optical delusion" of everyday consciousness.
It's actually a person's trachea.
And those colored globs are microbes that are actually swimming around in this room right now, all around us.
She's concerned about what's happening in this world right now.
I've spent my life as a warrior, working for women's issues, working on political campaigns, being an activist for the environment.
Now here's a title that may sound familiar, but whose author may surprise you: "Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice."
And then they morph into violent extremism.
A couple of weeks ago, I took a conservative Tea Party woman to lunch.
Well, she was shocked.
By the end of our lunch, we acknowledged each other's openness.
Neither of us had tried to change the other, but we also hadn't pretended that our differences were just going to melt away after a lunch.
I'll meet you there."
(Applause)
The 100 girls project tells us some really nice statistics.
For example, for every 100 girls that are suspended from school, there are 250 boys that are suspended from school.
For every 100 girls who are expelled from school, there are 335 boys who are expelled from school.
For every 100 girls in special education, there are 217 boys.
For every 100 girls with a learning disability, there are 276 boys.
For every 100 girls with an emotional disturbance diagnosed, we have 324 boys.
And if you are a boy, you're four times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD -- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
There are three reasons that I believe that boys are out of sync with the culture of schools today.
I'm not suggesting that we need to be allowing guns and knives in the school.
But when we say that an Eagle Scout in a high school classroom who has a locked parked car in the parking lot and a penknife in it, has to be suspended from school, I think we may have gone a little too far with zero tolerance.
He's just a little boy.
You'll see, the conversation changes depending upon who's sitting around the table.
This compressed curriculum is bad for all active kids.
We need to talk to teachers and parents and school board members and politicians.
Because good games, really good games, cost money, and World of Warcraft has quite a budget.
If we change these things, if we pay attention to these things, and we reengage boys in their learning, they will leave the elementary schools saying, "I'm smart."
Thank you.
(Applause)
I spent a week at sea on a research vessel.
Now I'm not a scientist, but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South Florida who have been tracking the travels of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life depends on it.
Rachel Carson -- the godmother of modern environmentalism -- warned us about this very thing back in 1962.
Thus the title "Silent Spring."
I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties.
We have to figure out why we keep letting this happen, because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all -- deciding what to do, or not to do, about climate change.
Now as you know, a great deal of time is spent, in this country and around the world, inside the climate debate, on the question of, "What if the IPC scientists are all wrong?"
Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle -- the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait for perfect scientific certainty.
But climate policy in the wealthy world -- to the extent that such a thing exists -- is not based on precaution, but rather on cost-benefit analysis -- finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP.
It's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science.
The fact is that we simply don't know when the warming that we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops.
This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it, because taking big risks, as we all know, pays a lot of money.
By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, had a plaque on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"
Now I'm not going to belabor this point, but studies do show that, as investors, women are much less prone to taking reckless risks than men, precisely because, as we've already heard, women tend not to suffer from overconfidence in the same way that men do.
And this problem -- call it the "perils of privilege" -- brings us closer, I think, to the root of our collective recklessness.
For instance, I stumbled across this advertisement outside the women's washroom in the Kansas City airport.
We slapped Mother Nature around and won, and we always win, because dominating nature is our destiny.
"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean.
And it's also the story of modern capitalism, because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic system, one that cannot survive without perpetual growth and an unending supply of new frontiers.
Now the problem is that the story was always a lie.
And now we are hitting those limits on multiple fronts.
How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin?
So stop worrying and keep shopping.
This assessment, unfortunately, is far too optimistic.
The truth is that we have already exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuels that we have already entered a far riskier business era, the era of extreme energy.
I'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar Sands, which this year are projected to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States.
You can't just drill a hole and pump it out.
Then, you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand.
The process requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds.
That's very bad news for local indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates.
Now, you may have noticed more and more headlines like these.
The idea behind this form of "geoengineering" as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the planet.
So, solving the problem of pollution with more pollution.
Think of it as the ultimate junk shot.
We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kinds of risks -- risks that confront recklessness head on, that put the precautionary principle into practice, even if that means through direct action -- like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested, blocking dirty power plants or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Six years before that, I was starting my career as an opera singer in Europe, when I was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension -- also known as PH.
I come from Colorado.
And I gave up salt, I went vegan, and I started taking huge doses of sildenafil, also known as Viagra.
(Laughter) My father and my grandfather were always looking for the newest thing in alternative or traditional therapies for PH, but after six months, I couldn't walk up a small hill. I couldn't climb a flight of stairs.
This is a list of the side effects: if you eat too much salt, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you'll probably end up in the ICU.
If you go through a metal detector, you'll probably die.
Within a few weeks, I was performing, and in a few months, I debuted at the Kennedy Center.
A few days after arriving, I met this wonderful, old conductor who started casting me in all of these roles.
And before long, I was commuting between Budapest, Milan and Florence.
Then in February of 2008, my grandfather passed away.
Seven weeks later, I got a call from my family.
I had to say goodbye in some way, shape or form.
But soon I was showing signs of right-heart failure, and I had to return to sea level, doing so knowing that I probably would never see my home again.
I fell through my apartment door and crawled to the bathroom where I found my problem: I had forgotten to mix in the most important part of my medicine.
I performed here and there, but as my condition deteriorated, so did my voice.
I had two friends who had recently died months after having very challenging surgeries.
I thought stem cells were a good option, but they hadn't developed to a point where I could take advantage of them yet.
I officially took a break from singing, and I went to the Cleveland Clinic to be reevaluated for the third time in five years, for transplant.
And it was right-heart failure.
But the next morning, while I was still in the hospital, I got a telephone call.
I flew to Cleveland, and my family rushed there in hopes that they would meet me and say what we knew might be our final goodbye.
The last thing I remember was lying on a white blanket, telling my surgeon that I needed to see my mother again, and to please try and save my voice.
Though my mom couldn't say goodbye to me before the surgery, she didn't leave my side in the months of recovery that followed.
There were a dozen tubes coming in and out of my body.
But life isn't really just about avoiding death, is it?
My parents were totally stressed out about me going and auditioning and traveling and performing all over the place, but they knew that it was much better for me to do that than be preoccupied with my own mortality all of the time.
(Applause) [Singing: French] Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you so much.
Thank you.
(Laughter) Journalists who studied journalism, engineers who studied engineering.
(Laughter) Years of studying DNA replication and photosynthesis did little to prepare me for a career in technology.
I had to teach myself everything from sales, marketing, strategy, even a little programming, on my own.
The advances in robotics and machine learning and transforming the way we work, automating routine tasks in many occupations while augmenting and amplifying human labor in others.
Baseball was transformed when the cash-strapped Oakland Athletics started recruiting players who didn't score highly on traditionally valued metrics, like runs batted in, but who had the ability to help the team score points and win games.
This idea is taking hold outside of sports.
Two: hire for performance.
Inspired by my own job experience, I cofounded a hiring platform called Headlight, which gives candidates an opportunity to shine.
If you're hiring a marketing manager, have them plan a launch campaign for a new product.
Seek out ways to showcase your unique skills and abilities outside of just the standard resume and cover letter.
My father saw what was happening and quickly explained our family situation.
We need employers to let go of outdated hiring practices and embrace new ways of identifying and cultivating talent, and candidates can help by learning to tell their story in powerful and compelling ways.
We could live in a world where people are seen for what they're truly capable of and have the opportunity to realize their full potential.
Thank you.
(Applause)
We've been talking a lot about the horrific impacts of plastic on the planet and on other species, but plastic hurts people, too -- especially poor people.
It shortens the lives of the people who live there in the Gulf.
And what we don't often appreciate is the price that poor people pay for us to have these disposable products.
But biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species.
We would have a green society that Dr. King would be proud of.
That should be the goal.
And I would say that we live in a country -- five percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the greenhouse gases, but also 25 percent of the world's prisoners.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And this is our beast of burden -- this is a Computer Tomography machine, a CT machine.
It uses X-rays, X-ray beams, that are rotating very fast around the human body.
So this is a fantastic machine that we can use for improving health care, but as I said, it's also a challenge for us.
It's the medical data explosion that we're having right now.
These machines that came out -- they started coming in the 1970s -- they would scan human bodies, and they would generate about 100 images of the human body.
There is the problem."
So transforming the data set into something that looks like this.
Using computers, even though they're getting faster and better all the time, it's a challenge to deal with gigabytes of data, terabytes of data and extracting the relevant information.
This is my daughter.
So what's inside of this machine is what enables me to do the things that I'm doing with the medical data.
I paid about one million dollars for that machine.
So every month there are new graphics cards coming out, and here is a few of the latest ones from the vendors -- NVIDIA, ATI, Intel is out there as well.
And you know, for a few hundred bucks you can get these things and put them into your computer, and you can do fantastic things with these graphics cards.
This is a data set that was captured using a CT scanner.
It's a woman. You can see the hair.
You can see that there is [a] scattering of X-rays on the teeth, the metal in the teeth.
They're really high resolution, and they're really showing us what we can do with standard graphics cards today.
In the forensic case -- and this is something that ... there's been approximately 400 cases so far just in the part of Sweden that I come from that has been undergoing virtual autopsies in the past four years.
It's very high-resolution, and it's our algorithms that allow us to zoom in on all the details.
And again, it's fully interactive, so you can rotate and you can look at things in real time on these systems here.
Without saying too much about this case, this is a traffic accident, a drunk driver hit a woman.
It's very interesting for us to be able to look at things like knife stabbings.
Here you can see that knife went through the heart.
So it really, really helps the criminal investigation to establish the cause of death, and in some cases also directing the investigation in the right direction to find out who the killer really was.
Here's another case that I think is interesting.
Here you can see a bullet that has lodged just next to the spine on this person.
During a physical autopsy, if you actually have to dig through the body to find these fragments, that's actually quite hard to do.
It's a touch device that we have developed based on these algorithms, using standard graphics GPUs.
So if you were thinking of buying an iPad, forget about it. This is what you want instead.
Steve, I hope you're listening to this, all right.
Okay, now that we're talking about touch, let me move on to really "touching" data.
So what you're seeing on the left is a touch device.
So when I virtually touch data, it will generate forces in the pen, so I get a feedback.
And this is also due to these fantastic new scanners, that just in 0.3 seconds, I can scan the whole heart, and I can do that with time resolution.
And this, I think, is really the future for heart surgeons.
I mean it's probably the wet dream for a heart surgeon to be able to go inside of the patient's heart before you actually do surgery, and do that with high-quality resolution data.
Now this is really an interesting project.
MRI is using magnetic fields and radio frequencies to scan the brain, or any part of the body.
So what we're really getting out of this is information of the structure of the brain, but we can also measure the difference in magnetic properties of blood that's oxygenated and blood that's depleted of oxygen.
That means that it's possible to map out the activity of the brain.
So Motts is doing something here, and probably he is going like this with his right hand, because the left side is activated on the motor cortex.
So she came to the center, and they sedated her and then put her straight into the scanner.
So here's a bear.
And here it is. Here is the nose of the bear.
So with that, I'd like to thank all the people who have helped me to generate these images.
It's a huge effort that goes into doing this, gathering the data and developing the algorithms, writing all the software.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
Some of the greatest innovations and developments in the world often happen at the intersection of two fields.
I'm also interested in creating new technologies for the arts and to attract people to science and technology.
With my new venture, Marilyn Monrobot, I would like to use art to create tech.
And if you're a performer that wants to collaborate with an adorable robot, or if you have a robot that needs entertainment representation, please contact me, the Bot-Agent.
I'd like to introduce you to one of our first robots, Data.
He's named after the Star Trek character.
And also I can use each one of you as the acting coach to our future robot companions.
Right, so, a doctor says to his patient, "I have bad news and worse news.
The bad news is that you only have 24 hours to live."
The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911.
(Laughter) (Applause) Question: Why is television called a medium?
Because it's neither rare nor well done.
Actually, as soon as someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
The world is changing with really remarkable speed.
And if you look at the chart for 2050, it's projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States.
Goldman Sachs projected 2027.
China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects.
Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country.
This is an illusion.
Now the big question here is obviously, how do we make sense of China?
How do we try to understand what China is?
This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring-state period -- the birth of modern China.
Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty, still 2,000 years ago.
And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this: Of course we know China's big, huge, demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.3 billion people.
What we often aren't really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized.
So this is China, a civilization-state, rather than a nation-state.
The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization.
The second is maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong.
Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997?
One country, two systems.
We were wrong. Why were we wrong?
So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong -- as it will be to the question of Taiwan -- was a natural response: one civilization, many systems.
The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries.
Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han?
The Chinese don't feel like that.
Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together.
The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together.
Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West.
The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state.
And the reason for this is because -- well, there are two reasons, I think.
And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy.
So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history.
The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state.
This is the Chinese view of the state -- very, very different to ours.
Know that China believes in the market and the state.
But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state.
But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C.
It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai.
And yet we still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts.
You know, there's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian.
Whereas those cultures -- virtually the rest of the world, in fact, which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West -- have been thereby forced to understand the West, because of the West's presence in those societies.
I mean, take the question of East Asia.
East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. -- a third of the world's population lives there.
And I'll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia.
Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning, the Goldman Sachs chart.
What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world.
First, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world.
There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago -- Copenhagen, climate change conference.
Europe was not at the final negotiating table.
I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago.
And that is what is going to happen in the future.
And the second implication is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence, become increasingly unfamiliar to us, because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with, or conversant with.
Some people -- I've got an English friend in China, and he said, "The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion."
Well, maybe that's true, maybe that's an exaggeration.
If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future, try China -- there's old Confucius.
This is a railway station the likes of which you've never seen before.
It doesn't even look like a railway station.
China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together.
So this is a solution to a situation where China's going to have many, many, many cities over 20 million people.
Well, what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us?
The arrival of countries like China and India -- between them 38 percent of the world's population -- and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years.
This big ship here was the one sailed in by Zheng He in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the South China Sea, the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa.
(Laughter) Or, look carefully at this silk scroll made by ZhuZhou in 1368.
Christ, the Chinese even invented golf.
Welcome to the future. Thank you.
(Applause)
Because we are all patients, we are all people.
Even doctors are patients at some point.
You're looking at things where people are actually given information, and they're not following through with it.
It's a problem that manifests itself in diabetes, obesity, many forms of heart disease, even some forms of cancer -- when you think of smoking.
It goes all the way back to Aristotle.
So that was the low-fear group.
So go brush and floss your teeth.
That was the message. That was the experiment.
It was a notion that really came out of Albert Bandura's work, who studied whether people could get a sense of empowerment.
This is a campaign from the American Diabetes Association.
And I don't know if it works.
Again, Bandura recognized this years ago, decades ago.
So you start with personalized data, personalized information that comes from an individual, and then you need to connect it to their lives.
We need to connect the information always with the action, and then that action feeds back into different information, and it creates, of course, a feedback loop.
Now this is a very well-observed and well-established notion for behavior change.
So we've all seen these. These are the "your speed limit" signs.
And here's how they work in the feedback loop.
Your blood pressure might drop a little bit.
This is a pharmaceutical ad.
It says very clearly what the drug is for, specifically who it is good for, so you can start to personalize your understanding of whether the information is relevant to you or whether the drug is relevant to you.
Every time you take a drug, you're walking into a possible side effect.
Now the CRP test is often done following a cholesterol test, or in conjunction with a cholesterol test.
It's a protein that shows up when your blood vessels might be inflamed, which might be a risk for heart disease.
So we start to use the data we have to run a very simple calculation that's on all sorts of online calculators to get a sense of what the actual risk is.
(Laughter) Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, the two largest lab testing companies -- last year, they made profits of over 700 million dollars and over 500 million dollars respectively.
This is information that is incredibly powerful.
But you can create your own feedback loop.
And the only acceptable answer is -- (Audience: Yes.) -- yes.
What does this mean? Help me understand what the data is.
You do not need to have the education level of people in this room.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
It didn't work.
My parents got divorced, and my sister was arrested.
I found that I didn't have to wear high heels, I didn't have to wear pink, and I could feel like I fit in.
Even though I've traveled a lot, I still think like an American woman.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And when I was five, my parents gave me an orange Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle.
I traveled around the world, entered different cultures, wrote a series of books about my travels, including "Walking the Bible."
I hosted a television show by that name on PBS.
Until, in May 2008, a routine visit to my doctor and a routine blood test produced evidence in the form of an alkaline phosphatase number that something might be wrong with my bones.
They'd just turned three, and they were into all things pink and purple.
(Laughter) The next day I came to see him. I was like, "Doctor, that was a really good joke."
And I snuck out behind, and there was a moat, a fence and a field of cows.
And Jeff's advice was, "Be a traveller, not a tourist.
Twenty years ago, doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped, and there was a 15 percent survival rate.
And then I had a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon, Dr. John Healey at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, took out my left femur and replaced it with titanium.
And if you did see the Sanjay special, you saw these enormous screws that they screwed into my pelvis.
This is a surgery so rare only two human beings have survived it before me.
And one night I got a call from my mother-in-law that my daughters, at that time three and a half, were missing me and feeling my absence.
(Laughter) And one night my daughter Eden came to me.
And it made me think -- and I'll just note for the record -- one word that I've only heard once actually was when we were all doing Tony Robbins yoga yesterday -- the one word that has not been mentioned in this seminar actually is the word "friend."
(Laughter) But he's a literary agent, which means he's a broker of dreams in a world where most dreams don't come true.
And I said, "What's the most valuable thing you can give to a dreamer?"
My home is not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, and during the year and a half I was on crutches, it became a sort of symbol to me.
I was on crutches, my wife was next to me, my girls were doing these rockstar poses up ahead.
And yet, for the four million years humans have been walking upright, the act is essentially unchanged.
200 years ago, a new type of pedestrian appeared in Paris.
My lost year was my jubilee year.
So I stand here today as you see now, walking without crutches or a cane.
And last week I had my 18-month scans.
And the epidemiologists here will tell you, that's half the number of people who get the disease in one year in the United States.
So if you go to 23andMe, or if you go to councilofdads.com, you can click on a link.
May you find a mud puddle to jump in someplace, or find a way to get over, around, or through any wall that stands between you and one of your dreams.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So the era of big infrastructure is over.
Similarly, the idea of architecture as this sort of object in the field, devoid of context, is really not the -- excuse me, it's fairly blatant -- is really not the approach that we need to take.
So the oyster was the basis for a manifesto-like urban design project that I did about the New York Harbor called "oyster-tecture."
And what's circled is the site that I'm going to talk about, the Gowanus Canal and Governors Island.
Another set of views of actually the Gowanus Canal itself.
When we started this project, one of the core ideas was to look back in history and try to understand what was there.
We also learned at this time that you could eat an oyster about the size of a dinner plate in the Gowanus Canal itself.
So the project really addresses these three core issues in a new and exciting way, I think.
Here we are, back to our hero, the oyster.
And one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day.
Basically, New York was built on the backs of oystermen, and our streets were literally built over oyster shells.
And so the core idea here was to hit the reset button and regenerate an ecology over time that was regenerative and cleaning and productive.
What is fuzzy rope, you ask?
In the end, what we realized we were making was a new blue-green watery park for the next watery century -- an amphibious park, if you will.
So you can imagine scuba diving here.
Another new vocabulary word for the brave new world: this is the word "flupsy" -- it's short for "floating upwelling system."
I get asked two questions about this project.
And the second one is: when can we eat the oysters?
Thank you.
(Applause)
We don't just live, but we make.
And this is a particularly small scooter for a gentleman of this size.
There was one held in Detroit here last summer, and it will be held again next summer, at the Henry Ford.
And I think that's tremendously important.
This is Andrew Archer.
I met Andrew at one of our community meetings putting together Maker Faire.
Andrew had moved to Detroit from Duluth, Minnesota.
He liked to take things apart.
His mother gave him a part of the garage, and he collected things from yard sales, and he made stuff.
And then he didn't particularly like school that much, but he got involved in robotics competitions, and he realized he had a talent, and, more importantly, he had a real passion for it.
And he began building robots.
And when I sat down next to him, he was telling me about a company he formed, and he was building some robots for automobile factories to move things around on the factory floor.
If you don't know what those are, they're just the "brains."
And I don't know if you can see it that well, but that's a mailbox -- so an ordinary mailbox and an Arduino.
And when someone opens your mailbox, you get a notification, an alert message goes to your iPhone.
This is Makerbot.
And they do interesting things.
You could build your own satellite and get it into space for like 8,000 dollars.
(Applause)
I think that social media is actually going to help us dismantle some of the silly and demeaning stereotypes that we see in media and advertising about gender.
But they get a lot more information about what you do online, what you like, what interests you.
If you look at the statistics -- these are worldwide statistics -- in every single age category, women actually outnumber men in their use of social networking technologies.
If the case is that social media is dominating old media and women are dominating social media, then does that mean that women are going to take over global media?
Are we suddenly going to see a lot more female characters in cartoons and in games and on TV shows?
Could this be possible, that suddenly our media landscape will become a feminist landscape?
I think that media companies are going to hire a lot more women, because they realize this is important for their business, and I think that women are also going to continue to dominate the social media sphere.
Why should I know this?
Of course, old media companies and advertisers need to know this.
I've spent most of my professional life researching media and entertainment and its impact on people's lives.
And I do it not just because it's fun -- though actually, it is really fun -- but also because our research has shown over and over again that entertainment and play have a huge impact on people's lives -- for instance, on their political beliefs and on their health.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
There's an African proverb that goes, "The lion's story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it."
Key to this literacy is a forgotten truth, that the more we understand that our cultural differences represent the power to heal the centuries of racial discrimination, dehumanization and illness.
Both of my parents were African-American.
My father was born in Southern Delaware, my mother, North Philadelphia, and these two places are as different from each other as east is from west, as New York City is from Montgomery, Alabama.
My mother's coping approach was a little different.
And she pissed a lot of people off with her cultural style.
So we get into the supermarket, and people look at us -- stare at us as if we just stole something.
(Laughter) Now, both my parents were Christians.
The difference is my father prayed before a racial conflict and my mother prayed after.
Our brains imagine that children and adults are older than they really are, larger than they really are and closer than they really are.
It requires a racial literacy.
Now, how do parents have these conversations, and what is a racial literacy?
(Laughter) A racial literacy involves the ability to read, recast and resolve a racially stressful encounter.
And I can feel it in my stomach, like a bunch of butterflies are fighting with each other, so much so that they fly up into my throat and choke me."
And if you really want help, try breathing in and exhaling slowly.
Another project, with the help of my colleagues Loretta and John Jemmott, we leverage the cultural style of African-American barbershops, where we train black barbers to be health educators in two areas: one, to safely reduce the sexual risk in their partner relationships; and the other, to stop retaliation violence.
And a final project, in which we teach parents and their children separately to understand their racial traumas before we bring them together to problem-solve daily microaggressions.
Now, racially literate conversations with our children can be healing, but it takes practice.
I have two sons.
(Laughter) But, when I think of them, they are still babies to me, and I worry every day that the world will misjudge them.
On the TV were Trayvon Martin's parents, and they were crying because of the acquittal of George Zimmerman.
And Julian was glued to the TV.
He wanted to know why: Why would a grown man stalk and hunt down and kill an unarmed 17-year-old boy?
The best thing that could come out of my mouth was, "Julian, sometimes in this world, there are people who look down on black and brown people and do not treat them -- and children, too -- do not treat them as human."
HS: Yeah, and that's what we call, we call that racism.
And Julian's reaction to me was priceless.
Because in my mind's eye, I was thinking: What if my Julian or Bryan was Trayvon?
I calculated my anger at a 10.
And in my mind's eye, I could see somebody chasing Julian, and I was chasing them.
And um, you gotta be careful.
And you deserve to be on this planet, just as happy and beautiful and smart as you want to be.
HS: Racial socialization is not just what parents teach their children.
It's also how children respond to what their parents teach.
If you take the centuries of racial rage that boils up in all of our bodies, minds and souls -- and anything that affects our bodies, minds and souls affects our health -- we could probably use gun control for our hearts.
With racial literacy, and yes, practice, we can decode the racial trauma from our stories, and our healing will come in the telling.
But we must never forget that our cultural differences are full of affection and protection, and remember always that the lion's story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
An Ethiopian woman named Derartu Tulu turns up at the starting line.
It's a heartwarming story, but if you drill a little bit deeper, you've got to sort of wonder about what exactly was going on there.
What they found is that if you start running the marathon at age 19, you'll get progressively faster, year by year, until you reach your peak at age 27.
64-year-old men and women are running as fast as they were at age 19.
If you read folklore and mythology, any kind of myths, any kind of tall tales, running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor.
What I've been seeing today is there is a growing subculture of barefoot runners, people who've gotten rid of their shoes.
I will craft my own drum.
(Applause) A bunch of pacifists.
Like a lot.
I never was pure.
Everything is everything.
One woman loses six.
One woman loses her head.
Where do refugee hearts go?
My spine curves spiral.
Cluster bombs left behind.
Breathe.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior -- I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I was working too hard and I was neglecting the family.
So I went back to work, and I've spent these seven years since struggling with, studying and writing about work-life balance.
And I have four observations I'd like to share with you today.
The first is: if society's to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate.
But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance.
(Laughter) The second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us.
(Laughter) I'm talking about all companies.
We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life.
Have sex.
Have breakfast with my wife and children.
Have sex again.
(Laughter) Drive the kids to school on the way to the office.
Do another three hours' work.
Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink.
Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids.
Have sex.
(Laughter) We need to be realistic.
(Laughter) A day is too short; "after I retire" is too long.
A fourth observation: We need to approach balance in a balanced way.
I work 10 hours a day; I commute two hours a day.
(Laughter) Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life -- there's the intellectual side; there's the emotional side; there's the spiritual side.
You want me to go to church and call my mother."
And I understand.
But an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective.
My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today, called me up at the office and said, "Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son" -- Harry -- "up from school."
So I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school gates.
With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life.
Because if enough people do it, we can change society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like.
And that, I think, is an idea worth spreading.
(Applause)
Ever since I was a little girl seeing "Star Wars" for the first time, I've been fascinated by this idea of personal robots.
I knew robots like that didn't really exist, but I knew I wanted to build them.
So 20 years pass -- I am now a graduate student at MIT studying artificial intelligence, the year is 1997, and NASA has just landed the first robot on Mars.
And so that year, I started to build this robot, Kismet, the world's first social robot.
Three years later -- a lot of programming, working with other graduate students in the lab -- Kismet was ready to start interacting with people.
(Video) Scientist: I want to show you something.
Kismet: (Nonsense) Scientist: This is a watch that my girlfriend gave me.
This little robot was somehow able to tap into something deeply social within us -- and with that, the promise of an entirely new way we could interact with robots.
So over the past several years I've been continuing to explore this interpersonal dimension of robots, now at the media lab with my own team of incredibly talented students.
And one of my favorite robots is Leonardo.
We developed Leonardo in collaboration with Stan Winston Studio.
And so I want to show you a special moment for me of Leo.
This is Matt Berlin interacting with Leo, introducing Leo to a new object.
And because it's new, Leo doesn't really know what to make of it.
But sort of like us, he can actually learn about it from watching Matt's reaction.
(Video) Matt Berlin: Hello, Leo.
Leo, this is Cookie Monster.
Can you find Cookie Monster?
Cookie Monster is very, very bad.
He's a scary monster.
(Laughter) CB: All right, so Leo and Cookie might have gotten off to a little bit of a rough start, but they get along great now.
So what I've learned through building these systems is that robots are actually a really intriguing social technology, where it's actually their ability to push our social buttons and to interact with us like a partner that is a core part of their functionality.
And with that shift in thinking, we can now start to imagine new questions, new possibilities for robots that we might not have thought about otherwise.
Well, one of the things that we've learned is that, if we design these robots to communicate with us using the same body language, the same sort of non-verbal cues that people use -- like Nexi, our humanoid robot, is doing here -- what we find is that people respond to robots a lot like they respond to people.
It's turning out now that robots are actually becoming a really interesting new scientific tool to understand human behavior.
Is it the mimicking of particular gestures that matters?
And so in this video here -- this is a video taken from David DeSteno's lab at Northeastern University.
For instance, if robots do respond to our non-verbal cues, maybe they would be a cool, new communication technology.
So imagine this: What about a robot accessory for your cellphone?
This is just like video conferencing today.
And then the fully expressive MeBot.
Today we know that families are living further and further apart, and that definitely takes a toll on family relationships and family bonds over distance.
For me, I have three young boys, and I want them to have a really good relationship with their grandparents.
But my parents live thousands of miles away, so they just don't get to see each other that often.
I imagine a time not too far from now -- my mom can go to her computer, open up a browser and jack into a little robot.
I could imagine grandmothers being able to do social-plays with their granddaughters, with their friends, and to be able to share all kinds of other activities around the house, like sharing a bedtime story.
And through this technology, being able to be an active participant in their grandchildren's lives in a way that's not possible today.
So in the United States today, over 65 percent of people are either overweight or obese, and now it's a big problem with our children as well.
And we know that as you get older in life, if you're obese when you're younger, that can lead to chronic diseases that not only reduce your quality of life, but are a tremendous economic burden on our health care system.
This is a robot, Autom.
Cory Kidd developed this robot for his doctoral work.
And it was designed to be a robot diet-and-exercise coach.
You'd use a screen interface to enter information, like how many calories you ate that day, how much exercise you got.
Is it really just the quality of advice and information that matters?
So one of the things we really wanted to look at was not how much weight people lost, but really how long they interacted with the robot.
(Laughter) And when you look at emotional engagement, it was completely different.
The last thing I want to talk about today is the future of children's media.
We know that kids spend a lot of time behind screens today, whether it's television or computer games or whatnot.
My sons, they love the screen. They love the screen.
And so I have a new project in my group I wanted to present to you today called Playtime Computing that's really trying to think about how we can take what's so engaging about digital media and literally bring it off the screen into the real world of the child, where it can take on many of the properties of real-world play.
So here's the first exploration of this idea, where characters can be physical or virtual, and where the digital content can literally come off the screen into the world and back.
So changes that children make in the real world need to translate to the virtual world.
So here, Nathan has changed the letter A to the number 2.
You can imagine maybe these symbols give the characters special powers when it goes into the virtual world.
And then finally, what I've been trying to do here is create a really immersive experience for kids, where they really feel like they are part of that story, a part of that experience.
I want them to be able to literally build their imagination into these experiences and make them their own.
And so whether they're helping us to become creative and innovative, or whether they're helping us to feel more deeply connected despite distance, or whether they are our trusted sidekick who's helping us attain our personal goals in becoming our highest and best selves, for me, robots are all about people.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So there was no job, no food.
Children, most of them, became very malnourished, like this.
There is no government to protect them.
But there are only two rules.
That's our two rules.
Because the last 20 years, the Somali woman has stood up.
In a camp with 90,000 people, you have to come up with some rules or there is going to be some fights.
(Applause) So empowering the women and giving the opportunity -- we are there for them. They are not alone for this.
It brought much, much needed medical care to people who wouldn't get it.
But one day, I went to the hospital -- my mother was sick -- and I saw the hospital, how they [were] treating the doctors, how they [are] committed to help the sick people.
My mother died, unfortunately, when I was 12 years [old].
My mother died in [a] gynecology complication, so I decided to become a gynecology specialist.
That's why I became a doctor.
DM: For me, my mother was preparing [me] when I was a child to become a doctor, but I really didn't want to.
I loved it, but it didn't work.
When the war broke out -- civil war -- I saw how my mother was helping and how she really needed the help, and how the care is essential to the woman to be a woman doctor in Somalia and help the women and children.
And I thought, maybe I can be a reporter and doctor gynecologist.
My sister was different.
PM: So what is the biggest challenge working, mother and daughter, in such dangerous and sometimes scary situations?
HA: Yes, I was working in a tough situation, very dangerous.
And when I saw the people who needed me, I was staying with them to help, because I [could] do something for them.
Now my place is 90,000 people who are respecting each other, who are not fighting.
And I'm thankful for my daughters.
That's the best part.
You see 300 patients, 20 surgeries and 90,000 people to manage.
(Applause) Wait. Wait.
The nearest we've come is with aramid fiber.
That's roughly 10,000 times the range of man-made fire detectors.
So these two examples give a sense of what biomimicry can deliver.
And if we're to make progress with the sustainability revolution, I believe there are three really big changes we need to bring about.
And thirdly, changing from a fossil fuel economy to a solar economy.
And for all three of these, I believe, biomimicry has a lot of the solutions that we're going to need.
You could look at nature as being like a catalog of products, and all of those have benefited from a 3.8-billion-year research and development period.
And given that level of investment, it makes sense to use it.
And let's start with radical increases in resource efficiency.
Studying pollen grains and radiolaria and carbon molecules helped us devise the most efficient structural solution using hexagons and pentagons.
And to do that we had to find an alternative to glass, which is really very limited in terms of its unit sizes.
And in nature there are lots of examples of very efficient structures based on pressurized membranes.
So we started exploring this material called ETFE.
And what you do is you put it together in three layers, you weld it around the edge, and then you inflate it.
And the great thing about this stuff is you can make it in units of roughly seven times the size of glass, and it was only one percent of the weight of double-glazing.
And what we found is that we got into a positive cycle in which one breakthrough facilitated another.
And at the end of the project we worked out that the weight of that superstructure was actually less than the weight of the air inside the building.
So I think the Eden Project is a fairly good example of how ideas from biology can lead to radical increases in resource efficiency -- delivering the same function, but with a fraction of the resource input.
So for instance, you could develop super-efficient roof structures based on giant Amazon water lilies, whole buildings inspired by abalone shells, super-lightweight bridges inspired by plant cells.
Nature works very differently.
And there are some examples of projects that have deliberately tried to mimic ecosystems.
And one of my favorites is called the Cardboard to Caviar Project by Graham Wiles.
And in their area they had a lot of shops and restaurants that were producing lots of food, cardboard and plastic waste.
They then shredded the cardboard and sold it to equestrian centers as horse bedding.
Graham Wiles has continued to add more and more elements to this, turning waste streams into schemes that create value.
And just as natural systems tend to increase in diversity and resilience over time, there's a real sense with this project that the number of possibilities just continue increasing.
And I know it's a quirky example, but I think the implications of this are quite radical, because it suggests that we could actually transform a big problem -- waste -- into a massive opportunity.
Then we would have an anaerobic digester, which could deal with all the biodegradable waste from the local area, turn that into heat for the greenhouse and electricity to feed back into the grid.
We'd have a water treatment system treating wastewater, turning that into fresh water and generating energy from the solids using just plants and micro-organisms.
So you can see that we're bringing together cycles of food, energy and water and waste all within one building.
And just for fun, we've proposed this for a roundabout in central London, which at the moment is a complete eyesore.
And with just a little bit of planning, we could transform a space dominated by traffic into one that provides open space for people, reconnects people with food and transforms waste into closed loop opportunities.
So the final project I want to talk about is the Sahara Forest Project, which we're working on at the moment.
So for instance, when Julius Caesar arrived in North Africa, huge areas of North Africa were covered in cedar and cypress forests.
The more vegetation we lose, the more that's likely to exacerbate climate change and lead to further desertification.
We're working with the guy who invented the Seawater Greenhouse.
This is a greenhouse designed for arid coastal regions, and the way it works is that you have this whole wall of evaporator grills, and you trickle seawater over that so that wind blows through, it picks up a lot of moisture and is cooled in the process.
So inside it's cool and humid, which means the plants need less water to grow.
So it was like a green inkblot spreading out from the building turning barren land back into biologically productive land -- and in that sense, going beyond sustainable design to achieve restorative design.
But actually in mature ecosystems, you're just as likely to find examples of symbiotic relationships.
And the technology that we settled on as an ideal partner for the Seawater Greenhouse is concentrated solar power, which uses solar-tracking mirrors to focus the sun's heat to create electricity.
And just to give you some sense of the potential of CSP, consider that we receive 10,000 times as much energy from the sun every year as we use in energy from all forms -- 10,000 times.
That's exactly what the Seawater Greenhouse produces.
CSP produces a lot of waste heat.
And finally, in the shade under the mirrors, it's possible to grow all sorts of crops that would not grow in direct sunlight.
And it turns out that different things crystallize out at different stages.
When you evaporate seawater, the first thing to crystallize out is calcium carbonate.
And that builds up on the evaporators -- and that's what that image on the left is -- gradually getting encrusted with the calcium carbonate.
The next thing is sodium chloride.
This is a hotel in Bolivia.
And then after that, there are all sorts of compounds and elements that we can extract, like phosphates, that we need to get back into the desert soils to fertilize them.
And there's just about every element of the periodic table in seawater.
So it should be possible to extract valuable elements like lithium for high-performance batteries.
And in parts of the Arabian Gulf, the seawater, the salinity is increasing steadily due to the discharge of waste brine from desalination plants.
Really the Sahara Forest Project is a model for how we could create zero-carbon food, abundant renewable energy in some of the most water-stressed parts of the planet as well as reversing desertification in certain areas.
So returning to those big challenges that I mentioned at the beginning: radical increases in resource efficiency, closing loops and a solar economy.
And I firmly believe that studying the way nature solves problems will provide a lot of the solutions.
And this is an important point.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Applause) Thank you very much.
And they had some, in my opinion, terrible Christmas music.
And when I hear music that I don't like, I try to make it better.
(Whistling) But during a Christmas party -- at dinner, actually -- it's very annoying.
So my sister-in-law asked me a few times, "Please stop whistling."
(Laughter) I lost my face.
(Applause) That was great fun, of course.
And to defend my title -- like judokas do and sportsmen -- I thought, well let's go back in 2005 -- and I won again.
So what happened now is I'm standing here in Rotterdam, in the beautiful city, on a big stage, and I'm talking about whistling.
So I quit my day job as a nurse.
(Laughter) OK, I'm not the only one whistling here.
We're here to celebrate compassion.
But compassion, from my vantage point, has a problem.
As essential as it is across our traditions, as real as so many of us know it to be in particular lives, the word "compassion" is hollowed out in our culture, and it is suspect in my field of journalism.
Karen Armstrong has told what I think is an iconic story of giving a speech in Holland and, after the fact, the word "compassion" was translated as "pity."
And I hope you'll come with me on my basic premise that words matter, that they shape the way we understand ourselves, the way we interpret the world and the way we treat others.
Compassion is a worthy successor.
Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others, both in our private and in our civic spaces.
To start simply, I want to say that compassion is kind.
Now "kindness" might sound like a very mild word, and it's prone to its own abundant cliche.
But kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues.
Compassion is also curious.
I love a phrase that was offered me by two young women who are interfaith innovators in Los Angeles, Aziza Hasan and Malka Fenyvesi.
Compassion can be synonymous with empathy.
I think that compassion also is often linked to beauty -- and by that I mean a willingness to see beauty in the other, not just what it is about them that might need helping.
I love it that my Muslim conversation partners often speak of beauty as a core moral value.
And in that light, for the religious, compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery -- encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other.
I'm not sure if I can show you what tolerance looks like, but I can show you what compassion looks like -- because it is visible.
When we see it, we recognize it and it changes the way we think about what is doable, what is possible.
I first started to learn this most vividly from Matthew Sanford.
He's been paralyzed from the waist down since he was 13, in a car crash that killed his father and his sister.
He's doing some amazing work now with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is Jean Vanier.
And compassion can also have those qualities.
Compassion is rarely a solution, but it is always a sign of a deeper reality, of deeper human possibilities.
And compassion is unleashed in wider and wider circles by signs and stories, never by statistics and strategies.
We need those things too, but we're also bumping up against their limits.
And at the same time that we are doing that, I think we are rediscovering the power of story -- that as human beings, we need stories to survive, to flourish, to change.
This is going to change science, I believe, and it will change religion.
We don't hear about the Einstein who used his celebrity to advocate for political prisoners in Europe or the Scottsboro boys in the American South.
Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions.
But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century.
He once said that science in his generation had become like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old.
And Einstein foresaw that as we grow more modern and technologically advanced, we need the virtues our traditions carry forward in time more, not less.
Now invoking Einstein might not seem the best way to bring compassion down to earth and make it seem accessible to all the rest of us, but actually it is.
So in this photograph you see a mind looking out a window at what might be a cathedral -- it's not.
This is the full photograph, and you see a middle-aged man wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigar.
He was incredibly compassionate in some of his relationships and terribly inadequate in others.
And it is much harder, often, to be compassionate towards those closest to us, which is another quality in the universe of compassion, on its dark side, that also deserves our serious attention and illumination.
Gandhi, too, was a real flawed human being.
So was Mother Teresa.
So are we all.
But what a liberating thing to realize that our problems, in fact, are probably our richest sources for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion, towards bringing compassion towards the suffering and joys of others.
Einstein became a humanitarian, not because of his exquisite knowledge of space and time and matter, but because he was a Jew as Germany grew fascist.
So I want to propose a final definition of compassion -- this is Einstein with Paul Robeson by the way -- and that would be for us to call compassion a spiritual technology.
And what we're learning is going to shed some light on what the romantic writers and poets described as the "celestial openness" of the child's mind.
What we see here is a mother in India, and she's speaking Koro, which is a newly discovered language.
What this mother -- and the 800 people who speak Koro in the world -- understands is that, to preserve this language, they need to speak it to the babies.
No scientists dispute this curve, but laboratories all over the world are trying to figure out why it works this way.
Work in my lab is focused on the first critical period in development, and that is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language.
We think, by studying how the sounds are learned, we'll have a model for the rest of language, and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development.
The baby sits on a parent's lap, and we train them to turn their heads when a sound changes -- like from "ah" to "ee."
And what we've learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics, and the statistics of Japanese and English are very, very different.
So babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains; it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners that we are.
We are governed by the representations in memory that were formed early in development.
So what we're seeing here is changing our models of what the critical period is about.
We're arguing from a mathematical standpoint that the learning of language material may slow down when our distributions stabilize.
It's raising lots of questions about bilingual people.
We are embarking on a grand and golden age of knowledge about child's brain development.
We're going to be able to see a child's brain as they experience an emotion, as they learn to speak and read, as they solve a math problem, as they have an idea.
In investigating the child's brain, we're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human, and in the process, we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning for our entire lives.
(Applause)
I was around 10 when one day, I discovered a box of my father's old things.
In it, under a bunch of his college textbooks, was a pair of black corduroy bell-bottom pants.
These pants were awful -- musty and moth-eaten.
Until that day, all I'd ever known and worn was my school uniform, which, in fact, I was pretty grateful for, because from quite a young age, I'd realized I was somewhat different.
(Laughter) I was bullied quite a bit.
And so, I figured that to survive I would be invisible, and the uniform helped me to seem no different from any other child.
(Laughter) And eventually, it became pretty clear that I was not growing up to be the son that my father always wanted.
Sorry, Dad.
And over time, I grew less and less sure that I actually wanted to.
Therefore, the day those black corduroy bell-bottom pants came into my life, something happened.
(Laughter) All the way to school, and then all the way back because I was sent home at once -- (Laughter) I transformed into a little brown rock star.
That day, instead of being invisible, I chose to be looked at, just by wearing something different.
That day, I discovered the power of what we wear.
That day, I discovered the power of fashion, and I've been in love with it ever since.
And we should express ourselves, wear what we want.
What's the worst that could happen?
However, in October 2017, she faced a different enemy, when online trolls viciously attacked the photograph that showed the 20-year-old wearing jeans that day.
Now, when most of us decide to wear a pair of jeans someplace like New York, London, Milan, Paris, we possibly don't stop to think that it's a privilege; something that somewhere else can have consequences, something that can one day be taken away from us.
My grandmother was a woman who took extraordinary pleasure in dressing up.
And the color she loved to wear so much was possibly the only thing that was truly about her, the one thing she had agency over, because like most other women of her generation in India, she'd never been allowed to exist beyond what was dictated by custom and tradition.
She'd been married at 17, and after 65 years of marriage, when my grandfather died suddenly one day, her loss was unbearable.
But that day, she was going to lose something else as well, the one joy she had: to wear color.
In India, according to custom, when a Hindu woman becomes a widow, all she's allowed to wear is white from the day of the death of her husband.
In it, you can't really see what she's wearing -- the photo is in black and white.
This is also what fashion can do.
It has the power to fill us with joy, the joy of freedom to choose for ourselves how we want to look, how we want to live -- a freedom worth fighting for.
And fighting for freedom, protest, comes in many forms.
Widows in India like my grandmother, thousands of them, live in a city called Vrindavan.
However, only as recently as 2013, the widows of Vrindavan have started to celebrate Holi, the Indian festival of color, which they are prohibited from participating in.
Lessons of defiance have always been taught by fashion's great revolutionaries: its designers.
Jean Paul Gaultier taught us that women can be kings.
Thom Browne -- he taught us that men can wear heels.
And Alexander McQueen, in his spring 1999 show, had two giant robotic arms in the middle of his runway.
McQueen, thus, before he took his own life, taught us that this body of ours is a canvas, a canvas we get to paint however we want.
However, he soon started receiving death threats for how he looked.
And eyewitnesses say that his body showed multiple wounds.
Two thousand miles away in Peshawar, Pakistani transgender activist Alisha was shot multiple times in May 2016.
She was taken to the hospital, but because she dressed in women's clothing, she was refused access to either the men's or the women's wards.
What we choose to wear can sometimes be literally life and death.
Alisha died that day and then was buried as a man.
What kind of world is this?
Well, it's one in which it's natural to be afraid, to be frightened of this surveillance, this violence against our bodies and what we wear on them.
However, the greater fear is that once we surrender, blend in and begin to disappear one after the other, the more normal this false conformity will look, the less shocking this oppression will feel.
For the children we are raising, the injustice of today could become the ordinary of tomorrow.
The time is now to stand up, to stand out.
Get used to it.
Fashion can give us a language for dissent.
Wear it like armor.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I've been spending a lot of time traveling around the world these days, talking to groups of students and professionals, and everywhere I'm finding that I hear similar themes.
On the one hand, people say, "The time for change is now."
I don't want to disappoint my family or friends."
And nothing important happens in life without a cost."
These conversations really reflect what's happening at the national and international level.
Our leaders and ourselves want everything, but we don't talk about the costs.
One of my favorite quotes from literature was written by Tillie Olsen, the great American writer from the South.
What is the cost of not trying?
And I've been touched by Cambodian women -- beautiful women, women who held the tradition of the classical dance in Cambodia.
In the 1970s, under the Pol Pot regime, the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people, and they focused and targeted the elites and the intellectuals, the artists, the dancers.
And I sat there in the studio watching these women clapping their hands -- beautiful rhythms -- as these little fairy pixies were dancing around them, wearing these beautiful silk colors.
And I thought, after all this atrocity, this is how human beings really pray.
Because they're focused on honoring what is most beautiful about our past and building it into the promise of our future.
I also have been touched by the dark side of power and leadership.
In 1986, I moved to Rwanda, and I worked with a very small group of Rwandan women to start that country's first microfinance bank.
And one of the women was Agnes -- there on your extreme left -- she was one of the first three women parliamentarians in Rwanda, and her legacy should have been to be one of the mothers of Rwanda.
And though she had been part of building a liberal party, a political party that was focused on diversity and tolerance, about three months before the genocide, she switched parties and joined the extremist party, Hutu Power, and she became the Minister of Justice under the genocide regime and was known for inciting men to kill faster and stop behaving like women.
And there is no group more vulnerable to those kinds of manipulations than young men.
I've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male.
Sometimes very small investments can release enormous, infinite potential that exists in all of us.
And he's been working with this young group of men who come from the largest slum in the world, Kibera.
And then they created a business plan competition.
What we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other.
And the reason these young guys told me that they're doing these TEDx's is because they were sick and tired of the only workshops coming to the slums being those workshops focused on HIV, or at best, microfinance.
And they're doing it.
And my hat's off to you in Kibera.
My own work focuses on making philanthropy more effective and capitalism more inclusive.
At Acumen Fund, we take philanthropic resources and we invest what we call patient capital -- money that will invest in entrepreneurs who see the poor not as passive recipients of charity, but as full-bodied agents of change who want to solve their own problems and make their own decisions.
But we find those entrepreneurs who put people and the planet before profit.
I happened to be in Lahore, Pakistan on the day that two mosques were attacked by suicide bombers.
But less than 24 hours, I was 13 miles away from those mosques, visiting one of our Acumen investees, an incredible man, Jawad Aslam, who dares to live a life of immersion.
It took almost two years just to register the land.
And there's schools and clinics and shops.
But there's only one mosque.
We need that kind of moral leadership and courage in our worlds.
I had the great honor of working with the child psychologist Dr. Robert Coles, who stood up for change during the Civil Rights movement in the United States.
But she became part of history and opened up this idea that all of us should have access to education.
And he said, "So I conclude that, in many ways, leadership is like a panicle of rice.
We need leaders.
And we need to have the humility to recognize that we cannot do it alone.
Robert Kennedy once said that "few of us have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events."
Our lives are so short, and our time on this planet is so precious, and all we have is each other.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm speaking to you about what I call the "mesh."
We've shared wine and food and other sorts of fabulous experiences in coffee bars in Amsterdam.
One is the recession -- that the recession has caused us to rethink our relationship with the things in our lives relative to the value -- so starting to align the value with the true cost.
More people, smaller spaces, less stuff.
(Laughter) The other thing that's worth considering is that we've made a huge investment over decades and decades, and tens of billions of dollars have gone into this investment that now is our inheritance.
Basically Zipcar is the largest car-sharing company in the world.
When you pick your aunt up at the airport, you get a sedan.
The number across the U.S. and Western Europe is eight percent.
In the last year, 2010, two car companies started, one that's in the U.K. called WhipCar, and the other one, RelayRides, in the U.S.
They're both peer-to-peer car-sharing services, because the two things that really work for car-sharing is, one, the car has to be available, and two, it's within one or two blocks of where you stand.
It took them six years to get 1,000 cars in service.
In general, and maybe, again, it's because I'm a tech entrepreneur, I look at things as platforms.
These platforms invite all sorts of developers and all sorts of people to come with their ideas and their opportunity to create and target an application for a particular audience.
So in this way, I think that cities are platforms, and certainly Detroit is a platform.
It's inviting participation, and cities have, historically, invited all sorts of participation.
And so there's about seven or eight cities already in the U.S.
So I was having a coffee in Portland, and half-of-a-latte in and the little board in the cafe all of a sudden starts showing me that the next bus is coming in three minutes and the train is coming in 16 minutes.
There's this fabulous opportunity we have across the U.S. now: about 21 percent of vacant commercial and industrial space.
There's a pop-up general store every three weeks, and they do a fantastic job of making a very social event happening for foodies.
The Crafty Fox is this woman who's into crafts, and she does these pop-up crafts fairs around London.
(Laughter) I would just like to say that one of the big things, when we look at waste and when we look at ways that we can really be generous and contribute to each other, but also move to create a better economic situation and a better environmental situation, is by sharing failures.
And one quick example is Velib, in 2007, came forward in Paris with a very bold proposition, a very big bike-sharing service.
We're at the very beginning of something that, what we're seeing and the way that mesh companies are coming forward, is inviting, it's engaging, but it's very early.
And thank you very much.
(Applause)
And so what I have felt -- and I have looked at this from a national security issue -- when I was Secretary of State, I decided that women's issues had to be central to American foreign policy, not just because I'm a feminist, but because I believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered, that values are passed down, the health situation is better, education is better, there is greater economic prosperity.
(Applause) PM: So when you look around the world and you see that, in many cases -- certainly in the Western world -- women are evolving into more leadership positions, and even other places some barriers are being brought down, but there's still so much violence, still so many problems, and yet we hear there are more women at the negotiating tables.
For instance, she is now the president of Finland, but Tarja Halonen was the foreign minister of Finland and, at a certain stage, head of the European Union.
It's Monday morning.
In Washington, the president of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office, assessing whether or not to strike Al Qaeda in Yemen.
In Madrid, Maria Gonzalez is standing at the door, listening to her baby crying and crying, trying to work out whether she should let it cry until it falls asleep or pick it up and hold it.
Because in a world of data deluge and extreme complexity, we believe that experts are more able to process information than we can -- that they are able to come to better conclusions than we could come to on our own.
But I believe that this is a big problem, a problem with potentially dangerous consequences for us as a society, as a culture and as individuals.
The problem lies with us: we've become addicted to experts.
We've surrendered our power, trading off our discomfort with uncertainty for the illusion of certainty that they provide.
This is no exaggeration.
In a recent experiment, a group of adults had their brains scanned in an MRI machine as they were listening to experts speak.
As they listened to the experts' voices, the independent decision-making parts of their brains switched off.
And they listened to whatever the experts said and took their advice, however right or wrong.
Did you know that studies show that doctors misdiagnose four times out of 10?
Now there are, of course, exceptions, wonderful, civilization-enhancing exceptions.
And what all this means is that paradigms take far too long to shift, that complexity and nuance are ignored and also that money talks -- because we've all seen the evidence of pharmaceutical companies funding studies of drugs that conveniently leave out their worst side effects, or studies funded by food companies of their new products, massively exaggerating the health benefits of the products they're about to bring by market.
They make mistakes every single day -- mistakes born out of carelessness.
A recent study in the Archives of Surgery reported surgeons removing healthy ovaries, operating on the wrong side of the brain, carrying out procedures on the wrong hand, elbow, eye, foot, and also mistakes born out of thinking errors.
A common thinking error of radiologists, for example -- when they look at CT scans -- is that they're overly influenced by whatever it is that the referring physician has said that he suspects the patient's problem to be.
I've shared with you so far some insights into the world of experts.
Well for the sake of time, I want to focus on just three strategies.
It recently came out that experts trialing drugs before they come to market typically trial drugs first, primarily on male animals and then, primarily on men.
It seems that they've somehow overlooked the fact that over half the world's population are women.
Being a rebel is about recognizing that experts' assumptions and their methodologies can easily be flawed.
If we are to shift paradigms, if we are to make breakthroughs, if we are to destroy myths, we need to create an environment in which expert ideas are battling it out, in which we're bringing in new, diverse, discordant, heretical views into the discussion, fearlessly, in the knowledge that progress comes about, not only from the creation of ideas, but also from their destruction -- and also from the knowledge that, by surrounding ourselves by divergent, discordant, heretical views.
For now, more than ever, is not the time to be blindly following, blindly accepting, blindly trusting.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I can hear them sing the sounds of the car alarms like they were songs of spring.
(Laughter) What does a violin have to do with technology?
Where in the world is this world heading?
It's a very strange world inside a nanotube.
The surface of the Earth is absolutely riddled with holes, and here we are, right in the middle.
When all the little mockingbirds fly away, they're going to sound like the last four days.
Thank you, TED.
(Applause) Wow.
(Applause)
This woman is slowly dying because the benign tumors in her facial bones have completely obliterated her mouth and her nose so she can't breathe and eat.
But let's not forget the hair.
You're looking at the image on your left-hand side -- that's my son with his eyebrows present.
Dysmorphophobia is an extreme version of the fact that we don't see ourselves as others see us.
It's a shocking truth that we only see mirror images of ourselves, and we only see ourselves in freeze-frame photographic images that capture a mere fraction of the time that we live.
Age is another thing when our attitude toward our appearance changes.
Here's a classic example: Rebecca has a benign blood vessel tumor that's growing out through her skull, has obliterated her nose, and she's having difficulty seeing.
They've grown used to their face; they think they're special.
Actually, sometimes the parents argue about whether these children should have the lesion removed.
Is this change, though, a real change, or is it a figment of the imagination of the patient themselves?
So this is a photograph of Henry, two weeks after he had a malignant cancer removed from the left side of his face -- his cheekbone, his upper jaw, his eye-socket.
He maintained a calm insouciance.
This is a man in his 20s whose first visit out of Nigeria was with this malignant cancer that he came to the United Kingdom to have operated on.
He continued to work as a psychiatric nurse.
When they have facial surgery, they feel their lives have changed because other people perceive them as better people.
Because you might say, "Well, this type of surgery might be regarded as cosmetic."
But then we have other people who don't choose to have facial surgery.
This is a little Bangladeshi girl from the east end of London who's got a huge malignant tumor on the right side of her face, which has already made her blind and which is rapidly growing and is going to kill her shortly.
After she had surgery to remove the tumor, her parents dressed her in this beautiful green velvet dress, a pink ribbon in her hair, and they wanted the painting to be shown around the world, despite the fact that they were orthodox Muslims and the mother wore a full burqa.
So it's not simply a Western phenomenon.
It's been going on since we can think of Lombroso and the way he would define criminal faces.
Todorov tells us that, in a tenth of a second, we can make a judgment on somebody's face.
So we've talked a lot about facial appearance.
So with modern technology, we used computers to make models.
We also don't know what they feel about recognition and identity.
So there are going to be problems with face transplantation.
This is a bit like a Julia Child recipe.
In the U.K. we have an epidemic of facial injuries among young people.
(Applause)
It was during the 2003 Nashik Kumbh Mela, one of the world's largest religious gatherings.
Every 12 years, over 30 million Hindu worshippers descend upon our city -- which is built only for 1.5 million people -- and stay for 45 days.
The main purpose is to wash away all their sins by bathing in the river Godavari.
It sounds like the perfect solution, but the funny part is, most of the people do not carry cell phones in events like Kumbh Mela.
So we built Ashioto, meaning "footstep" in Japanese, as it consists of a portable mat which has pressure sensors which can count the number of people walking on it, and sends the data over the internet to the advanced data analysis software we created.
Otherwise, people might step over the sensor.
We started with a proof of concept built in three days, made out of cardboard and aluminum foil.
When the sensors were colored, people would get scared and would ask us questions like, "Will I get electrocuted if I step on this?"
(Laughter) So we decided to design a cover for the sensor so that people don't have to worry what it is on the ground.
So after some experimentation, we decided to use an industrial sensor, used as a safety trigger in hazardous areas as the sensor, and a black neoprene rubber sheet as the cover.
Now the data is sent to the server in real time, and a heat map is plotted, taking into account all the active devices on the ground.
I would be glad if someone used this code to make many more gatherings safer.
And my new dream is to improve, adapt and deploy the system all over the world to prevent loss of life and ensure a safe flow of people, because every human soul is precious, whether at concerts or sporting events, the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the Hajj in Mecca, the Shia procession to Karbala or at the Vatican City.
Thank you.
(Cheers) (Applause)
And before we get to how future tech may affect us, I'd like to spend a little time exploring the unintended consequences of some of our recent tech, namely, social media.
Social media was supposed to bring us together in ways we could never imagine.
These three girls are talking to one another without the awkward discomfort of eye contact.
(Laughter) So are we more connected, or are we just more connected to our devices?
This is an actual tweet that I received.
"Chuck, no one wants to hear your stupid, ill-informed political views!
(Laughter) (Applause) Along with trolls, we got a brand new way of torturing teenagers -- cyberbullying.
(Laughter) "Well, why don't you just turn off the internet?"
Driverless cars.
(Laughter) The other thing is that since driverless cars will be shared, most people won't own cars, and that means the DMV will go away.
(Laughter) That is the real service they provide.
(Laughter) Nobody will own their car in the future, and that means teenagers will not have a place to make out.
That's right, artificial intelligence.
You know, there was a time when artificial intelligence was a joke.
I mean, literally a quip that you would hear at a cocktail party when somebody would bring it up in conversation: "Artificial intelligence.
(Laughter) Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates have all gone on record expressing grave reservations about artificial intelligence.
(Laughter) The one thing that's for sure: the creation always despises its creator.
And anybody who has a teenager has heard these words: "I hate you and you're ruining my life!
(Laughter) What we need to do before we perfect artificial intelligence is perfect artificial emotions.
Remember when you thought robotics were cool?
(Laughter) (Applause) And finally, I have to talk about bioengineering, an area of science that promises to end disease before it even begins, to help us live longer, fuller, healthier lives.
And when you couple that with implantable hardware, you are looking at the next incarnation of human evolution.
And all of that sounds great, until you figure out where it's really going.
(Laughter) That boy is surprised because he just found out both his parents are black.
(Laughter) Can you imagine him at a cocktail party in 20 years?
"Yeah, both my parents are black.
(Laughter) Now, all of this seems scary, and everybody in this room knows that it isn't.
The true question is not whether or not technology is scary.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As a child, I was raised by native Hawaiian elders -- three old women who took care of me while my parents worked.
Hawaiians say it's a good night for fishing.
In fact, the hull of the canoe is the womb of the vessel.
It is the most accurate place to feel the rhythm and sequence and direction of waves.
They have been compared to astronauts -- these elder navigators who sail vast open oceans in double-hulled canoes thousands of miles from a small island.
The year is 2010.
Just as the women in Hawaii that raised me predicted, the world is in trouble.
We live in a society bloated with data, yet starved for wisdom.
An African shaman said, "Your society worships the jester while the king stands in plain clothes."
The link between the past and the future is fragile.
Mau passed away five months ago, but his legacy and lessons live on.
And this is what he said: "The island is the canoe; the canoe, the island."
(Applause)
I admit that I'm a little bit nervous here because I'm going to say some radical things, about how we should think about cancer differently, to an audience that contains a lot of people who know a lot more about cancer than I do.
So let me start with genomics.
And in particular, you've probably all heard the analogy that the genome is like the blueprint of your body, and if that were only true, it would be great, but it's not.
If they have tons of salt, you might guess they're using too much salt, or something like that.
So if I look at a person and I look at a person's genome, it's the same thing.
The part of the genome that we can read is the list of ingredients.
But most things, you really have to know what's going on in the kitchen, because, mostly, sick people used to be healthy people -- they have the same genome.
But you really for the most part can't tell the difference between a healthy person and a sick person -- except in some of these special cases.
It is very useful in certain circumstances.
It's also the great theoretical triumph of biology.
It's the one theory that the biologists ever really got right.
And Darwinian evolution is really the core theory.
There's a huge amount of information about the genetics just by comparing the genetic similarity.
So to do that, what you really need to do, you need to look at the things that the genes are producing and what's happening after the genetics, and that's what proteomics is about.
Just like genome mixes the study of all the genes, proteomics is the study of all the proteins.
And so the trick is -- unfortunately, we don't have an easy way to measure these like we can measure the genome.
It requires hundreds of steps, and it takes a long, long time.
I kept getting this call from this oncologist named David Agus.
And then one day, I get a call from John Doerr, Bill Berkman and Al Gore on the same day saying return David Agus's phone call.
I mean, I see patients dying every day because we don't know what's going on inside of them.
And so we did that, and working with David, we made a little company called Applied Proteomics eventually, which makes this robotic assembly line, which, in a very consistent way, measures the protein.
And so we can look at literally hundreds of thousands of features at once out of that drop of blood.
So we're actually measuring each isotope as a different one.
So seeing this picture is sort of like getting to be Galileo and looking at the stars and looking through the telescope for the first time, and suddenly you say, "Wow, it's way more complicated than we thought it was."
So here we have Alice in green and Bob in red.
So this already, I think, is tremendously useful in all kinds of medicine.
The thing about cancer -- when I got into this, I really knew nothing about it, but working with David Agus, I started watching how cancer was actually being treated and went to operations where it was being cut out.
So if we put you in the category of you've got syphilis, we can give you penicillin.
If you've got malaria, we give you quinine or some derivative of it.
I think this is the big mistake.
I think cancer should not be a noun.
And so those tumors, those are symptoms of cancer.
And so your body is probably cancering all the time, but there are lots of systems in your body that keep it under control.
Whereas living room water, it's better to do tar on the roof."
And it sounds silly, but that's basically what we do.
David got me invited to give a talk at National Cancer Institute and Anna Barker was there.
But what we're going to do, is we're going to create a program for people outside the field of cancer to get together with doctors who really know about cancer and work out different programs of research."
And we will actually try to get to the point where we have a predictive model where we can understand, when cancer happens, what's actually happening in there and which treatment will treat that cancer.
So I think eventually, once we have one of these models for people, which we'll get eventually -- I mean, our group won't get all the way there -- but eventually we'll have a very good computer model -- sort of like a global climate model for weather.
It's going to require a lot of work, a lot of research.
But I think eventually, we will design for everybody a custom treatment for cancer.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Applause) Thank you so much.
What you just heard is "Skylife" by David Balakrishnan.
And we talk about different ideas -- he had this idea that he thought music should be from the heart.
This was in the middle of the 20th century when music from the heart, beautiful music, wasn't the most popular thing in the classical music world.
And he insisted on beautiful music.
So this is "Oblivion" by Astor Piazzolla.
(Music) (Applause)
A room full of boys.
A girl child, hardly nine or ten years old, she is sitting in the center of the room, surrounded by books.
There isn't a single functional girls' school in her village.
It was customary in her family to keep girls inside the homes.
By the time women get hold of the paper, it is old news.
Sorry, it is impossible."
But a miracle happened.
Identity determines your position in society, wherever you live.
Millions of girls in this world are being denied their basic rights because of being female.
I would have faced the same, if I hadn't been raised as a boy.
I was determined to continue my studies, to learn, to be free.
I went on a three-day hunger strike.
(Laughter) (Applause) In that way, I completed my college.
Two years later, when the time came for me to go to university, my father turned his eyes, his attention, to my younger brothers.
Luckily, I got the job, but the hardest part is facing my father.
So that night, I packed all my things in a bag, and I walked into my father's room and told him, "Tomorrow morning, the bus is going to come in.
Then I went to sleep.
The next morning, my father was standing beside me to take me to the bus stop.
(Applause) That day, I understood the importance of words.
At TRDP, I saw there was a Pakistan which I didn't know, a country much more complex than I had realized.
But here, I saw what women in other parts of Pakistan were experiencing.
The nearest hospital was at least 32 kilometers away.
So if a woman is in labor, she travels by camel to get to the hospital.
Relatives and neighbors were noticing this.
By that time, some other parents started sending their daughters to school.
(Applause) Girls are doing jobs in health sites, even in police.
But somewhere in my heart, I realized that my region, beyond my village needs further change.
This was also the time when I joined Acumen Fellowship.
There, I met leaders like me across the country.
I started to understand what leadership really means.
So I decided to go back to my region and take a position as a teacher in a remote school, a school that I have to reach by bus -- two hours traveling, every morning and evening.
Though it was hard, on my first day I knew I made the right decision.
So the girls are eager to learn, but the school is understaffed.
I enlisted a few of my friends to help me to teach.
I'm introducing my girls to the outside world by extracurricular activities and books.
For me, I never stop studying.
I believe that without educating the girls, we may not make world peace.
We may not reduce maternal mortality rate.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Ten years ago exactly, I was in Afghanistan.
I was covering the war in Afghanistan, and I witnessed, as a reporter for Al Jazeera, the amount of suffering and destruction that emerged out of a war like that.
For decades, we have lived under authoritarian regimes -- in the Arab world, in the Middle East.
And actually other regimes, they told their citizens, "Would you like to see the situation of Iraq?
A new generation, well-educated, connected, inspired by universal values and a global understanding, has created a new reality for us.
This is what happened in Tunisia.
This is what they were telling. This is their propaganda.
We in Al Jazeera were banned from Tunisia for years, and the government did not allow any Al Jazeera reporter to be there.
In front of Facebook, they brought the camels in Tahrir Square.
In front of Al Jazeera, they started creating tribalism.
Because this corrupt elite in that region has lost even the power of deception.
Al Jazeera is not a tool of revolution.
We were banned from Egypt, and our correspondents, some of them were arrested.
For 18 days, our cameras were broadcasting, live, the voices of the people in Tahrir Square.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
We have covered a lot of tragedies, a lot of problems, a lot of conflict zones, a lot of hot spots in the region, because we were centered at the middle of it.
CA: There are a lot of people in the West who are still skeptical, or think this may just be an intermediate stage before much more alarming chaos.
At this moment in time, the youth in the Arab world are much more wiser and capable of creating the change than the old -- including the political and cultural and ideological old regimes.
Two weeks ago I was in my studio in Paris, and the phone rang and I heard, "Hey, JR, you won the TED Prize 2011.
You have to make a wish to save the world."
I can't do anything to save the world."
(Laughter) "That's cool."
I mean, technology, politics, business do change the world -- not always in a good way, but they do.
What about art?
Could art change the world?
So when I found a cheap camera on the subway, I started documenting those adventures with my friends and gave them back as photocopies -- really small photos just that size.
And I did my first "expo de rue," which means sidewalk gallery.
So that's Paris.
That's on the Champs-Elysees.
Everyone was glued to the TV, watching disturbing, frightening images taken from the edge of the neighborhood.
A year later, the exhibition was displayed in front of the city hall of Paris.
That's where I realized the power of paper and glue.
So could art change the world?
A year later, I was listening to all the noise about the Middle East conflict.
So with my friend Marco, we decided to go there and see who are the real Palestinians and who are the real Israelis.
So we decided to take portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same jobs -- taxi-driver, lawyer, cooks.
And those ones are actually two taxi-drivers."
And then there was always a silence.
"Well, yeah, yeah, that's part of the project."
Face 2 Face demonstrated that what we thought impossible was possible -- and, you know what, even easy.
We didn't push the limit; we just showed that they were further than anyone thought.
When you go in these developing societies, women are the pillars of their community, but the men are still the ones holding the streets.
So we were inspired to create a project where men will pay tribute to women by posting their photos.
I called that project Women Are Heroes.
So for example, in June 2008, I was watching TV in Paris, and then I heard about this terrible thing that happened in Rio de Janeiro -- the first favela of Brazil named Providencia.
All Brazil was shocked.
I heard it was one of the most violent favelas, because the largest drug cartel controls it.
So I decided to go there.
So we just walked around, and we met a woman, and I showed her my book.
We're hungry for culture.
I just took a few photos of the kids, and the next day I came with the posters and we pasted them.
Then the next day, I held a meeting on the main square and some women came.
Are you an NGO? Are you the media?"
Don't you have color in France?"
I think it's people's curiosity that motivates them to come into the projects.
This is Kibera, Kenya, one of the largest slums of Africa.
This time we covered the roofs of the houses, but we didn't use paper, because paper doesn't prevent the rain from leaking inside the house -- vinyl does.
When you look at Kibera now, they look back.
But you know how India has a lot of dust in the streets, and the more dust you would have going up in the air, on the white paper you can almost see, but there is this sticky part like when you reverse a sticker.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Music) Okay.
In Kibera, each year we cover more roofs.
And that has always been a central part of the work.
And I was even invited to cover the MOCA museum.
That's London.
New York.
(Applause) This image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in Chernobyl originally, and I pasted it in Southern Italy, where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground.
Art can change the way we see the world.
People say, "Oh, why don't you go in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
This is Revolution 2.0.
Because everyone was a hero.
We all use Wikipedia.
And in the Egyptian revolution, the Revolution 2.0, everyone has contributed something, small or big. They contributed something -- to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind when it comes to revolutions.
It was actually really inspiring to see all these Egyptians completely changing.
Everything was going bad.
Everything was going wrong.
And it's not because people were happy or people were not frustrated.
But the reason why everyone was silent is what I call the psychological barrier of fear.
Everyone was scared.
And that psychological barrier of fear had worked for so many years, and here comes the Internet, technology, BlackBerry, SMS.
They probably have the best life in the world.
But they are still feeling the pain of the Egyptian.
The Internet has played a great role, helping these people to speak up their minds, to collaborate together, to start thinking together.
It was an educational campaign.
I still remember the photo.
He was tortured, brutally tortured to death.
Because of the Internet, the truth prevailed and everyone knew the truth.
He was a middle-class guy.
His photo was remembered by all of us.
In a few days, tens of thousands of people there -- angry Egyptians who were asking the ministry of interior affairs, "Enough.
But actually when people went to the street -- the first time it was thousands of people in Alexandria -- it felt like -- it was amazing. It was great because it connected people from the virtual world, bringing them to the real world, sharing the same dream, the same frustration, the same anger, the same desire for freedom.
People were taking shots and photos; people were reporting violations of human rights in Egypt; people were suggesting ideas, they were actually voting on ideas, and then they were executing the ideas; people were creating videos.
There was no leader.
The Tunisian experiment, as Amir was saying, inspired all of us, showed us that there is a way.
Yes we can. We can do it.
And when I saw the street on the 25th, I went back and said, "Egypt before the 25th is never going to be Egypt after the 25th.
The revolution is happening.
This is not the end, this is the beginning of the end."
I was detained on the 27th night.
I was detained for 12 days, blindfolded, handcuffed.
I was not allowed to speak with anyone.
Seriously, with the amount of change I had noticed in this square, I thought it was 12 years.
The fear is no longer fear.
It was amazing how everyone was so empowered and now asking for their rights.
This whole revolution showed us how ugly such a regime was and how great and amazing the Egyptian man, the Egyptian woman, how simple and amazing these people are whenever they have a dream.
We're going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams."
Actually, I had this taxi driver telling me, "Listen, I am breathing freedom.
I feel that I have dignity that I have lost for so many years."
My last word to you is a statement I believe in, which Egyptians have proven to be true, that the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power.
(Applause)
Well, this is about state budgets.
This is probably the most boring topic of the whole morning.
And these budgets are the key for our future; they're the key for our kids.
Most education funding -- whether it's K through 12, or the great universities or community colleges -- most of the money for those things is coming out of these state budgets.
U.S. economy is big -- 14.7 trillion.
Answer is 26 percent.
After all, at least on paper, there's this notion that these state budgets are balanced.
Only one state says they don't have to balance the budget.
But what this means actually is that there's a pretense.
They sell off the assets.
In fact, there's about five states that are worse and only really four states that don't face this big challenge.
There's ways, if it's temporary, to minimize the impact, but it's a problem.
Technology has a role to play.
So what's going on?
Just look at this spending.
Everybody has an opinion.
And the numbers are used to make decisions.
So what do we need to do?
We need better accounting.
We need to understand why they've done the pension accounting the way they have.
And finally, we need to really reward politicians.
In fact, the week afterwards, some tax cuts were done that made the situation even worse than their assumptions.
Now I think this is a solvable problem.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The fact is that we're living longer.
In fact, in the last 10 years, the number of patients requiring an organ has doubled, while in the same time, the actual number of transplants has barely gone up.
So that's where this field comes in that we call the field of regenerative medicine.
It really involves many different areas.
You can use, actually, scaffolds, biomaterials -- they're like the piece of your blouse or your shirt -- but specific materials you can actually implant in patients and they will do well and help you regenerate.
But it's actually not a new field.
Interestingly, this is a book that was published back in 1938.
But I want you to note his co-author: Charles Lindbergh.
Liver cells, nerve cells, pancreatic cells -- we still can't grow them even today.
This is actually like a cotton candy machine.
That was like the fibers of the cotton candy creating this structure, this tubularized structure, which is a biomaterial that we can then use to help your body regenerate using your very own cells to do so.
What we did was we actually used the biomaterial as a bridge so that the cells in the organ could walk on that bridge, if you will, and help to bridge the gap to regenerate that tissue.
Now today, many clinical trials are using different kinds of stem cells for heart disease.
Or if we're going to use larger structures to replace larger structures, we can then use the patient's own cells, or some cell population, and the biomaterials, the scaffolds, together.
So you see the leaflets opening and closing -- of this heart valve that's currently being used experimentally to try to get it to further studies.
Another technology that we have used in patients actually involves bladders.
It has the same conditions as the human body -- 37 degrees centigrade, 95 percent oxygen.
But we now have better ways to create these structures with the cells.
We use now some type of technologies, where for solid organs, for example, like the liver, what we do is we take discard livers.
Two weeks later, you have something that looks like a liver.
And we now have been able just to show the creation of human liver tissue just this past month using this technology.
Another technology that we've used is actually that of printing.
This is actually a desktop inkjet printer, but instead of using ink, we're using cells.
And you can actually see here the printhead going through and printing this structure, and it takes about 40 minutes to print this structure.
Another more advanced technology we're looking at right now, our next generation of technologies, are more sophisticated printers.
You see a scanner technology that first scans the wound on the patient and then it comes back with the printheads actually printing the layers that you require on the patients themselves.
This is how it actually works.
Here's the scanner going through, scanning the wound.
And this is actually new technology still under development.
We're also working on more sophisticated printers.
Because in reality, our biggest challenge are the solid organs.
I don't know if you realize this, but 90 percent of the patients on the transplant list are actually waiting for a kidney.
Patients are dying every day because we don't have enough of those organs to go around.
So the strategy here is -- this is actually a CT scan, an X-ray -- and we go layer by layer, using computerized morphometric imaging analysis and 3D reconstruction to get right down to those patient's own kidneys.
So we go layer by layer through the organ, analyzing each layer as we go through the organ, and we then are able to send that information, as you see here, through the computer and actually design the organ for the patient.
It takes about seven hours to print a kidney, so this is about three hours into it now.
Thank you.
This is Dr. Kang who's been working with us on this project, and part of our team.
Thank you, Dr. Kang. I appreciate it.
And this is actually a new technology we're working on now.
So after the surgery, life got a lot better for me.
(Applause) Juan Enriquez: These experiments sometimes work, and it's very cool when they do.
I'm a sophomore and studying communications, TV and mass media, and basically trying to live life like a normal kid, which I always wanted growing up.
I went through about 16 surgeries, and it seemed impossible to do that when I was in kidney failure when I was 10.
And this surgery came along and basically made me who I am today and saved my life.
I know I was one of the first 10 people to have this surgery.
And when I was 10, I didn't realize how amazing it was.
(Applause)
Thank you. Thank you for hip-hop -- and Anita Hill.
(Cheering) My parents were radicals -- (Laughter) who became, well, grown-ups.
When I was just a little girl, my mom started what is now the longest-running women's film festival in the world.
So while other kids were watching sitcoms and cartoons, I was watching very esoteric documentaries made by and about women.
They were the co-authors of a book called "Manifesta."
Jennifer Baumgardner was wearing them.
So race, class, gender, ability, all of these things go into our experiences of what it means to be a woman.
Feminist blogging is basically the 21st century version of consciousness raising.
And one of our biggest successes is we get mail from teenage girls in the middle of Iowa who say, "I Googled Jessica Simpson and stumbled on your site.
Thank you.
It's enough to make you feel very overwhelmed.
I experienced this firsthand myself when I graduated from Barnard College in 2002.
I wrote about Nia Martin-Robinson, the daughter of Detroit and two civil rights activists, who's dedicating her life to environmental justice.
Instead, what she really wanted to do was make films.
So she made a film about the welfare system and had a huge impact.
I wrote about Maricela Guzman, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, who joined the military so she could afford college.
She was actually sexually assaulted in boot camp and went on to co-organize a group called the Service Women's Action Network.
And at the end of the day, what could possibly be more important than that?
This isn't to say we give up our wildest, biggest dreams.
So when I was a little girl, I had a couple of very strange habits.
The activists I interviewed had nothing in common, literally, except for one thing, which was that they all cited their mothers as their most looming and important activist influences.
My mom and so many women like her have taught me that life is not about glory, or certainty, or security even.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Notice, this is an aldehyde, and it's an alcohol.
Start differentiating into effector and memory cells.
We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day.
And some of you all might know, about five years ago, I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I was in Boston, and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans, remotely.
This is just an excerpt from one of those letters: "My 12 year-old son has autism, and has had a terrible time with math.
(Laughter) (Applause) But I was excited, so I kept going.
If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to.
One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did, they can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time.
But the more interesting thing -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom, and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom.
So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job, and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level?
And the Khan Academy videos are there.
But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.
(Laughter) But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now.
They're doing Khan Academy, that software, for roughly half of their math class.
And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- this is actually a live dashboard from the Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard.
In our mind, the relevant metric is: student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio.
So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.
They're doing it at the district level.
Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club.
I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education.
(Applause)
And the journalist was asking him, "Why is this so important?"
And I want to talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like.
So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, the Internet meant something very different to me.
And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed.
And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links.
So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web.
Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at -- everything from what kind of computer you're on to what kind of browser you're using to where you're located -- that it uses to personally tailor your query results.
Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore.
But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google "Egypt" and to send me screen shots of what they got.
When you put them side-by-side, you don't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are.
So it's not just Google and Facebook either.
It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan.
And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that, because they're mainly looking at what you click on first, it can throw off that balance.
And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did.
Because I think we really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Imagine if you could record your life -- everything you said, everything you did, available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips, so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them, or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that previously had gone undiscovered.
Well that's exactly the journey that my family began five and a half years ago.
This is my wife and collaborator, Rupal.
And so with many privacy provisions put in place to protect everyone who was recorded in the data, we made elements of the data available to my trusted research team at MIT so we could start teasing apart patterns in this massive data set, trying to understand the influence of social environments on language acquisition.
And the [horizontal] axis is time.
Of course, my son is learning from his linguistic environment, but the environment is learning from him.
So welcome to my home.
That's me and my son on the floor.
Same concept, but looking at communication dynamics in a very different sphere.
So we have the programs and the sporting events and the commercials, and all of the link structures that tie them together make a content graph.
And then the important third dimension.
And there are, again, now tens of millions of these links that give us the connective tissue of social graphs and how they relate to content.
And we can now start to probe the structure in interesting ways.
It's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication.
And so just to return to my son, when I was preparing this talk, he was looking over my shoulder, and I showed him the clips I was going to show to you today, and I asked him for permission -- granted.
Listen very carefully.
(Applause)
This is a river.
This is a stream.
It runs through a populated area from East Helena to Lake Helena.
Well, it started back in the late 1800s when people started settling in places like Montana.
In short, there was a lot of water and there weren't very many people.
But as more people showed up wanting water, the folks who were there first got a little concerned, and in 1865, Montana passed its first water law.
There were precedent-setting suits in 1870 and 1872, both involving Prickly Pear Creek.
And the senior water rights holders, if they don't use their water right, they risk losing their water right -- along with the economic value that goes with it.
Most of you will be happy to know that the rest of the presentation's free ...
(Laughter) There's another thing happening around the country, which is that companies are starting to get concerned about their water footprint.
Now the brewers in Montana have already done a lot to reduce their water consumption, but they still use millions of gallons of water.
I mean, there's water in beer.
After all, there's a strong correlation between water and fishing, and for some, there's a strong correlation between fishing and beer.
Up until now, business water stewardship has been limited to measuring and reducing, and we're suggesting that the next step is to restore.
In some states, senior water rights holders can leave their water in the stream while legally protecting it from others, and maintaining their water right.
After all, it is their water right, and if they want to use that water right to help the fish grow in the stream, it's their right to do so.
Because he's the senior water-rights holder, he can protect the water from other users in the stream.
This guy's measuring the water that this leaves in the stream.
Each increment gets a serial number and a certificate, and then the brewers and others buy those certificates as a way to return water to these degraded ecosystems.
The brewers pay to restore water to the stream.
It provides a simple, inexpensive and measurable way to return water to these degraded ecosystems, while giving farmers an economic choice and giving businesses concerned about their water footprints an easy way to deal with them.
After 140 years of conflict and 100 years of dry streams, a circumstance that litigation and regulation has not solved, we put together a market-based, willing buyer, willing seller solution -- a solution that does not require litigation.
It's about giving folks concerned about their water footprints a real opportunity to put water where it's critically needed, into these degraded ecosystems, while at the same time providing farmers a meaningful economic choice about how their water is used.
We've connected senior water-rights holders with brewers in Montana, with hotels and tea companies in Oregon, and with high-tech companies that use a lot of water in the Southwest.
(Applause)
So in the course of my career, I have covered a series of failures.
The second insight is that emotions are at the center of our thinking.
We are now children of the French Enlightenment.
In the United States, 55 percent of babies have a deep two-way conversation with Mom and they learn models to how to relate to other people.
(Laughter) This is a gender-linked trait, by the way.
But some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases, their own overconfidence.
And that comes in tremendously handy, because groups are smarter than individuals.
He was married to a woman named Carol, and they had a wonderful relationship.
Through the policy failures of the last 30 years, we have come to acknowledge, I think, how shallow our view of human nature has been.
Thank you.
(Applause)
We see light reflected off the Moon.
And with all of our modern telescopes, we've been able to collect this stunning silent movie of the universe -- these series of snapshots that go all the way back to the Big Bang.
We might one day see a shadow a black hole can cast on a very bright background, but we haven't yet.
Einstein realized that if space were empty, if the universe were empty, it would be like this picture, except for maybe without the helpful grid drawn on it.
It was Einstein's great general theory of relativity.
What Einstein did not realize was that, if you took our Sun and you crushed it down to six kilometers -- so you took a million times the mass of the Earth and you crushed it to six kilometers across, you would make a black hole, an object so dense that if light veered too close, it would never escape -- a dark shadow against the universe.
It wasn't Einstein who realized this, it was Karl Schwarzschild who was a German Jew in World War I -- joined the German army already an accomplished scientist, working on the Russian front.
So you can't hide anything behind a black hole.
If this were Battlestar Galactica and you're fighting the Cylons, don't hide behind the black hole.
Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole -- it's not massive enough -- but there are tens of thousands of black holes in our galaxy.
But even though the black hole is dark from the outside, it's not dark on the inside, because all of the light from the galaxy can fall in behind us.
It would be like a near-death experience where you see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's a total death experience.
And if you can see -- it's kind of faint -- but if you can see the red waves emanating out, those are the gravitational waves.
Both black holes are getting closer together.
In this Hubble image, we see two galaxies.
These two black holes are colliding, and they will merge over a billion-year time scale.
This animation from my friends at Proton Studios shows looking at the Big Bang from the outside.
So imagine you're inside the Big Bang.
Imagine a billion years ago, two black holes collided.
It's literally the definition of noise.
Will it happen again?
(Applause)
He said, "Bezos, I need you to go into the house.
So, not exactly what I was hoping for, but off I went -- up the stairs, down the hall, past the 'real' firefighters, who were pretty much done putting out the fire at this point, into the master bedroom to get a pair of shoes.
Now I know what you're thinking, but I'm no hero.
(Laughter) In both my vocation at Robin Hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter, I am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale, but I'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis.
Don't wait until you make your first million to make a difference in somebody's life.
If you have something to give, give it now.
Not every day is going to offer us a chance to save somebody's life, but every day offers us an opportunity to affect one.
Thank you.
(Applause) Mark Bezos: Thank you.
One winter morning, a couple of years ago, I was driving to work in Johannesburg, South Africa, and noticed a haze hanging over the city.
The contrast between the scenic environment I knew and this smog-covered skyline stirred up something within me.
The main challenge was, I didn't know much about environmental science air-quality management or atmospheric chemistry.
Sometimes the unique perspective you have can result in unconventional thinking that can move the needle, but you need to be bold enough to try.
What I knew back then was that if I was even going to try to make a difference, I had to get smart about air pollution first, and so I became a student again.
I did a bit of basic research and soon learned that air pollution is the world's biggest environmental health risk.
Data from the World Health Organization shows that almost 14 percent of all deaths worldwide in 2012 were attributable to household and ambient air pollution, with most occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
Ambient air pollution alone causes more deaths each year than malaria and HIV/AIDS.
I started to speak to officials from the City of Johannesburg and other surrounding cities, and I engaged the local scientific community, and I also made a few cold calls.
I began to develop an idea about what I could do to improve the situation.
I started by simply asking myself how I could bring together in some meaningful way my skills in software engineering and artificial intelligence and the expertise of the people I'd reached out to.
I wanted to create an online air-quality management platform that would uncover trends in pollution and project into the future to determine what outcomes can be expected.
I was determined to see my idea translate into a practical solution, but I faced uncertainty and had no guarantee of success.
What I have come to realize is that sometimes just one fresh perspective, one new skill set, can make the conditions right for something remarkable to happen.
We then used new machine learning technology to predict future levels of pollution for several different pollutants days in advance.
We can predict adverse pollution events ahead of time, identify heavy polluters, and they can be ordered by the relevant authorities to scale back their operations.
Through assisted scenario planning, city planners can also make better decisions about how to extend infrastructure, such as human settlements or industrial zones.
So here is the point: What if I'd not investigated the problem of air pollution further?
So wherever you are in the world, the next time you find that there's some natural curiosity you have that is being piqued, and it's about something you care about, and you have some crazy or bold ideas, and perhaps it's outside the realm of your expertise, ask yourself this: Why not?
Thank you.
(Applause)
And this image of the Sun may suggest that the Sun is something evil and aggressive, but we should not forget that all energy on this planet actually comes from the Sun, and light is only a manifestation of that energy.
So in an indirect way, you can see the sun.
But actually, the human eye turns out to be remarkably adaptable to all these different light conditions that together create an environment that is never boring and that is never dull, and therefore helps us to enhance our lives.
In the 1930s, Richard Kelly was the first person to really describe a methodology of modern lighting design.
And he coined three terms, which are "focal glow," "ambient luminescence" and "play of the brilliants" -- three very distinctly different ideas about light in architecture that all together make up this beautiful experience.
Richard Kelly saw it as something infinite, something without any focus, something where all details actually dissolve in infinity.
And behind them, you see that Seagram Building that later turned into an icon of modern lighting design.
And there is the idea that, when we look at things, it is the yellow light that helps us the most, that we are the most sensitive for.
But I would like to talk further about the combination of light and darkness as a quality in our life.
It never reaches the ground where it was meant for.
It only spoils the darkness.
So at a global scale, it looks like this.
Because if we look at the Earth the way it should be, it would be something like this very inspiring image where darkness is for our imagination and for contemplation and to help us to relate to everything.
It was just a much smaller city, and the pace of urbanization is incredible and enormous.
And we have to understand these main questions: How do people move through these new urban spaces?
It's not that long ago that our lighting was just done with these kinds of lamps.
So you can preserve the darkness and make the light.
So we have to rethink the way we light our cities.
In all of these examples, I think, we should start making the light out of darkness, and use the darkness as a canvas -- like the visual artists do, like Edward Hopper in this painting.
I think that there is a lot of suspense in this painting.
By appreciating the darkness when you design the light, you create much more interesting environments that truly enhance our lives.
This is the most well-known example, Tadao Ando's Church of the Light.
But I also think of Peter Zumthor's spa in Vals, where light and dark, in very gentle combinations, alter each other to define the space.
And I think it's fantastic that we are today experiencing TEDx in a theater for the first time because I think we really owe to the theater a big thanks.
And I think the theater is a place where we truly enhance life with light.
(Applause)
But, of course, my real field of expertise lies in an even different kind of civilization -- I can't really call it a civilization.
(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.
So in many, many ways, we can do things today that we couldn't do when I began in 1960.
So here we are, a chimpanzee using a computer.
Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans also learn human sign language.
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.
(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.
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.
And we find chimps are capable of true compassion and altruism.
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.
And now they've got transport; they take it on the logging trucks or the mining trucks into the towns where they sell it.
Their culture is being destroyed, along with the animals upon whom they depend.
We talked already about the loss of human cultural diversity, and I've seen it happening with my own eyes.
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.
Every individual has a role to play.
Violence leads to violence, at least in my view.
Secondly, the resilience of nature.
We are surrounded by the most amazing people who do things that seem to be absolutely impossible.
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.
So, yes, there is hope, and where is the hope?
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.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "Oh, I know that like the back of my hand."
You're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him.
Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place, to see if you can change him.
But that's what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything, if you let it.
Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away.
Always apologize when you've done something wrong, but don't you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.
Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing.
So here are three things I know to be true.
I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that, "A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order."
(Laughter) And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke.
(Laughter) Why was the scarecrow invited to TED?
(Laughter) I'm sorry.
Okay, so these are three things I know to be true.
Sometimes I get to the end of the poem, look back and go, "Oh, that's what this is all about," and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.
Spoken-word poetry is the art of performance poetry.
So I decided to give it a try.
The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage, I was shaking.
I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open Mic, and my bewildered, but supportive, parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could.
I was the youngest by at least a decade, but somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the 14-year-old wandering about.
The Bowery Poetry Club became my classroom and my home, and the poets who performed encouraged me to share my stories as well.
There were things that were specific to me, and the more that I focused on those things, the weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine.
When I got to university, I met a fellow poet who shared my belief in the magic of spoken-word poetry.
When I was in high school I had created Project V.O.I.C.E.
But it turns out sometimes, poetry can be really scary.
So I came up with lists. Everyone can write lists.
And the first list that I assign is "10 Things I Know to be True."
At a certain point, you would realize that someone has the exact same thing, or one thing very similar, to something on your list.
And so she wrote her first poem, a love poem unlike any I had ever heard before.
And the poem began, "Anderson Cooper is a gorgeous man."
(Laughter) "Did you see him on 60 Minutes, racing Michael Phelps in a pool -- nothing but swim trunks on -- diving in the water, determined to beat this swimming champion?
(Laughter) (Applause) Now, I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you.
I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it.
I write musicals; I make short films alongside my poems.
It's not uncommon to feel like you're alone or that nobody understands you, but spoken word teaches that if you have the ability to express yourself and the courage to present those stories and opinions, you could be rewarded with a room full of your peers, or your community, who will listen.
And that is an amazing realization to have, especially when you're 14.
You have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself.
And that is step three: infusing the work you're doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing.
I travel a lot while I'm teaching, and I don't always get to watch all of my students reach their step three, but I was very lucky with Charlotte, that I got to watch her journey unfold the way it did.
And I'm trying to tell stories only I can tell -- like this story.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell this story, and I wondered if the best way was going to be a PowerPoint, a short film -- And where exactly was the beginning, the middle or the end?
When they bombed Hiroshima, the explosion formed a mini-supernova, so every living animal, human or plant that received direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash.
And what was left of the city soon followed.
When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby."
But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page.
So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed.
My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name.
There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation.
But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone.
The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light.
After the A-bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again.
When I meet you, in that moment, I'm no longer a part of your future.
So if you tell me I can do the impossible -- I'll probably laugh at you.
I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it -- and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in.
But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around.
Thank you.
You may know this feeling: you wake up to multiple unread notifications on your mobile phone.
And I didn't know what to do.
How do we find fulfillment in a world that's literally changing as fast as we can think, or maybe even faster?
I started looking for answers.
I spoke to many people, I spoke to my friends, I spoke to my family.
I even read many self-help books.
In fact, the more self-help books I read, the more stressed and anxious I became.
(Laughter) It was like I was feeding my mind with junk food, and I was becoming mentally obese.
(Laughter) I was about to give up, until one day, I found this.
This is an ancient Chinese philosophy classic that was written more than 2,600 years ago.
My anxiety and stress just suddenly disappeared.
And today, I'd like to share with you three lessons I learned so far from this philosophy of water -- three lessons that I believe have helped me find greater fulfillment in almost everything that I do.
The first lesson is about humility.
It helps all the plants grow and keeps all the animals alive.
But without water's humble contribution, life as we know it may not exist.
I want to learn more, and I need your help."
I became genuinely interested in the stories and experiences that make them unique and magical.
Humility gives water its power.
The second lesson I learned is about harmony.
If we think about water flowing towards a rock, it will just flow around it.
When I was thinking through this, I began to understand why I was feeling stressed out in the first place.
I was forcing things to change because I was consumed by the need to succeed or to prove myself.
By simply shifting my focus from trying to achieve more success to trying to achieve more harmony, I was immediately able to feel calm and focused again.
Does this align with my nature?
I became more comfortable simply being who I am, rather than who I'm supposed to be or expected to be.
Work actually became easier, because I stopped focusing on things that I cannot control and only on the things that I can.
That's Tao Te Ching's way of describing the power of harmony.
In fact, it's water's ability to adapt and change and remain flexible that made it so enduring through the ages, despite all the changes in the environment.
We also live in a world today of constant change.
We can no longer expect to work to a static job description or follow a single career path.
In our organization, we host a lot of hackathons, where small groups or individuals come together to solve a business problem in a compressed time frame.
And what's interesting to me is that the teams that usually win are not the ones with the most experienced team members, but the ones with members who are open to learn, who are open to unlearn and who are open to helping each other navigate through the changing circumstances.
Life is like a hackathon in some way.
So humility, harmony and openness.
Those are the three lessons I learned from the philosophy of water so far.
So nowadays, whenever I feel stressed, unfulfilled, anxious or just not sure what to do, I simply ask the question: What would water do?
(Laughter) This simple and powerful question inspired by a book written long before the days of bitcoin, fintech and digital technology has changed my life for the better.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life.
That was a great day for my mother.
To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.
Today, in Sweden and other rich countries, people are using so many different machines.
Look -- the homes are full of machines.
I can't even name them all.
There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than two dollars a day.
So two billion have access to washing machines.
Or, to be more precise, how do most of the women in the world wash?
It's hard, time-consuming labor, which they have to do for hours every week.
And sometimes they also have to bring water from far away to do the laundry at home, or they have to bring the laundry away to a stream far off.
That's what most of the electricity and the energy in the world is.
Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world population.
That makes 12 of them.
But the main concern for the environmentally interested students -- and they are right -- is about the future.
Population growth will mainly occur among the poorest people here, because they have high child mortality and they have many children per woman.
Because the risk, the high probability of climate change is real.
And she became Dilma Rousseff, the president-elect of one of the biggest democracies in the world, moving from minister of energy to president.
If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines.
Thank you, steel mill.
Thank you very much.
I just came back from a community that holds the secret to human survival.
It's a place where women run the show, have sex to say hello, and play rules the day -- where fun is serious business.
This is the world of wild bonobos in the jungles of Congo.
Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, your living closest relative.
Now, chimpanzees are well-known for their aggression.
(Laughter) But unfortunately, we have made too much of an emphasis of this aspect in our narratives of human evolution.
But unfortunately, bonobos are the least understood of the great apes.
The Congo is a paradox -- a land of extraordinary biodiversity and beauty, but also the heart of darkness itself -- the scene of a violent conflict that has raged for decades and claimed nearly as many lives as the First World War.
Yet, in this land of violence and chaos, you can hear hidden laughter swaying the trees.
Now, I'm not saying this is the solution to all of humanity's problems -- since there's more to bonobo life than the Kama Sutra.
Bonobos, like humans, love to play throughout their entire lives.
Play is not just child's games.
Play increases creativity and resilience, and it's all about the generation of diversity -- diversity of interactions, diversity of behaviors, diversity of connections.
And when you watch bonobo play, you're seeing the very evolutionary roots of human laughter, dance and ritual.
Play is the glue that binds us together.
Have a look what she's doing.
Yeah.
(Laughter) So sex play is common in both bonobos and humans.
I think, like her, we sometimes play alone, and we explore the boundaries of our inner and our outer worlds.
And it's that playful curiosity that drives us to explore, drives us to interact, and then the unexpected connections we form are the real hotbed for creativity.
In order to adapt successfully to a changing world, we need to play.
But will we make the most of our playfulness?
In times when it seems least appropriate to play, it might be the times when it is most urgent.
And so, my fellow primates, let us embrace this gift from evolution and play together, as we rediscover creativity, fellowship and wonder.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In the history of our planet, there have been three great waves of evolution.
The first wave of evolution is what we think of as Darwinian evolution.
Then human beings stepped out of the Darwinian flow of evolutionary history and created the second great wave of evolution, which was we changed the environment in which we evolved.
We altered our ecological niche by creating civilization.
By changing our environment, we put new pressures on our bodies to evolve.
Whether it was through settling down in agricultural communities, all the way through modern medicine, we have changed our own evolution.
We started selectively breeding animals many, many thousands of years ago.
And if you think of dogs for example, dogs are now intentionally-designed creatures.
Dogs are the result of selectively breeding traits that we like.
This is a beefalo.
And they are now making them, and someday, perhaps pretty soon, you will have beefalo patties in your local supermarket.
This is a geep, a goat-sheep hybrid.
The scientists that made this cute little creature ended up slaughtering it and eating it afterwards.
I think they said it tasted like chicken.
This is a cama.
It's bigger than a tiger.
And so one of the things we've been doing is using genetic enhancement, or genetic manipulation, of normal selective breeding pushed a little bit through genetics.
We all know that some deep-sea creatures glow.
And what you see here is these cells glowing in the dark under certain wavelengths of light.
And, in fact, they did it with monkeys.
And in fact, right now in many states, you can go out and you can buy bioluminescent pets.
And so some states have decided to allow them, some states have decided to ban them.
Some of you may have read about the FDA's consideration right now of genetically-engineered salmon.
But if you can clone that horse, you can have both the advantage of having a gelding run in the race and his identical genetic duplicate can then be put out to stud.
(Laughter) In addition, we've started to use cloning technology to try to save endangered species.
This is the use of animals now to create drugs and other things in their bodies that we want to create.
The guar is an endangered Southeast Asian ungulate.
We have two kinds of DNA in our bodies.
And it raises the question of how we're going to define animal species in the age of biotechnology -- a question that we're not really sure yet how to solve.
This lovely creature is an Asian cockroach.
This actually is one of DARPA's very important -- DARPA is the Defense Research Agency -- one of their projects.
And in fact, this technology has gotten so developed that this creature -- this is a moth -- this is the moth in its pupa stage, and that's when they put the wires in and they put in the computer technology, so that when the moth actually emerges as a moth, it is already prewired.
They've now created an organic robot.
The graduate students in Sanjiv Talwar's lab said, "Is this ethical?
This is Miguel Nicolelis of Duke.
The computer learned what the monkey brain did to move its arm in various ways.
They then hooked it up to a prosthetic arm, which you see here in the picture, put the arm in another room.
Then he put a video monitor in the monkey's cage that showed the monkey this prosthetic arm, and the monkey got fascinated.
And it's not just technology that we're putting into animals.
This is Thomas DeMarse at the University of Florida.
He took 20,000 and then 60,000 disaggregated rat neurons -- so these are just individual neurons from rats -- put them on a chip.
And he used that as the IT piece of a mechanism which ran a flight simulator.
So now we have organic computer chips made out of living, self-aggregating neurons.
This is a mouse created by Charles Vacanti of the University of Massachusetts.
Genetic engineering coupled with polymer physiotechnology coupled with xenotransplantation.
Finally, not that long ago, Craig Venter created the first artificial cell, where he took a cell, took a DNA synthesizer, which is a machine, created an artificial genome, put it in a different cell -- the genome was not of the cell he put it in -- and that cell then reproduced as the other cell.
So you may have thought that the creation of life was going to happen in something that looked like that.
(Laughter) But in fact, that's not what Frankenstein's lab looks like.
This is a DNA synthesizer, and here at the bottom are just bottles of A, T, C and G -- the four chemicals that make up our DNA chain.
And so, we need to ask ourselves some questions.
Do we get to create organic robots, where we remove the autonomy from these animals and turn them just into our playthings?
And then the final step of this, once we perfect these technologies in animals and we start using them in human beings, what are the ethical guidelines that we will use then?
We are now taking control of our own evolution.
We are directly designing the future of the species of this planet.
It confers upon us an enormous responsibility that is not just the responsibility of the scientists and the ethicists who are thinking about it and writing about it now.
It is the responsibility of everybody because it will determine what kind of planet and what kind of bodies we will have in the future.
(Applause)
We at Berkeley Bionics call these robots exoskeletons.
Soldier: With the HULC exoskeleton, I can carry 200 lbs. over varied terrain for many hours.
There are 68 million people estimated to be in wheelchairs worldwide.
And the only option, pretty much -- when it's stroke or other complications -- is the wheelchair.
Let me now introduce you to eLEGS that is worn by Amanda Boxtel that 19 years ago was spinal cord injured, and as a result of that she has not been able to walk for 19 years until now.
(Applause) Amanda Boxtel: Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
In August 2007, Claron was awarded the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts, winning praise for her brilliance, her amazing and extensively wide repertoire and her vivid stage personality.
And we behold the wondrous beauty of vocal expression -- mysterious, spontaneous and primal.
A few years ago, I did a meditation retreat in Thailand.
I spent two weeks at this retreat in my own little hut -- no music, no nothing -- sounds of nature, trying to find the essence of concentration, being in the moment.
So I closed my eyes, I took breath and the first thing that came up and out was "Summertime," Porgy and Bess.
Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high.
Oh, your daddy's rich and your ma is good-lookin'.
And I opened my eyes, and I saw that she had her eyes closed.
And after a moment, she opened her eyes and she looked at me and she said, "It's like meditation."
I know what you're thinking.
You think I've lost my way, and somebody's going to come on the stage in a minute and guide me gently back to my seat.
How long are you staying?"
(Applause) And in that time, I have seen a lot of changes.
I want to tell you about my friend who was teaching English to adults in Abu Dhabi.
And one fine day, she decided to take them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary.
But it was she who ended up learning all the Arabic words for the local plants, as well as their uses -- medicinal uses, cosmetics, cooking, herbal.
But I do know that I've seen a lot of changes.
Actually, not that long ago.
But nevertheless, I was recruited by the British Council, along with about 25 other teachers.
And we were the first non-Muslims to teach in the state schools there in Kuwait.
Now this is the major change that I've seen -- how teaching English has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to becoming a massive international business that it is today.
But if you're not a native speaker, you have to pass a test.
Well, I don't think so.
I don't think so.
We English teachers are the gatekeepers.
I ask you, what happened to translation?
If you think about the Islamic Golden Age, there was lots of translation then.
Case in point, Einstein.
But fortunately for the world, he did not have to pass an English test.
(Applause) It brings to mind a headline I saw recently: "Education: The Great Divide."
And to do that, they need a Western education.
My daughter came to England from Kuwait.
She had studied science and mathematics in Arabic.
(Applause) When he received his award, he said these lovely words: "The children can lead Africa from what it is today, a dark continent, to a light continent."
(Applause) Thank you very much.
(Applause)
The idea behind the Stuxnet computer worm is actually quite simple.
We don't want Iran to get the bomb.
Their major asset for developing nuclear weapons is the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
The gray boxes that you see, these are real-time control systems.
Now if we manage to compromise these systems that control drive speeds and valves, we can actually cause a lot of problems with the centrifuge.
The gray boxes don't run Windows software; they are a completely different technology.
And this is the plot behind Stuxnet.
So we start with a Windows dropper.
The payload goes onto the gray box, damages the centrifuge, and the Iranian nuclear program is delayed -- mission accomplished.
When we started our research on Stuxnet six months ago, it was completely unknown what the purpose of this thing was.
The only thing that was known is it's very, very complex on the Windows part, the dropper part, used multiple zero-day vulnerabilities.
And it seemed to want to do something with these gray boxes, these real-time control systems.
So that got our attention, and we started a lab project where we infected our environment with Stuxnet and checked this thing out.
And then some very funny things happened.
Stuxnet behaved like a lab rat that didn't like our cheese -- sniffed, but didn't want to eat.
Didn't make sense to me.
And after we experimented with different flavors of cheese, I realized, well, this is a directed attack.
And if not, Stuxnet does nothing.
It could be, let's say for example, a U.S. power plant, or a chemical plant in Germany.
So we extracted and decompiled the attack code, and we discovered that it's structured in two digital bombs -- a smaller one and a bigger one.
So they know everything.
And if you have heard that the dropper of Stuxnet is complex and high-tech, let me tell you this: the payload is rocket science.
It's way above everything that we have ever seen before.
Here you see a sample of this actual attack code.
We are talking about -- around about 15,000 lines of code.
Looks pretty much like old-style assembly language.
And I want to tell you how we were able to make sense out of this code.
So what we were looking for is, first of all, system function calls, because we know what they do.
And then we were looking for timers and data structures and trying to relate them to the real world -- to potential real world targets.
In order to get target theories, we remember that it's definitely hardcore sabotage, it must be a high-value target and it is most likely located in Iran, because that's where most of the infections had been reported.
It basically boils down to the Bushehr nuclear power plant and to the Natanz fuel enrichment plant.
So I told my assistant, "Get me a list of all centrifuge and power plant experts from our client base."
So we were able to associate the small digital warhead with the rotor control.
The rotor is that moving part within the centrifuge, that black object that you see.
And if you manipulate the speed of this rotor, you are actually able to crack the rotor and eventually even have the centrifuge explode.
The big digital warhead -- we had a shot at this by looking very closely at data and data structures.
So for example, the number 164 really stands out in that code; you can't overlook it.
I started to research scientific literature on how these centrifuges are actually built in Natanz and found they are structured in what is called a cascade, and each cascade holds 164 centrifuges.
These centrifuges in Iran are subdivided into 15, what is called, stages.
An almost identical structure.
Now don't get me wrong here, it didn't go like this.
Anyway, so we figured out that both digital warheads were actually aiming at one and the same target, but from different angles.
The small warhead is taking one cascade, and spinning up the rotors and slowing them down, and the big warhead is talking to six cascades and manipulating valves.
So in all, we are very confident that we have actually determined what the target is.
It is Natanz, and it is only Natanz.
So we don't have to worry that other targets might be hit by Stuxnet.
Now what this thing does is it intercepts the input values from sensors -- so for example, from pressure sensors and vibration sensors -- and it provides legitimate program code, which is still running during the attack, with fake input data.
And as a matter of fact, this fake input data is actually prerecorded by Stuxnet.
It actually is much more dangerous and aggressive.
So for example, in a power plant, when your big steam turbine gets too over speed, you must open relief valves within a millisecond.
Obviously, this cannot be done by a human operator.
And when they are compromised, then real bad things can happen.
Think about this: this attack is generic.
And you don't have -- as an attacker -- you don't have to deliver this payload by a USB stick, as we saw it in the case of Stuxnet.
You could also use conventional worm technology for spreading.
Just spread it as wide as possible.
That's the consequence that we have to face.
So unfortunately, the biggest number of targets for such attacks are not in the Middle East.
We have to face the consequences, and we better start to prepare right now.
Ralph, it's been quite widely reported that people assume that Mossad is the main entity behind this.
Ralph Langner: Okay, you really want to hear that?
Yeah. Okay.
My opinion is that the Mossad is involved, but that the leading force is not Israel.
So the leading force behind that is the cyber superpower.
There is only one, and that's the United States -- fortunately, fortunately.
Because otherwise, our problems would even be bigger.
CA: Thank you for scaring the living daylights out of us. Thank you, Ralph.
(Applause)
This production was directed by South African artist and theater director, William Kentridge.
And in a way that's a metaphor for life.
AK: So in 1981, I persuaded Basil and some friends of mine to form a puppet company.
And 20 years later, miraculously, we collaborated with a company from Mali, the Sogolon Marionette Troupe of Bamako, where we made a piece about a tall giraffe.
It was just called "Tall Horse," which was a life-sized giraffe.
BJ: So this production was seen by Tom Morris of the National Theatre in London.
So we began with a test.
This is a cardboard model, a little bit smaller than the hyena.
You'll notice that the legs are plywood legs and the canoe structure is still there.
And we went back to Cape Town and redesigned the horse completely.
(Laughter) And here is our factory in Cape Town where we make horses.
So here are some half-finished horses ready to be worked in London.
And now we would like to introduce you to Joey.
Joey.
(Applause) (Applause) Joey.
Joey, come here.
He has bicycle brake cables going down to the head control in his hand.
Horses' hearing is very important.
Over here, Tommy's got what you call the heart position.
Adrian thought that he was going to have to split the chest of the puppet in two and make it breathe like that -- because that's how a horse would breathe, with an expanded chest.
The skin itself is made out of a see-through nylon mesh, which, if the lighting designer wants the horse to almost disappear, she can light the background and the horse becomes ghostlike.
Again, that was a practical consideration.
They have to be able to act along with their fellow actors in the production.
(Applause) Mikey Brett, Craig, Leo, Zem Joaquin and Basil and me.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
It was October 13, 2012, a day that I will never forget.
And it wasn't just any hill: it was a 15-mile climb up to a town called Hawi on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Every year, during my childhood, I watched this very race on TV in our family living room.
I volunteered at the local hospital in high school.
In college, I interned at the White House, studied abroad in Spain and backpacked through Europe all by myself with my leg braces and crutches.
Upon graduating, I moved to New York City for a job in management consulting, earned an MBA, got married and now have a daughter.
(Applause) At age 28, I was introduced to the sport of hand-cycling, and then triathlon, and by luck, I met Jason Fowler, an Ironman World Champion, at a camp for athletes with disabilities.
And with his encouragement, at age 34, I decided to go after Kona.
The Kona, or Hawaii Ironman is the oldest Iron-distance race in the sport, and if you're not familiar, it's like the Super Bowl of triathlon.
And the Ironman, for a wheelchair athlete like me, consists of a 2.4-mile open-water swim in the Pacific Ocean, a 112-mile hand cycle ride in lava fields -- now, that sounds exotic, but it's not as scenic as it sounds, and it's pretty desolate -- and then you top it off with a marathon, or a 26.2-mile run in 90-degree heat using a racing wheelchair.
There was no way I was going to make that swim in my time limit of 10 and a half hours, because I was almost two hours off pace.
My best friend Shannon and my husband Shawn were waiting at the top of Hawi to drive me back to town.
And on my way back to town, I began to cry.
My dream of completing the Ironman World Championship was crushed.
I worried about what my friends, my family and people at work would think of me.
(Laughter) How was I going to explain to everyone that things didn't go the way I had assumed or planned?
A few weeks later I was talking to Shannon about the Kona "disaster," and she said this to me: "Minda, big dreams and goals can only be realized when you're ready to fail."
I knew I had to put that failure behind me in order to move forward, and it wouldn't be the first time that I had faced insurmountable odds.
I was born in Bombay, India, and just before my first birthday, I contracted polio, which left me paralyzed from the hips down.
Unable to care for me, my birth mother left me at an orphanage.
Fortunately, I was adopted by an American family, and I moved to Spokane, Washington just shortly after my third birthday.
Over the next few years, I underwent a series of surgeries on my hips, my legs and my back that allowed me to walk with leg braces and crutches.
As a child, I struggled with my disability.
People stared at me all the time, and I was embarrassed about wearing a back brace and leg braces, and I always hid my chicken legs under my pants.
Many people who contract polio in developing countries do not have access to the same medical care, education, or opportunities like I have had in America.
Many do not even live to reach adulthood.
All of us, in our own lives, may face seemingly insurmountable goals.
I want to share with you what I learned when I tried again.
One year after my first attempt, on a sunny Saturday morning, my husband Shawn dumped me into the ocean at the Kona Pier and, with 2,500 of my closest friends and competitors, we started swimming as that cannon went off promptly at 7am.
And I told myself, "Minda, you better focus.
And when I rolled into town, I heard on the loudspeaker, "Minda Dentler is one of the last competitors to make the bike cutoff."
(Applause) By only three minutes.
(Laughter) It was 5:27pm, and I had been racing for 10-and-a-half hours.
I pressed on, focusing on one push at a time.
I crossed that finish line.
For the first time in the 35-year history, a female wheelchair athlete completed the Ironman World Championship.
(Laughter) A paralyzed orphan from India.
Against all odds, I achieved my dream, and through this very personal commitment to myself, I slowly realized that completing the Ironman was about more than conquering Kona.
Today, we are closer than ever to eliminating one of those diseases everywhere in the world.
In the mid-1980s, polio once paralyzed more than 350,000 children a year in more than 125 countries.
By contrast, so far this year, the last endemic countries have reported a total of only 12 cases.
Since 1988, more than 2.5 billion children have been immunized against polio, and an estimated 16 million children, who otherwise would have been paralyzed like me, are walking.
Despite this incredible progress, we know that until it's eradicated, polio remains a very real threat, especially to children in the poorest communities of the world.
And so this is my new Ironman: to end polio.
And I am reminded every day, when I look at my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Maya.
She is able to climb a ladder in the park, push her scooter or kick a ball across the grass.
Almost everything that I see her do at her age reminds me of what I could not do at that age.
And when she was two months old, I took her to get her first polio vaccine.
When we left the room, I could feel my eyes welling up with tears.
It was in that moment that I realized that my daughter's life would be very different from mine.
Thank you.
(Applause)
It was a cube -- a very well large cube, at that.
A look through the windows revealed a sharp contrast: within the cubes are tranquil, civilized, domestic images of African family members, friends and Nigerian professionals, ranging from writers, poets, fashion designers, etc.
But the images captured by Western media overwhelmingly depict Africans as basically primitive at best, or barely distinguishable from the African animals.
I began my professional photography practice in 1994, but my passion and enthusiasm for photography goes back to childhood, when my parents arranged for us to be photographed by a professional photographer on almost a monthly basis.
Later, when I was in boarding school, my friends and I bought Polaroid cameras, and then I began to experiment with self-portraiture, or what I would call "proto-selfie auto-portraits."
(Laughter) "Cover Girl 1994" was my first major work that was critically well received in the US and Europe and quite instantly became a part of the school anthologies at universities and colleges.
With the "Cover Girl" series, I wanted to reimagine the magazine cover with imagery totally unexpected, yet profoundly reasonable.
The "Cover Girl" series proposed a different way the African can be represented in a more complex manner.
Like "Cover Girl," the "Sartorial Anarchy" series is made up of self-portraits.
In each image, I married disparate costumes from widely diverse traditions, countries and time frames.
This was paired with a British Norfolk jacket, Yoruba Nigerian trousers, and, improbably, a South African Zulu fighting stick.
I also began to investigate the vast possibilities of color: its emotional values, psychological impulse, poetic allure and a boundless capacity beyond the realm of meaning and logic.
Nollywood is the first time that you have a school of African filmmakers truly, truly, profoundly in charge of telling African stories.
In their varied movies -- from romantic movies, horror films, gangster movies to action movies -- one sees Nigerians portrayed with many layers of complexities.
Nollywood is Africa's mirror par excellence.
Now, Nollywood is a new phase of Africa.
This grand group portrait is the exact same size as Rafael's "School of Athens."
Nollywood also exemplifies a type of modernity never before seen in Africa.
As shocking as this may be, it is almost a taboo in the art world to show Africans in a modern framework -- that is to say, as polished, dry-cleaned, manicured, pedicured and coiffed.
(Applause) Part of my job is to keep beautifying Africa for the world, one portrait at a time.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As a boy, I loved cars.
When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident.
I saw the concept first in the DARPA Grand Challenges where the U.S. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert.
And the unimaginable happened: it became the first car to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge, winning Stanford 2 million dollars.
We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1.
Do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people?
This is four billion hours wasted in this country alone.
Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology, and I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back at us and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.
(Applause)
I wanted to be a rock star.
And mostly I wanted to be the fifth member of Depeche Mode or Duran Duran.
And I grew up in this little farming town in northern Nevada.
And the choir conductor there knew that I sang and invited me to come and join the choir.
And about a week later, a friend of mine came to me and said, "Listen, you've got to join choir.
And I felt for the first time in my life that I was part of something bigger than myself.
And then I started conducting, and I ended up doing my master's degree at the Juilliard School.
Well a couple of years ago, a friend of mine emailed me a link, a YouTube link, and said, "You have got to see this."
And it was this young woman who had posted a fan video to me, singing the soprano line to a piece of mine called "Sleep."
Britlin was so innocent and so sweet, and her voice was so pure.
And I had this idea: if I could get 50 people to all do this same thing, sing their parts -- soprano, alto, tenor and bass -- wherever they were in the world, post their videos to YouTube, we could cut it all together and create a virtual choir.
And lo and behold, people started uploading their videos.
(Singing) This is Evangelina Etienne (Singing) from Massachusetts.
(Singing) Stephen Hanson from Sweden.
(Singing) This is Jamal Walker from Dallas, Texas.
I said, "Thank you, Scott. I'm so glad that you found me."
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
And the video went viral.
And so I decided for Virtual Choir 2.0 that I would choose the same piece that Britlin was singing, "Sleep," which is another work that I wrote in the year 2000 -- poetry by my dear friend Charles Anthony Silvestri.
And again, I posted a conductor video, and we started accepting submissions.
(Singing) And some younger members.
And we just closed submissions January 10th, and our final tally was 2,051 videos from 58 different countries.
It's so wonderful to sing together again!"
Me too.
As I am in the Great Alaskan Bush, satellite is my connection to the world."
I feel a closeness to this choir -- almost like a family.
If I'm going to teach my daughter about electronics, I'm not going to give her a soldering iron.
(Applause) And once you have the basics, we can make a slightly more complicated circuit.
And now I can start talking about parallel and series circuits.
We don't usually think of our kitchen as an electrical engineering lab or little kids as circuit designers, but maybe we should.
(Applause)
Ten years ago, on a Tuesday morning, I conducted a parachute jump at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
And you're very careful how you put the straps, particularly the leg straps because they go between your legs.
Then you sit down, and you wait a little while, because this is the Army.
And of course, if your leg straps aren't set right, at that point you get another little thrill.
When we landed on the drop-zone, everything had changed.
But things had changed; I was a 46-year-old brigadier general.
I'd been successful, but things changed so much that I was going to have to make some significant changes, and on that morning, I didn't know it.
And I still believe real leaders are like that.
But then a couple of years later, when I was a company commander, I went out to the National Training Center.
Sort of leadership by humiliation.
And I went up to apologize to him, and he said, "Stanley, I thought you did great."
More importantly, the force that I led was spread over more than 20 countries.
And that's a new kind of leadership for me.
I stood in front of a screen one night in Iraq with one of my senior officers and we watched a firefight from one of our forces.
And I said, "John, where's your son? And how is he?"
I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment.
Every Ranger promises every other Ranger, "No matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming."
And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever.
I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust.
It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs.
(Laughter) And it isn't always fair.
But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So what does the happiest man in the world look like?
So how do you get to be the happiest man in the world?
Well it turns out there is a way to measure happiness in the brain.
And you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fMRI, versus the right prefrontal cortex.
He's by far the happiest man ever measured by science.
(Laughter) Actually, he was meditating on compassion.
My dream is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime -- and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale.
Compassion is something that creates happiness.
And that mind-blowing insight changes the entire game.
Therefore, to create the conditions for global compassion, all we have to do is to reframe compassion as something that is fun.
But fun is not enough.
What if compassion is also profitable?
Then, every boss, every manager in the world, will want to have compassion -- like this.
So, I started paying attention to what compassion looks like in a business setting.
Because what I was looking for was right in front of my eyes -- in Google, my company.
Google is a company born of idealism.
It's a company that thrives on idealism.
In Google, expressions of corporate compassion almost always follow the same pattern.
It's sort of a funny pattern.
And sometimes it gets big enough to become official.
The first example is the largest annual community event -- where Googlers from around the world donate their labor to their local communities -- was initiated and organized by three employees before it became official, because it just became too big.
During the Haiti earthquake, a number of engineers and product managers spontaneously came together and stayed overnight to build a tool to allow earthquake victims to find their loved ones.
And expressions of compassion are also found in our international offices.
In China for example, one mid-level employee initiated the largest social action competition in China, involving more than 1,000 schools in China, working on issues such as education, poverty, health care and the environment.
There is so much organic social action all around Google that the company decided to form a social responsibility team just to support these efforts.
And this idea, again, came from the grassroots, from two Googlers who wrote their own job descriptions and volunteered themselves for the job.
And I found it fascinating that the social responsibility team was not formed as part of some grand corporate strategy.
But again, fun is not enough.
There are also real business benefits.
The first benefit of compassion is that it creates highly effective business leaders.
What does that mean?
There are three components of compassion.
So what has this got to do with business leadership?
According to a very comprehensive study led by Jim Collins, and documented in the book "Good to Great," it takes a very special kind of leader to bring a company from goodness to greatness.
And he calls them "Level 5 leaders."
These are leaders who, in addition to being highly capable, possess two important qualities, and they are humility and ambition.
These are leaders who are highly ambitious for the greater good.
And they, according to the research, make the best business leaders.
The motivational component of compassion creates ambition for greater good.
In other words, compassion is the way to grow Level 5 leaders.
And this is the first compelling business benefit.
The second compelling benefit of compassion is that it creates an inspiring workforce.
Employees mutually inspire each other towards greater good.
It creates a vibrant, energetic community where people admire and respect each other.
I mean, you come to work in the morning, and you work with three guys who just up and decide to build a hospital in India.
So this mutual inspiration promotes collaboration, initiative and creativity.
The first ingredient is to create a culture of passionate concern for the greater good.
So always think: how is your company and your job serving the greater good?
This awareness of serving the greater good is very self-inspiring and it creates fertile ground for compassion to grow in.
The second ingredient is autonomy.
And he considers himself one of the inmates.
The third ingredient is to focus on inner development and personal growth.
Leadership training in Google, for example, places a lot of emphasis on the inner qualities, such as self-awareness, self-mastery, empathy and compassion, because we believe that leadership begins with character.
What a company.
And this creates the foundation for emotion intelligence.
What does that mean?
It means being able to observe our thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity, objectivity and from a third-person perspective.
The third step, following the second step, is to create new mental habits.
Imagine whenever you meet any other person, any time you meet a person, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, "I want you to be happy.
Imagine you can do that.
Having this habit, this mental habit, changes everything at work.
I found this to be true, both on the individual level and at a corporate level.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I have spent the past few years putting myself into situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous.
So when I knew I was coming here to do a TED Talk that was going to look at the world of branding and sponsorship, I knew I would want to do something a little different.
So as some of you may or may not have heard, a couple weeks ago, I took out an ad on eBay.
I sent out some Facebook messages, some Twitter messages, and I gave people the opportunity to buy the naming rights to my 2011 TED Talk.
(Laughter) You know how many people watch these TED Talks?
(Video) Morgan Spurlock: What I want to do is make a film all about product placement, marketing and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing and advertising.
So the movie will be called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."
So that's the whole concept, the whole film, start to finish.
JK: Both.
MK: I can help you.
MS: Okay. (MK: Good.) Awesome.
MS: And just like that, one by one, all of these companies suddenly disappeared.
But the problem was, you see, my idea had one fatal flaw, and that flaw was this.
See, when you do a Google image search for transparency, this is --- (Laughter) (Applause) This is one of the first images that comes up.
You see, we hear a lot about transparency these days.
Our politicians say it, our president says it, even our CEO's say it.
(Laughter) It's unpredictable -- (Music) (Laughter) like this odd country road.
And it's also very risky.
(Laughter) That's very risky.
See, when I was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie -- and there he is giving me the look he often gave me -- he would say, "Son, there's three sides to every story.
(Video) MS: I have friends who make great big, giant Hollywood films, and I have friends who make little independent films like I make.
And the friends of mine who make big, giant Hollywood movies say the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners that they have.
And the movie is called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."
MS: What are the words that you would use to describe Ban?
(Laughter) Woman: Superior technology.
MS: And that's a multi-million dollar corporation.
(Video) MS: How would you guys describe your brand?
I don't know.
But usually I have an accessory, like sunglasses, or I like crystal and things like that too.
Man 5: Failed writer-alcoholic brand.
Lawyer: I'm a lawyer brand.
Tom: I'm Tom.
(Laughter) And what I realized is I needed an expert.
Most companies tend to -- and it's human nature -- to avoid things that they're not sure of, avoid fear, those elements, and you really embrace those, and you actually turn them into positives for you, and it's a neat thing to see.
What other brands are like that?
MS: A playful, mindful brand. What is your brand?
If somebody asked you to describe your brand identity, your brand personality, what would you be?
They enabled us to tell the story about neuromarketing, as we got into telling the story in this film about how now they're using MRI's to target the desire centers of your brain for both commercials as well as movie marketing.
(Applause) And we went to school districts where now companies are making their way into cash-strapped schools all across America.
The film hasn't even been distributed yet.
What I always believe is that if you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity.
I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks.
And that being said, through honesty and transparency, my entire talk, "Embrace Transparency," has been brought to you by my good friends at EMC, who for $7,100 bought the naming rights on eBay.
EMC presents: "Embrace Transparency."
(Applause) June Cohen: So, Morgan, in the name of transparency, what exactly happened to that $7,100?
I have in my pocket a check made out to the parent organization to the TED organization, the Sapling Foundation -- a check for $7,100 to be applied toward my attendance for next year's TED.
(Laughter) (Applause)
And that was the onset of ALS.
So I went and met with his brother and father and said, "We're going to give you this money.
So I showed up with the desire to just write a check, and instead, I wrote a check that I had no freaking idea how I was going to cash.
I met these guys called GRL, Graffiti Research Lab, and they have a technology that allows them to project a light onto any surface and then, with a laser pointer, draw on it, and it just registers the negative space.
(Applause) Which was awesome.
The other thing we did is we flew seven programmers from all over the world -- literally every corner of the world -- into our house.
My wife and kids and I moved to our back garage, and these hackers and programmers and conspiracy theorists and anarchists took over our house.
This is called the EyeWriter, and you can see the description.
(Applause) Thank you.
And after over a year of planning, two weeks of programming, carb-fest and all-night sessions, Tony drew again for the first time in seven years.
And we set up a projector on a wall out in the parking lot outside of his hospital.
Everything in this room wasn't possible -- this stage, this computer, this mic, the EyeWriter -- wasn't possible at one point.
Thank you guys.
(Applause)
Can any of you remember what you wanted to be when you were 17?
So I used to get my eyes tested just for fun.
And on my seventeenth birthday, after my fake eye exam, the eye specialist just noticed it happened to be my birthday.
And I took that driving lesson, and I said, "I'm going to learn how to drive."
I am, and have been since birth, legally blind.
See this hand?
Every man in this room, even you, Steve, is George Clooney.
The really strange part is that, at three and a half, just before I was going to school, my parents made a bizarre, unusual and incredibly brave decision.
The first thing I thought about was my mom, who was crying over beside me.
I was 28 years old.
And I simply said, "I'm sorry.
And that door closed.
And then I remember thinking about that eye specialist asking me, "What do you want to be? What do you want to be?
Nine months later, after that day on snot rock, I had the only blind date in my life with a seven and a half foot elephant called Kanchi.
And you know what, when you really believe in yourself and everything about you, it's extraordinary what happens.
I simply needed vision and belief.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works.
An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens.
In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy.
Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone, there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded.
So here's a great puzzle: in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I've described, the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center?
Well, the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty.
And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage.
We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments.
And at each threshold, the going gets tougher.
The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it's more difficult to create complexity.
Now, we, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.
And that's the story that we tell in big history.
So let's do it.
(Laughter) Let's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years, to the beginning of time.
The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom.
And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter -- quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons.
And all of that happens in the first second.
Now we move forward 380,000 years.
And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium.
Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage.
Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background.
What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas.
Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff.
So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms.
So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds.
From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them.
And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex.
Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds.
If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.
So now the universe is chemically more complex.
And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago.
Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials.
So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity.
The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity.
Living organisms are created by chemistry.
We are huge packages of chemicals.
That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets.
Now, what are the ideal conditions for chemistry?
Well, first, you need energy, but not too much.
In the center of a star, there's so much energy that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again.
But not too little.
In intergalactic space, there's so little energy that atoms can't combine.
You also need a great diversity of chemical elements, and you need liquids, such as water.
In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can't move.
In liquids, they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules.
Now, where do you find such Goldilocks conditions?
Well, planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect.
How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable?
Well, it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick.
And DNA also copies itself.
The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections.
And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning.
Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear.
Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out.
We've seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information.
DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work.
But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning: it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time.
The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them.
And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history.
Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, humans learned to farm.
And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied.
Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected.
Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it.
I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction.
So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning.
I want my grandson, Daniel, and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us.
We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them, as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet.
(Applause)
Public space.
An art review.
This is a huge problem and a huge obstacle to change, because it means that some of the most passionate and informed voices are completely silenced, especially during election time.
It's like trying to run into a brick wall.
We can democratize our public spaces.
(Applause)
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 in the worship of my church, the most frequently used adjective about God is "almighty."
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.
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.
Then, on December 26th last year, just two months ago, that underwater earthquake triggered the tsunami.
Shortly after the tsunami I read a newspaper article written by the Archbishop of Canterbury -- fine title -- about the tragedy in Southern Asia.
The only appropriate response would be a compassionate silence and some kind of practical help.
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 the eternal God must be able to enter into the souls of human beings and experience the torment within.
And the devastating events of the 20th century have forced people to question the cold, unfeeling God.
And the answer was, "God is in this with us, or God doesn't deserve our allegiance anymore."
So we have a suffering God -- a God who is intimately connected with this world and with every living soul.
And last week we sang with the children one of their favorite songs, "The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock."
But if God can or will do these things -- intervene to change the flow of events -- then surely he could have stopped the tsunami.
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.
Can we earn God's favor by worshipping Him or believing in Him?
Does God demand loyalty, like any medieval tyrant?
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.
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.
This seems more acceptable, but it still leaves God with the ultimate moral responsibility.
Is God a cold, unfeeling spectator?
Is God intimately involved in our suffering, so that He feels it in His own being?
We must think again about God.
But what if God doesn't act? What if God doesn't do things at all?
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.
Is God just another name for the universe, with no independent existence at all?
To what extent can we ascribe personality to God?
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?
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.
I had some suggestions to make -- possible new ways of thinking about God.
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.
I grew up in the Paris suburbs and I was the youngest of three children.
I was in high school and got a bad grade, a rare event for me, so I decided to hide it from my parents.
Later, while checking my school bag, my mother got hold of my school assignment and immediately saw that the signature was forged.
I was born in Algeria.
Later on, in France, I loved eavesdropping on grownups' conversations, and I would hear all sorts of stories about my father's previous life, especially that he had "done" World War II, that he had "done" the Algerian war.
But knowing my father, and how he kept saying that he was a pacifist and non-violent, I found it very hard to picture him with a helmet and gun.
One day, while my father was working on a file for us to obtain French nationality, I happened to see some documents that caught my attention.
I managed to convince him that it was important for us, but possibly also for other people that he shared his story.
So, his story. My father was born in Argentina.
All this to tell you that if my father became a forger, actually, it was almost by accident.
My father had been instilled with such respect for the law that although he was being persecuted, he'd never thought of false papers.
Suddenly the man looked very, very interested.
(Applause) But it was only the beginning.
One day my father introduced me to my sister.
He also explained to me that I had a brother, too, and the first time I saw them I must have been three or four, and they were 30 years older than me.
They are both in their sixties now.
In order to write the book, I asked my sister questions. I wanted to know who my father was, who was the father she had known.
And then I understood that asking my father so many questions was stirring up a whole past he probably didn't feel like talking about because it was painful.
In Africa there were countries fighting for their independence: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Angola.
And then my father connected with Nelson Mandela's anti-apartheid party.
Then there was the Vietnam War.
All my childhood, while my friends' dads would tell them Grimm's fairy tales, my father would tell me stories about very unassuming heroes with unshakeable utopias who managed to make miracles.
(Applause) Thank you.
It was like breathing.
After surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak, eat or drink, I was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me.
For several days now, we have enjoyed brilliant and articulate speakers here at TED.
I used to be able to talk like that.
I will start with my wife, Chaz.
My tongue, larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected.
(Laughter) (Laughter) CE: I was optimistic, and all was right with the world.
The first surgery was a great success.
Suddenly, I had an episode of catastrophic bleeding.
So thank you, Leonard Cohen, for saving my life.
And before I left the hospital, after a year of being hospitalized, I had seven ruptures of my carotid artery.
I tried out various computer voices that were available online, and for several months I had a British accent, which Chaz called Sir Lawrence."
So Chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my TV show voice from a period of 30 years.
At first I was against it.
But I decided then to just give it a try.
These are a few of the comments I recorded for use when Chaz and I appeared on the Oprah Winfrey program.
And here's the voice we call Roger Jr.
The flow isn't natural.
I feel like the hero of that Harlan Ellison story titled "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."
For almost all of its millions and billions of years, there was no life on Earth at all.
Only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next, did civilization become possible.
Finally came mankind's most advanced and mysterious tool, the computer.
Some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of Urbana, the birthplace of HAL 9000.
As a local newspaper reporter still in high school, I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called PLATO.
This was a computer-assisted instruction system, which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC.
I have learned from Wikipedia that, starting with that humble beginning, PLATO established forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing and multiple-player games.
Since the first Web browser was also developed in Urbana, it appears that my hometown in downstate Illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual, online universe we occupy today.
I started writing on a computer back in the 1970s when one of the first Atech systems was installed at the Chicago Sun-Times.
When I bought my first desktop, it was a DEC Rainbow.
(Applause) "The Sun Times sent me to the Cannes Film Festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the Porteram Telebubble.
(Laughter) CE: All of this has happened in the blink of an eye.
It makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history.
For billions of years, the universe evolved completely without notice.
Now we live in the age of the Internet, which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness.
We are born into a box of time and space.
For me, the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence.
Not everybody has the patience of my wife, Chaz.
But online, everybody speaks at the same speed.
While harvesting tissue from both my shoulders, the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily.
People -- (Applause) People talk loudly -- I'm so sorry.
Excuse me.
(Laughter) You should never let your wife read something like this.
I have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way.
(Laughter) You all know the test for artificial intelligence -- the Turing test.
If the judge can't tell the machine apart from the human, the machine has passed the test.
(Applause)
I was born in Poland, now in the U.S.
I started a group called Open Source Ecology.
We've identified the 50 most important machines that we think it takes for modern life to exist -- things from tractors, bread ovens, circuit makers.
So I finished my 20s with a Ph.D. in fusion energy, and I discovered I was useless.
I guess you can call it the consumer lifestyle.
So I started a farm in Missouri and learned about the economics of farming.
I bought a tractor -- then it broke.
I paid to get it repaired -- then it broke again.
And I found that industrial productivity can be achieved on a small scale.
So then I published the 3D designs, schematics, instructional videos and budgets on a wiki.
So far, we have prototyped eight of the 50 machines.
And the same is starting to happen with hardware too.
We're focusing on hardware because it is hardware that can change people's lives in such tangible material ways.
We're exploring the limits of what we all can do to make a better world with open hardware technology.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I returned to Singapore and, in 1990, performed Asia's first successful cadaveric liver transplant procedure, but against all odds.
Now when I look back, the transplant was actually the easiest part.
(Applause) And perhaps more important, I am the proud godmother to her 14 year-old son.
(Applause) But not all patients on the transplant wait list are so fortunate.
The truth is, there are just simply not enough donor organs to go around.
As the demand for donor organs continues to rise, in large part due to the aging population, the supply has remained relatively constant.
In the United States alone, 100,000 men, women and children are on the waiting list for donor organs, and more than a dozen die each day because of a lack of donor organs.
Shortly after I performed the first liver transplant, I received my next assignment, and that was to go to the prisons to harvest organs from executed prisoners.
I was also pregnant at the time.
But my joyful period was marred by solemn and morbid thoughts -- thoughts of walking through the prison's high-security death row, as this was the only route to take me to the makeshift operating room.
No doubt, I was informed, the consent had been obtained.
I was troubled that the retrieval of organs from executed prisoners was at least as morally controversial as the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos.
It made me wonder if there could be a better way -- a way to circumvent death and yet deliver the gift of life that might exponentially impact millions of patients worldwide.
And in transplantation, concepts shifted from whole organs to cells.
In 1988, at the University of Minnesota, I participated in a small series of whole organ pancreas transplants.
And at that time, stem cell research had gained momentum, following the isolation of the world's first human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s.
I too was fascinated by this new and disruptive cell technology, and this inspired a shift in my mindset, from transplanting whole organs to transplanting cells.
And I focused my research on stem cells as a possible source for cell transplants.
Today we realize that there are many different types of stem cells.
Fat-derived stem cells are adult stem cells.
And as it turns out, fat is one of the best sources of adult stem cells.
But adult stem cells are not embryonic stem cells.
But in 2007, two remarkable individuals, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and Jamie Thomson of the United States, made an astounding discovery.
And so guess what, scientists around the world and in the labs are racing to convert aging adult cells -- aging adult cells from you and me -- they are racing to reprogram these cells back into more useful IPS cells.
And in our lab, we are focused on taking fat and reprogramming mounds of fat into fountains of youthful cells -- cells that we may use to then form other, more specialized, cells, which one day may be used as cell transplants.
If this research is successful, it may then reduce the need to research and sacrifice human embryos.
In May 2006, something horrible happened to me.
37 million people worldwide are blind, and 127 million more suffer from impaired vision.
Stem cell-derived retinal transplants, now in a research phase, may one day restore vision, or part vision, to millions of patients with retinal diseases worldwide.
As the world population ages, scientists are racing to discover new ways to enhance the power of the body to heal itself through stem cells.
And these stem cells then float in the bloodstream and hone in to damaged organs to release growth factors to repair the damaged tissue.
Stem cells may be used as building blocks to repair damaged scaffolds within our body, or to provide new liver cells to repair damaged liver.
As we speak, there are 117 or so clinical trials researching the use of stem cells for liver diseases.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide.
1.1 million Americans suffer heart attacks yearly.
4.8 million suffer cardiac failure.
Stem cells may be used to deliver growth factors to repair damaged heart muscle or be differentiated into heart muscle cells to restore heart function.
There are 170 clinical trials investigating the role of stem cells in heart disease.
While still in a research phase, stem cells may one day herald a quantum leap in the field of cardiology.
Stem cells provide hope for new beginnings -- small, incremental steps, cells rather than organs, repair rather than replacement.
Stem cell therapies may one day reduce the need for donor organs.
And in the U.K., neural stem cells to treat stroke are being investigated in a phase one trial.
The research success that we celebrate today has been made possible by the curiosity and contribution and commitment of individual scientists and medical pioneers.
Thank you.
My students often ask me, "What is sociology?"
And before we know it, they send in the tanks and they send in the troops.
There are a lot of countries, oil-producing countries, that aren't very democratic, but supported by the United States.
They're there to build schools and help people.
Can you feel their anger, their fear, their rage at what has happened in their country?
You see, that's empathy.
I'm not saying that I support the terrorists in Iraq.
But as a sociologist, what I am saying is: I understand.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I called my wife Leslie, and I said, "You know, there's so many good people trying to do so much good.
Her name is Pam Moran in Albemarle County, Virginia, the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
And she told me, she said, "You know, I grew up in Southwestern Virginia, in the coal mines and the farmlands of rural Virginia, and this table was in my grandfather's kitchen.
The project I'm going to tell you about is called the World Peace Game, and essentially it is also an empty space.
It all started back in 1977.
So I got a degree and it turned out to be education.
It was an experimental education program.
There was no program directive, no manual to follow, no standards in gifted education in that way.
(Applause) This film is called "World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements."
That's my brother Malcolm there on the right.
And my mother, who taught me in fourth grade in segregated schools in Virginia, who was my inspiration.
There are many people on this stage right now.
So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes.
But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game.
They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.
The students run the game.
(Video) Boy: The World Peace Game is serious.
John Hunter: I offered them a -- (Applause) Actually, I can't tell them anything because I don't know the answer.
It's impossible. Their collective wisdom is much greater than mine, and I admit it to them openly.
And we were very upset.
I thought I was failing as a teacher. Why would she do this?
Now she used a small war to avert a larger war, so we stopped and had a very good philosophical discussion about whether that was right, conditional good, or not right.
(Applause) Another example, a beautiful thing happened.
I was in tears.
I'll show you what my friend David says about this.
This is about my friend Brennan.
He says, "How many zeros in a trillion? I've got to calculate that right away."
(Applause)
A few years after that, in Bangalore, I was finding it hard to fall asleep one night, and I picked up this book, thinking it would put me to sleep in 10 minutes.
That feeling was the trigger for me to actually change my career -- from being a software engineer to become a science writer -- so that I could partake in the joy of science, and also the joy of communicating it to others.
And today I would like to share with you some images, some stories of these trips.
Astronomers and cosmologists and physicists think that there is something called dark matter in the universe, which makes up 23 percent of the universe, and something called dark energy, which permeates the fabric of space-time, that makes up another 73 percent.
And most of the experiments, telescopes that I went to see are in some way addressing this question, these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
I will take you first to an underground mine in Northern Minnesota where people are looking for something called dark matter.
And the miners in the early part of the last century worked, literally, in candlelight.
This is one of the largest underground labs in the world.
There is another way to search for dark matter, which is indirectly.
If dark matter exists in our universe, in our galaxy, then these particles should be smashing together and producing other particles that we know about -- one of them being neutrinos.
And neutrinos you can detect by the signature they leave when they hit water molecules.
When a neutrino hits a water molecule it emits a kind of blue light, a flash of blue light, and by looking for this blue light, you can essentially understand something about the neutrino and then, indirectly, something about the dark matter that might have created this neutrino.
But you need very, very large volumes of water in order to do this.
And where in the world would you find such water?
This is Lake Baikal.
This is Lake Baikal in the peak of the Siberian winter.
The lake is entirely frozen.
And the line of black dots that you see in the background, that's the ice camp where the physicists are working.
So this is the Russians working on the ice in the peak of the Siberian winter.
And you have to imagine, there's an entire sea-like lake underneath, moving.
And these people, a handful of people, have been working for 20 years, looking for particles that may or may not exist.
From Siberia to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to see something called The Very Large Telescope.
These are four 8.2 meter telescopes.
And the more you understand that, the better you would understand what this dark energy that the universe is made of is all about.
The reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the Atacama Desert is because of the high altitude desert.
Finally, I want to take you to Antarctica.
Some of the most amazing experiments, some of the most extreme experiments, are being done in Antarctica.
I was there to view something called a long-duration balloon flight, which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere, the upper stratosphere, 40 km up.
That's an American C-17 cargo plane that flew us from New Zealand to McMurdo in Antarctica.
This hut was built by Robert Falcon Scott and his men when they first came to Antarctica on their first expedition to go to the South Pole.
This is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper-stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km.
And the engineers, the technicians, the physicists have all got to assemble on the Ross Ice Shelf, because Antarctica -- I won't go into the reasons why -- but it's one of the most favorable places for doing these balloon launches, except for the weather.
And there's a volcano behind, which has glaciers at the very top.
And what they have to do is they have to assemble the entire balloon -- the fabric, parachute and everything -- on the ice and then fill it up with helium.
Those two trucks you see at the very end carry 12 tanks each of compressed helium.
Now, in case the weather changes before the launch, they have to actually pack everything back up into their boxes and take it out back to McMurdo Station.
And this particular balloon, because it has to launch two tons of weight, is an extremely huge balloon.
Here's the balloon being filled up with helium, and you can see it's a gorgeous sight.
So the balloon is being filled up with helium on the left-hand side, and the fabric actually runs all the way to the middle where there's a piece of electronics and explosives being connected to a parachute, and then the parachute is then connected to the payload.
(Video) Radio: Okay, release the balloon, release the balloon, release the balloon.
This is an observatory in the Himalayas, in Ladakh in India.
And the thing I want you to look at here is the telescope on the right-hand side.
And on the far left there is a 400 year-old Buddhist monastery.
And what struck me was every place that I went to to see these telescopes, the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence, whether it's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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.
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.
(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.
But here, I want to say something nice about creationists.
(Laughter) I think they're right about one thing.
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.
(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.
The God theory is not just a bad theory.
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.
It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith, instead of always insisting on evidence.
Now, there's a typical scientific journal, The Quarterly Review of Biology.
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."
"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots.
This is one nation under God."
(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.
(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.
And that all stems from the perception of atheists as some kind of weird, way-out minority.
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?
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.
About 20 percent are agnostic; the rest could fairly be called atheists.
Among biological scientists, the figure is even lower: 5.5 percent, only, believe in God.
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.
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.
We need a consciousness-raising, coming-out campaign for American atheists.
In most cases, people who out themselves will help to destroy the myth that there is something wrong with atheists.
There could be non-linearities, threshold effects.
I think that generally an 'agnostic' would be the most correct description of my state of mind."
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.
Anyway, it was Aveling, and when they met, Darwin challenged Aveling.
"Why do you call yourselves atheists?"
Darwin complained, "But why should you be so aggressive?"
(Laughter) But in any case, that was more than 100 years ago.
Now, a friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew, who, incidentally, observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a "tooth-fairy agnostic."
Like God.
Hence the phrase, "tooth-fairy agnostic."
Bertrand Russell made the same point using a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars.
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"?
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.
(Laughter) I think the best of the available alternatives for "atheist" is simply "non-theist."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Let's all stop being so damned respectful.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Imagine a big explosion as you climb through 3,000 ft.
Two minutes later, three things happened at the same time.
I no longer want to postpone anything in life.
Above all, above all, the only goal I have in life is to be a good dad.
How would you change your relationships and the negative energy in them?
And more than anything, are you being the best parent you can?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Would you like to be more attractive and self-confident?
Or perhaps you're one of those who's always yearned for more creativity.
(Audience Member: Creativity.) Creativity.
What about longevity?
Ah, the majority. That makes me feel very good as a doctor.
Or, is it, perhaps, possible?
Evolution has been a perennial topic here at the TED Conference, but I want to give you today one doctor's take on the subject.
(Laughter) But if you do accept biological evolution, consider this: is it just about the past, or is it about the future?
This is another look at the tree of life.
The human part of this branch, way out on one end, is, of course, the one that we are most interested in.
We branch off of a common ancestor to modern chimpanzees about six or eight million years ago.
We have been here for about 130,000 years.
This is not like human insulin; this is the same protein that is chemically indistinguishable from what comes out of your pancreas.
And speaking of bacteria, do you realize that each of us carries in our gut more bacteria than there are cells in the rest of our body?
Maybe 10 times more.
I mean think of it, when Antonio Damasio asks about your self-image, do you think about the bacteria?
Our gut is a wonderfully hospitable environment for those bacteria.
But otherwise, you are a wonderful environment for those bacteria, just as they are essential to your life.
But what will come in the future?
Or, are we destined to become something different -- something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment?
Now let's take a step back in time to the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago -- the Earth, the solar system, about four and a half billion years -- the first signs of proto-life, maybe three to four billion years ago on Earth -- the first multi-celled organisms, perhaps as much as 800 or a billion years ago -- and then the human species, finally emerging in the last 130,000 years.
(Laughter) Now when I was a freshman in college, I took my first biology class.
I was fascinated by the elegance and beauty of biology.
I became enamored of the power of evolution, and I realized something very fundamental: in most of the existence of life in single-celled organisms, each cell simply divides, and all of the genetic energy of that cell is carried on in both daughter cells.
In fact, you could say that the inevitability of the death of our bodies enters in evolutionary time at the same moment as sexual reproduction.
And one night, there's a knock at his hotel room door.
(Laughter) I came to realize, as a physician, that I was working toward a goal which was different from the goal of evolution -- not necessarily contradictory, just different.
Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation.
That is the sole test of survival and success.
So what does this mean, as we look back at what has happened in evolution, and as we think about the place again of humans in evolution, and particularly as we look ahead to the next phase, I would say that there are a number of possibilities.
And as far as isolation goes, when we as a species do colonize distant planets, there will be the isolation and the environmental changes that could produce evolution in the natural way.
But there's a third possibility, an enticing, intriguing and frightening possibility.
It's not necessarily good for the society, but it's what the individual and the family are choosing.
The Human Genome Project started in 1990, and it took 13 years.
The year after it was finished in 2004, you could do the same job for 20 million dollars in three to four months.
Today, you can have a complete sequence of the three billion base pairs in the human genome at a cost of about 20,000 dollars and in the space of about a week.
It won't be very long before the reality will be the 1,000-dollar human genome, and it will be increasingly available for everyone.
Just a week ago, the National Academy of Engineering awarded its Draper Prize to Francis Arnold and Willem Stemmer, two scientists who independently developed techniques to encourage the natural process of evolution to work faster and to lead to desirable proteins in a more efficient way -- what Frances Arnold calls "directed evolution."
A couple of years ago, the Lasker Prize was awarded to the scientist Shinya Yamanaka for his research in which he took an adult skin cell, a fibroblast, and by manipulating just four genes, he induced that cell to revert to a pluripotential stem cell -- a cell potentially capable of becoming any cell in your body.
The same technology that has produced the human insulin in bacteria can make viruses that will not only protect you against themselves, but induce immunity against other viruses.
You can change the cells in your body, but what if you could change the cells in your offspring?
What if you could change the sperm and the ova, or change the newly fertilized egg, and give your offspring a better chance at a healthier life -- eliminate the diabetes, eliminate the hemophilia, reduce the risk of cancer?
And when we are at a position where we can pass it on to the next generation, and we can adopt the attributes we want, we will have converted old-style evolution into neo-evolution.
We'll take a process that normally might require 100,000 years, and we can compress it down to a thousand years -- and maybe even in the next 100 years.
These are choices that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are going to have before them.
And most profoundly of all, will we ever be able to develop the wisdom, and to inherit the wisdom, that we'll need to make these choices wisely?
Thank you.
(Applause)
There aren't a lot of good words for the concepts we're going to talk about.
Whether this is a personal decision -- whether you're going to install a burglar alarm in your home -- or a national decision, where you're going to invade a foreign country -- you're going to trade off something: money or time, convenience, capabilities, maybe fundamental liberties.
You've heard in the past several years, the world is safer because Saddam Hussein is not in power.
The question is: Was it worth it?
In politics also, there are different opinions.
Imagine a rabbit in a field, eating grass.
And the rabbit sees a fox.
That rabbit will make a security trade-off: "Should I stay, or should I flee?"
And if you think about it, the rabbits that are good at making that trade-off will tend to live and reproduce, and the rabbits that are bad at it will get eaten or starve.
And I think that's a fundamentally interesting question.
Most of the time, feeling and reality are the same.
Now, there are several biases in risk perception.
This is for children.
So, Bin Laden is scarier because he has a name.
And the fourth is: people underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in situations they don't control.
There are a bunch of other of these cognitive biases, that affect our risk decisions.
There's the availability heuristic, which basically means we estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind.
If you hear a lot about tiger attacks, there must be a lot of tigers around.
(Laughter) When something is so common, it's no longer news.
Car crashes, domestic violence -- those are the risks you worry about.
We're also a species of storytellers.
And what these cognitive biases do is they act as filters between us and reality.
I write a lot about "security theater," which are products that make people feel secure, but don't actually do anything.
If economics, if the market, drives security, and if people make trade-offs based on the feeling of security, then the smart thing for companies to do for the economic incentives is to make people feel secure.
And there are two ways to do this.
We all know the crime rate in our neighborhood, because we live there, and we get a feeling about it that basically matches reality.
If you don't understand the risks, you don't understand the costs, you're likely to get the trade-off wrong, and your feeling doesn't match reality.
In a primitive and simple world, there's really no reason for a model, because feeling is close to reality.
You don't need a model.
But in a modern and complex world, you need models to understand a lot of the risks we face.
You need a model to understand them.
But he was born there, and he understood how to survive.
(Laughter) Because we had different models based on our different experiences.
Think of models of terrorism, child kidnapping, airline safety, car safety.
Models can come from industry.
A lot of models come from science.
Health models are a great example.
Think of cancer, bird flu, swine flu, SARS.
So an example might be, if you go back 100 years ago, when electricity was first becoming common, there were a lot of fears about it.
A nice example of this came from last year and swine flu.
When swine flu first appeared, the initial news caused a lot of overreaction.
And when the vaccine appeared last winter, there were a lot of people -- a surprising number -- who refused to get it.
I think it depends on the observer.
This is not uncommon.
An example, a great example, is the risk of smoking.
In the history of the past 50 years, the smoking risk shows how a model changes, and it also shows how an industry fights against a model it doesn't like.
Compare that to the secondhand smoke debate -- probably about 20 years behind.
Think about seat belts.
When I was a kid, no one wore a seat belt.
Compare that to the airbag debate, probably about 30 years behind.
And there's another cognitive bias I'll call confirmation bias, where we tend to accept data that confirms our beliefs and reject data that contradicts our beliefs.
We can have both models in our head simultaneously -- that kind of problem where we're holding both beliefs together, the cognitive dissonance.
We rely on government agencies to tell us what pharmaceuticals are safe.
I didn't check the airplane.
The second, more honest way is to actually fix the model.
Change happens slowly.
The smoking debate took 40 years -- and that was an easy one.
Really, though, information seems like our best hope.
1982 -- I don't know if people will remember this -- there was a short epidemic of Tylenol poisonings in the United States.
There wasn't any real risk, but people were scared.
It's complete security theater.
It turns out, when a baby's born now, they put an RFID bracelet on the baby, a corresponding one on the mother, so if anyone other than the mother takes the baby out of the maternity ward, an alarm goes off.
So let me start with an example.
You all know the story of Newton's apple, right? OK.
And definitely this was not impossible, at least for Newton.
And what about Einstein?
Or rather, was it again something adjacent and possible, to Einstein of course, and he got there by small steps and his very peculiar scientific path?
As a physicist, as a scientist, I have learned that posing the right questions is half of the solution.
But I think now we start having a great conceptual framework to conceive and address the right questions.
So we are discussing the "new," and of course, the science behind it.
The new can enter our lives in many different ways, can be very personal, like I meet a new person, I read a new book, or I listen to a new song.
It could be a new theory, a new technology, but it could also be a new book if you're the writer, or it could be a new song if you're the composer.
But still, experiencing the new means exploring a very peculiar space, the space of what could be, the space of the possible, the space of possibilities.
It could be a conceptual space, so acquiring new information, making sense of it, in a word, learning.
It could be a biological space.
I mean, think about the never-ending fight of viruses and bacteria with our immune system.
We are very, very bad at grasping this space.
For instance, this was the first attempt for weather forecasts, and it failed.
Now, I should tell you, this is a true story.
It happened a few months ago to Volvo's self-driving cars in the middle of the Australian Outback.
(Laughter) It is a general problem, and I guess this will affect more and more in the near future artificial intelligence and machine learning.
It's also a very old problem, I would say 17th century, but I guess now we have new tools and new clues to start solving it.
Italy. Rome. Winter.
So the winter of 2012 was very special in Rome.
And what happens?
It's something that gets continuously shaped and reshaped by our actions and our choices.
So we were so fascinated by these connections we made -- scientists are like this.
Of course, we need a testable framework to study innovation.
The first one concerns the pace of innovation, so the rate at which you observe novelties in very different systems.
So our theory predicts that the rate of innovation should follow a universal curve, like this one.
And this is good news, because it implies that impossible missions might not be so impossible after all, if we are guided by our intuition, somehow leading us to trigger a positive chain reaction.
(Laughter) So we could see very clearly all of these patterns in the huge amounts of data we collected and analyzed.
So it seems that the wise balance, you could also say a conservative balance, between past and future, between exploitation and exploration, is already in place and perhaps needed in our system.
But again the good news is now we have scientific tools to investigate this equilibrium, perhaps pushing it further in the near future.
So as you can imagine, I was really fascinated by all this.
Our mathematical scheme is already providing cues and hints to investigate the space of possibilities and the way in which all of us create it and explore it.
This, I guess, is a starting point of something that has the potential to become a wonderful journey for a scientific investigation of the new, but also I would say a personal investigation of the new.
And I guess this can have a lot of consequences and a huge impact in key activities like learning, education, research, business.
In parallel, we have a lot of tools, new tools now, to investigate how creativity works and what triggers innovation.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And so what if you could grow a battery in a Petri dish?
And so, going back to this abalone shell, besides being nanostructured, one thing that's fascinating is, when a male and female abalone get together, they pass on the genetic information that says, "This is how to build an exquisite material.
So what if you could do the same thing with a solar cell or a battery?
I like to say my favorite biomaterial is my four year old.
But it wasn't until about 500 million years ago -- during the Cambrian geologic time period -- that organisms in the ocean started making hard materials.
It was during this time that there was increased calcium, iron and silicon in the environment, and organisms learned how to make hard materials.
Now, going back to the abalone shell, the abalone makes this shell by having these proteins.
Now, this is a high-powered battery that we grew in my lab.
That battery went to the White House for a press conference, and I brought it here.
And what we've been able to do is engineer a virus to basically take dye-absorbing molecules and line them up on the surface of the virus so it acts as an antenna, and you get an energy transfer across the virus.
And then we give it a second gene to grow an inorganic material that can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, that can be used for clean fuels.
These are virus-assembled nanowires.
Thank you.
I grew up in a family of social scientists, but I was the weird child who drew.
(Laughter) From making sketches of the models in my mom's Sears catalog ...
to a bedroom so full of my craft projects that it was like my own personal art gallery, I lived to make.
But to be honest with you, the real foundation of the architect I became was not laid in that bedroom art gallery but by the conversations around my family's dinner table.
There were stories of how people lived and connected to one another, from the impact of urban migration on a village in Zambia to the complex health care needs of the homeless in the streets of San Francisco.
The fact is, we share some of our deepest connections in physical space.
And our stories play out, even in this crazy age of texting and tweeting, in physical space.
Unfortunately, architecture hasn't done a great job of telling all of our stories equally.
(Applause) Now, spatial justice means that we understand that justice has a geography, and that the equitable distribution of resources, services and access is a basic human right.
Back in the '90s, a community group led by mothers who lived in the public housing on the hill above the plant fought for its closure.
Sounds like a success story, right?
I'm part of the diverse team of designers that responded to that call, and for the last four years, we've been collaborating with those mothers and other residents, as well as local organizations and the utility company.
A few months ago, there was a community meeting in this neighborhood.
People asked things like, "If you're going to sell it to a developer, wouldn't they just build luxury condos like everyone else?"
There's pain from the fact that this zip code still has one of the lowest per capita income, highest unemployment and highest incarceration rates in a city which tech giants like Twitter, Airbnb and Uber call home.
And those tech companies -- hm -- they've actually helped to trigger a gentrification push that is rapidly redefining this neighborhood, both in terms of identity and population.
If you've ever been displaced, then you know the agony of losing a place that held your story.
Developer Majora Carter once said to me, "Poor people don't hate gentrification.
We could approach development with an acknowledgment of past injustices -- find value not only in those new stories but the old ones, too.
But to do this rethink, it requires looking at those past injustices and the pain and grief that is interwoven into them.
And as I started to reflect on my own work, I realized that pain and grief have been recurring themes.
I also heard it in Houston, when I was working on a project with day laborers.
From campaigns around statue removals in Charlottesville and New Orleans ...
But I've seen what happens when there's space for pain.
And we invited the residents to come and have their stories recorded for posterity.
That party -- it was one of the most amazing community meetings I've ever been a part of.
Healing also takes time.
My work's taken me all over the world, and I have yet to set foot in a place where pain didn't exist and the potential for healing was absent.
I suppose this is the point in the talk where I should be telling you those five steps to healing, but I don't have the solution -- yet.
For those of us with privilege, we have to have a reckoning with our own guilt, discomfort and complicity.
As non-profit leader Anne Marks once observed, "Hurt people hurt people; healed people heal people."
Healing is about acknowledging pain and making peace with it.
But the first step requires courage.
The courage to see each other's pain, and to be willing to stay in the presence of it, even when it gets uncomfortable.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So for the past year and a half, my team at Push Pop Press and Charlie Melcher and Melcher Media have been working on creating the first feature-length interactive book.
It's called "Our Choice" and the author is Al Gore.
Zoom into it and see where it was taken.
And throughout the book, there's over an hour of documentary footage and interactive animations.
But one of the coolest things in this book are the interactive infographics.
This is one of my favorites.
(Laughter) (Applause) When the wind is blowing, any excess energy coming from the windmill is diverted into the battery.
And so you can start reading on your iPad in your living room and then pick up where you left off on the iPhone.
And it works the exact same way.
So that's Push Pop Press' first title, Al Gore's "Our Choice."
Thank you.
I've been making toys for the last 30 years.
The early '70s, I was in college.
It was a very revolutionary time.
There was a person, Anil Sadgopal, did a Ph.D. from Caltech and returned back as a molecular biologist in India's cutting-edge research institute, the TIFR.
The slogan of the early '70s was "Go to the people.
And it was a turning point.
So I said, "I'm going to spend a year over here."
If you look at the hexagon, for instance, it's like an amoeba, which is constantly changing its own profile.
Why use triangles?
You make a tetrahedron like this.
I was a 24-year-old young engineer.
(Applause) If you, as a matter of fact, put four marbles inside, you simulate the molecular structure of methane, CH4.
Four atoms of hydrogen, the four points of the tetrahedron, which means the little carbon atom.
And every time I go to a school, I see a gleam in the eyes of the children.
Now this is a little pump with which you could inflate a balloon.
And this is how you make a valve.
And now, if you have this pump, it's like a great, great sprinkler.
This is a toy which is made from paper. It's amazing.
As a matter of fact, Feynman, as a child, was very fascinated by this.
And this is what Newton talked about 400 years back, that white light's made of seven colors, just by spinning this around.
This is a straw.
This is a kind of a blowing straw.
Now this is the simplest motor on Earth.
The most expensive thing is the battery inside this.
If you have a battery, it costs five cents to make it.
Whenever current flows through the coil, this becomes an electromagnet.
It's the interaction of both these magnets which makes this motor spin.
This program started with 16 schools and spread to 1,500 government schools.
Over 100,000 children learn science this way.
There are 12 million blind children in our country -- (Applause) who live in a world of darkness.
These are two magnets.
This is a large pulley made by sandwiching rubber between two old CDs.
And you can see, this LED is going to glow.
We make lots of toys with newspapers, and this is one of them.
And this is -- you can see -- this is a flapping bird.
This is called "The Captain's Hat Story."
They were singing and dancing.
Suddenly there was a storm and huge waves.
And the ship sinks, and the captain has lost everything, but for a life jacket.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
And yet, it feels natural to us now.
I first learned that my son had been in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001.
At the time, we knew that it was political.
Through that and through human rights groups, we were brought together with several other victims' families.
She was the only mother in the group.
And I saw in her eyes that she was a mother, just like me.
I was married when I was 14.
I lost a child when I was 15, a second child when I was 16.
So that's why I decided to tell my story, so that my suffering is something positive for other women.
It's up to us women, because we are women, because we love our children.
We must be hand-in-hand and do something together.
I go to schools to talk to young, Muslim girls so they don't accept to be married against their will very young.
Before we knew each others' names, or anything, we had embraced and wept.
Then we sat in a circle with support, with help, from people experienced in this kind of reconciliation.
I know what it is to suffer, and I feel that if there is a crime, a person should be tried fairly and punished."
Now what I learned from her, is a woman, not only who could be so generous under these present circumstances and what it was then, and what was being done to her son, but the life she's had.
I never had met someone with such a hard life, from such a totally different culture and environment from my own.
And I hope that someday we'll all live together in peace and respecting each other.
(Applause)
(Laughter) Think about this as a pixel, a flying pixel.
This is what we call, in our lab, sensible design.
Now today, if you want to win the race, actually you need also something like this -- something that monitors the car in real time, has a few thousand sensors collecting information from the car, transmitting this information into the system, and then processing it and using it in order to go back to the car with decisions and changing things in real time as information is collected.
This is what, in engineering terms, you would call a real time control system.
What is interesting today is that real time control systems are starting to enter into our lives.
Our cities, over the past few years, just have been blanketed with networks, electronics.
They are 75 percent of the energy consumption -- up to 80 percent of CO2 emissions.
It's called "Talk to Me."
And that is radically changing the interaction we have as humans with the environment out there.
In a certain sense, it's almost as if the old dream of Michelangelo ...
Well today, for the first time, our environment is starting to talk back to us.
Let's starting with sensing.
Well, the first project I wanted to share with you is actually one of the first projects by our lab.
And what we did there was actually use a new type of network at the time that had been deployed all across the world -- that's a cellphone network -- and use anonymous and aggregated information from that network, that's collected anyway by the operator, in order to understand how the city works.
The summer was a lucky summer -- 2006.
It's when Italy won the soccer World Cup.
And anyway, Italy won at the end.
Here you see the city.
Zidane, the headbutt in a moment.
The following day, again everybody went to the center to meet the winning team and the prime minister at the time.
But we know very little about where things go.
So in this project, we actually developed some small tags to track trash as it moves through the system.
(Music) From Seattle ...
But there's a lot of wasted transportation and convoluted things happening.
And the plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there.
And the first project is something we did a couple of years ago in Zaragoza, Spain.
It started with a question by the mayor of the city, who came to us saying that Spain and Southern Europe have a beautiful tradition of using water in public space, in architecture.
And one of the ideas that was developed at MIT in a workshop was, imagine this pipe, and you've got valves, solenoid valves, taps, opening and closing.
You create like a water curtain with pixels made of water.
We called it Digital Water Pavilion.
The whole building is made of water.
There's no doors or windows, but when you approach it, it will open up to let you in.
Well, I should tell you now what happened one night when all of the sensors stopped working.
But actually that night, it was even more fun.
(Video) (Crowd Noise) And that was, for us, was very interesting, because, as architects, as engineers, as designers, we always think about how people will use the things we design.
But then reality's always unpredictable.
Here is the video.
You can have each pixel having an input that comes from people, from people's movement, or so and so.
I want to show you something here for the first time.
We've been working with Roberto Bolle, one of today's top ballet dancers -- the étoile at Metropolitan in New York and La Scala in Milan -- and actually captured his movement in 3D in order to use it as an input for Flyfire.
And here you can see Roberto dancing.
You see on the left the pixels, the different resolutions being captured.
It's both 3D scanning in real time and motion capture.
So we want to use this as one of the possible inputs for Flyfire.
Imagine you can have everybody make a small donation for one pixel.
This has been digitizing everything, knowledge, and making that accessible through the Internet.
Now today, for the first time -- and the Obama campaign showed us this -- we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one.
But tomorrow it can be, in order to tackle today's pressing challenges -- think about climate change or CO2 emissions -- how we can go from the digital world to the physical one.
The cloud is a cloud, again, made of pixels, in the same way as the real cloud is a cloud made of particles.
And those particles are water, where our cloud is a cloud of pixels.
You can move inside, have different types of experiences.
Thank you.
(Applause)
But then I met a biologist, and now I think of materials like this -- green tea, sugar, a few microbes and a little time.
I'm essentially using a kombucha recipe, which is a symbiotic mix of bacteria, yeasts and other micro-organisms, which spin cellulose in a fermentation process.
I brew up to about 30 liters of tea at a time, and then while it's still hot, add a couple of kilos of sugar.
After about three days, the bubbles will appear on the surface of the liquid.
And they're sticking together, forming layers and giving us a sheet on the surface.
And then you can either cut that out and sew it conventionally, or you can use the wet material to form it around a three-dimensional shape.
So the color in this jacket is coming purely from green tea.
I guess it also looks a little bit like human skin, which intrigues me.
I can make it change color without using dye by a process of iron oxidation.
Bacterial cellulose is actually already being used for wound healing, and possibly in the future for biocompatible blood vessels, possibly even replacement bone tissue.
But with synthetic biology, we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality, quantity and shape of material that we desire.
What excites me about using microbes is their efficiency.
What I'm not suggesting is that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton, leather or other textile materials.
But I do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources.
Thank you very much.
We live in a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy.
There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
And if you take a camera and you point it at a random part of the sky, and you just keep the shutter open, as long as your camera is attached to the Hubble Space Telescope, it will see something like this.
Every one of these little blobs is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way -- a hundred billion stars in each of those blobs.
There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe.
The age of the universe, between now and the Big Bang, is a hundred billion in dog years.
As a cosmologist, I want to ask, why is the universe like this?
One big clue we have is that the universe is changing with time.
If you looked at one of these galaxies and measured its velocity, it would be moving away from you.
And if you look at a galaxy even farther away, it would be moving away faster.
So we say the universe is expanding.
In the past, the universe was more dense, and it was also hotter.
But the conditions near the Big Bang are very, very different than the conditions of the air in this room.
The gravitational pull of things was a lot stronger near the Big Bang.
It's a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly.
So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 19th century.
And it's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don't notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same.
This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics -- the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the universe.
The reason why entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy.
This insight that entropy increases, by the way, is what's behind what we call the arrow of time, the difference between the past and the future.
Every difference that there is between the past and the future is because entropy is increasing -- the fact that you can remember the past, but not the future.
The fact that you are born, and then you live, and then you die, always in that order, that's because entropy is increasing.
Boltzmann explained that if you start with low entropy, it's very natural for it to increase because there's more ways to be high entropy.
What he didn't explain was why the entropy was ever low in the first place.
That's our job as cosmologists.
If you come back a billion years later and look at it again, it will be moving away faster.
Individual galaxies are speeding away from us faster and faster so we say the universe is accelerating.
Unlike the low entropy of the early universe, even though we don't know the answer for this, we at least have a good theory that can explain it, if that theory is right, and that's the theory of dark energy.
And this energy, according to Einstein, exerts a push on the universe.
Because dark energy, unlike matter or radiation, does not dilute away as the universe expands.
The amount of energy in each cubic centimeter remains the same, even as the universe gets bigger and bigger.
This has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future.
Back when I was your age, we didn't know what the universe was going to do.
But if there's dark energy, and the dark energy does not go away, the universe is just going to keep expanding forever and ever and ever.
14 billion years in the past, 100 billion dog years, but an infinite number of years into the future.
Space may be finite or infinite, but because the universe is accelerating, there are parts of it we cannot see and never will see.
Finally, empty space has a temperature.
In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking told us that a black hole, even though you think it's black, it actually emits radiation when you take into account quantum mechanics.
A precisely similar calculation by Hawking and Gary Gibbons showed that if you have dark energy in empty space, then the whole universe radiates.
The energy of empty space brings to life quantum fluctuations.
And so even though the universe will last forever, and ordinary matter and radiation will dilute away, there will always be some radiation, some thermal fluctuations, even in empty space.
That implication was studied by Boltzmann back in the 19th century.
He said, well, entropy increases because there are many, many more ways for the universe to be high entropy, rather than low entropy.
But that's a probabilistic statement.
It will probably increase, and the probability is enormously huge.
So Boltzmann says, look, you could start with a universe that was in thermal equilibrium.
He didn't know about the Big Bang. He didn't know about the expansion of the universe.
But if you're Boltzmann, you know that if you wait long enough, the random fluctuations of those molecules will occasionally bring them into lower entropy configurations.
Well if that's true, Boltzmann then goes onto invent two very modern-sounding ideas -- the multiverse and the anthropic principle.
He says, the problem with thermal equilibrium is that we can't live there.
Remember, life itself depends on the arrow of time.
But there will also be large fluctuations.
Carl Sagan once famously said that "in order to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe."
In Boltzmann's scenario, if you want to make an apple pie, you just wait for the random motion of atoms to make you an apple pie.
That will happen much more frequently than the random motions of atoms making you an apple orchard and some sugar and an oven, and then making you an apple pie.
And Feynman also understood this.
If the universe is not a fluctuation, why did the early universe have a low entropy?
I just showed you this picture.
The universe is expanding for the last 10 billion years or so.
But even black holes don't last forever.
That empty space lasts essentially forever.
However, you notice, since empty space gives off radiation, there's actually thermal fluctuations, and it cycles around all the different possible combinations of the degrees of freedom that exist in empty space.
So even though the universe lasts forever, there's only a finite number of things that can possibly happen in the universe.
Why aren't you?
So like I said, I don't actually know the answer.
Or maybe the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe.
That's because an egg is not a closed system; it comes out of a chicken.
Maybe there is something that naturally, through the growth of the laws of physics, gives rise to universe like ours in low entropy configurations.
So the organizers asked me to end with a bold speculation.
We will all believe that our little universe is just a small part of a much larger multiverse.
And even better, we will understand what happened at the Big Bang in terms of a theory that we will be able to compare to observations.
It's exciting to think we may finally know the answer someday.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The little things in life, sometimes that we forget about, like pollination, that we take for granted.
When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action.
And many scientists believe it's the most serious issue facing mankind.
It's like the canary in the coalmine.
"Well, why?"
Because I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.
Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment.
(Music) (Applause) Thank you.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
My journey to become a polar specialist, photographing, specializing in the polar regions, began when I was four years old, when my family moved from southern Canada to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland.
The snow and the ice were my sandbox, and the Inuit were my teachers.
It's pure white, but it's not a polar bear.
It's a spirit bear, or a Kermode bear.
And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream of walking around with this bear through the forest.
So I'm very excited to be able to show you those images and a cross-section of my work that I've done on the polar regions.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
We're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it's at its lowest level.
And I want people to understand and get the concept that, if we lose ice, we stand to lose an entire ecosystem.
Projections are that we could lose polar bears, they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years.
Polar bears are amazing hunters.
And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here.
These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice.
They give birth inside the ice, and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice.
And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea.
And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zooplankton feeding on all that life.
Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden.
This is after an hour under the ice.
And I've come up, and all I wanted to do was get out of the water.
(Laughter) But it's worth it.
I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw, and I looked up under the underside of the ice, and I was dizzy; I thought I had vertigo.
This is a bowhead whale.
This very whale right here could be over 250 years old.
And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North because of the lives that we're leading in the South.
And the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods.
Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful, I don't think I'll ever have another experience like I did with these leopard seals.
Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation.
(Laughter) So after five days of crossing the Drake Passage -- isn't that beautiful -- after five days of crossing the Drake Passage, we have finally arrived at Antarctica.
(Laughter) And this seal is taking this penguin by the head, and it's flipping it back and forth.
But he was right.
So I had such dry mouth -- probably not as bad as now -- but I had such, such dry mouth.
This went on for four days.
(Laughter) And then that wasn't enough; she started to flip penguins onto my head.
And she would get frustrated; she'd blow bubbles in my face.
Thank you.
I'm going to talk about a new, old material that still continues to amaze us, and that might impact the way we think about material science, high technology -- and maybe, along the way, also do some stuff for medicine and for global health and help reforestation.
So that's kind of a bold statement.
And it's technological, so it can do things like microelectronics, and maybe photonics do.
And the material looks something like this.
So this material is silk.
The process of discovery, generally, is inspired by nature.
The silk worm does a remarkable thing: it uses these two ingredients, protein and water, that are in its gland, to make a material that is exceptionally tough for protection -- so comparable to technical fibers like Kevlar.
So the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material.
And so this starting material is back to the basic building block.
And then we use this to do a variety of things -- like, for example, this film.
So the recipe is simple: you take the silk solution, you pour it, and you wait for the protein to self-assemble.
And then you detach the protein and you get this film, as the proteins find each other as the water evaporates.
But I mentioned that the film is also technological.
And so what does that mean?
It means that you can interface it with some of the things that are typical of technology, like microelectronics and nanoscale technology.
So once you have these attributes of this material, then you can do a lot of things.
And if the angle is right, you can actually see a hologram appear in this film of silk.
But silk is versatile and it goes beyond optics.
Or if you're fashion forward, some silk LED tattoos.
So there's versatility, as you see, in the material formats, that you can do with silk.
I mentioned it briefly at the beginning; the protein is biodegradable and biocompatible.
And you see here a picture of a tissue section.
And so what does that mean, that it's biodegradable and biocompatible?
So, much like you're seen at night by a car, then the idea is that you can see, if you illuminate tissue, you can see deeper parts of tissue because there is that reflective tape there that is made out of silk.
It doesn't taste good, so I'm going to need some help with that.
Silk, during its self-assembly process, acts like a cocoon for biological matter.
And so if you change the recipe, and you add things when you pour -- so you add things to your liquid silk solution -- where these things are enzymes or antibodies or vaccines, the self-assembly process preserves the biological function of these dopants.
So that screw that you thought about beforehand can actually be used to screw a bone together -- a fractured bone together -- and deliver drugs at the same, while your bone is healing, for example.
So we've made a silk card with penicillin in it.
And we stored penicillin at 60 degrees C, so 140 degrees Fahrenheit, for two months without loss of efficacy of the penicillin.
And so what you see there is the difference.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I wanted to save the world and make everyone happy.
When I grew up and realized that science fiction was not a good source for superpowers, I decided instead to embark on a journey of real science, to find a more useful truth.
Players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an average of only 72.9 years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years.
Using 3D ultrasound technology, we can now see that developing babies appear to smile, even in the womb.
And even blind babies smile to the sound of the human voice.
Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically uniform expressions of all humans.
In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea, Paul Ekman, the world's most renowned researcher on facial expressions, found that even members of the Fore tribe, who were completely disconnected from Western culture, and also known for their unusual cannibalism rituals, (Laughter) attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would.
So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing, we smile often, and use smiles to express joy and satisfaction.
A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it's very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles.
You ask why?
Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles.
Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically helps us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler.
In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles.
(Laughter) In addition to theorizing on evolution in "The Origin of Species," Charles Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory.
In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who sent electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles.
British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate.
(Laughter) And unlike lots of chocolate, lots of smiling can actually make you healthier.
Smiling can help reduce the level of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphins, and reduce overall blood pressure.
A recent study at Penn State University found that when you smile, you don't only appear to be more likable and courteous, but you actually appear to be more competent.
My name is Amit.
And I grew up in India.
I had a great education -- I'm not complaining -- but I didn't have access to a lot of these museums and these artworks.
And so when I started traveling and going to these museums, I started learning a lot.
It doesn't matter where you are -- Bombay, Mexico, it doesn't really matter.
This is "The Starry Night," I think, never seen like this before.
You can go and create your own museum online -- create your own collection across all these images.
I probably shouldn't say that.
And the answer is no.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
I was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence.
And I'm going to tell you about the Richard Feynman that I knew.
He was a philosopher.
He made me feel we were both smart, and the two of us could solve any problem whatever.
The students went there in advance, and arranged that they'd all order Feynman sandwiches.
Can you build a machine that thinks like a human being that is conscious?
I realized there was something just extraordinary about Feynman, even when he did what he did.
We liked each other; we liked the same kind of things.
And Dick became convinced at some point that he and I had some kind of similarity of personality.
I said, "Well, my real hero was my father.
He even taught me the Pythagorean theorem.
And Feynman's eyes just opened up.
In fact, he had been convinced at one time that to be a good physicist, it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father.
But let me tell you a little bit about Feynman the physicist.
Feynman's scientific style was always to look for the simplest, most elementary solution to a problem that was possible.
In the 1950s, people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked.
It was a terribly complicated theory, full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth.
And unfortunately, the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other.
He had an idea, a very clear idea.
In 1968, in my own university -- I wasn't there at the time -- they were exploring the structure of the proton.
And the way to analyze it was, of course, Feynman diagrams.
The experiments that were going on were very simple: you simply take the proton, and you hit it really sharply with an electron.
He said, "Just think of it as a swarm of partons moving real fast."
So I think I'll just finish up by saying: I actually don't think Feynman would have liked this event.
I think he would have said, "I don't need this."
(Applause)
And that's that all those sensations, feelings, decisions and actions are mediated by the computer in your head called your brain.
And they've told us that this brain is an incredibly complicated circuit made out of hundreds of billions of cells called neurons.
Now, unlike a human-designed computer, where there's a fairly small number of different parts, and we know how they work because we humans designed them, the brain is made out of thousands of different kinds of cells, maybe tens of thousands.
They come in different shapes; they're made out of different molecules; they project and connect to different brain regions.
It's one of the cells that seems to be atrophied in disorders like schizophrenia.
It's called the basket cell.
And these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy.
Every one of these cells is an incredible electrical device.
So how are we going to figure out what this circuit does?
Now, in the 20th century, there was some hope that was generated through the development of pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders.
That's also why most of the drugs, not all, on the market can present some kind of serious side effect too.
Now some people have gotten some solace from electrical stimulators that are implanted in the brain, for Parkinson's disease or cochlear implants.
Well, there are many molecules that exist in nature which are able to convert light into electricity.
Around 2004, in collaboration with Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth, this vision came to fruition.
In its membrane, or its boundary, it contains little proteins that indeed can convert light into electricity.
These molecules are called channelrhodopsins.
And each of these proteins acts just like that solar cell that I told you about.
When blue light hits it, it opens a little hole and allows charged particles to enter the eyespot; that allows this eyespot to have an electrical signal, just like a solar cell charging a battery.
So all we've got to do is take that DNA, put it into a gene therapy vector, like a virus, and put it into neurons.
Early in the morning one day in the summer of 2004, we gave it a try, and it worked on the first try.
You take this DNA and put it into the neuron.
The neuron uses its natural protein-making machinery to fabricate these little light-sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell, like putting solar panels on a roof.
So this is very powerful.
And there's other genetic tricks you can play in order to get light-activated cells.
This field has now come to be known as "optogenetics."
And just as one example of the kind of thing you can do, you can take a complex network, use one of these viruses to deliver the gene just to one kind of cell in this dense network.
And then when you shine light on the entire network, just that cell type will be activated.
For example, let's consider that basket cell I told you about earlier, the one that's atrophied in schizophrenia and the one that is inhibitory.
One of the questions that we've confronted is: What signals in the brain mediate the sensation of reward?
To do that, we came up with a very simple paradigm in collaboration with the Fiorillo group, where, if the animal goes to one side of this little box, it gets a pulse of light.
Now the question is: What targets in the brain can we find that allow us to overcome this fear?
This brief video shows you one of these targets that we're working on now.
This next clip is just eight minutes later.
Over the last couple years, we've gone back to the tree of life, because we wanted to find ways to turn circuits in the brain off.
Consider, for example, a condition like epilepsy, where the brain is overactive.
Now, if drugs fail in epileptic treatment, one of the strategies is to remove part of the brain, but that's irreversible, and there could be side effects.
What if we could just turn off that brain for the brief amount of time until the seizure dies away, and cause the brain to be restored to its initial state, like a dynamical system that's being coaxed down into a stable state?
This animation tries to explain this concept where we made these cells sensitive to being turned off with light, and we beam light in, and just for the time it takes to shut down a seizure, we're hoping to be able to turn it off.
A new hope in gene therapy has been developed, because viruses like the adeno-associated virus -- which probably most of us around this room have; it doesn't have any symptoms -- have been used in hundreds of patients to deliver genes into the brain or the body.
So it's early days, to be upfront, but we're excited about it.
Now, there are many forms of blindness where the photoreceptors -- light sensors in the back of our eye -- are gone.
And the retina is a complex structure.
The photoreceptor cells are shown here at the top.
In many forms of blindness, like retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration, the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed.
The eye is still transparent and you can get light in.
What you see here is a mouse trying to solve a six-arm maze.
The goal of this maze is to get out of the water and go to a little platform that's under the lit top port.
We'll take these blue light photo sensors and install them onto a layer of cells in the middle of the retina in the back of the eye and convert them into a camera -- just like installing solar cells all over those neurons to make them light-sensitive.
Light is converted to electricity on them.
So this preclinical study, I think, bodes hope for the kinds of things we're hoping to do in the future.
We're also exploring new business models for this new field of neurotechnology.
Thank you.
(Laughter) But the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs and being able to target those specifically is a first step.
The second thing that I think I heard you say is you can now control the brain in two colors, like an on-off switch.
Ed Boyden: That's right.
JE: Does that mean that someday you could download memories and maybe upload them?
EB: That's something we're starting to work on very hard.
EB: Thank you.
(Applause)
Hello, my name is Thomas Heatherwick.
Sorry, this was my mother, by the way, in her bead shop in London.
This is a hospital building.
This is a sculpture made from a million yards of wire and 150,000 glass beads the size of a golf ball.
And this is a cafe by the sea in Britain.
A project that we've been working on very recently is to design a new biomass power station -- so a power station that uses organic waste material.
And what we found -- this area is one of the poorest parts of Britain.
And there are 2,000 new homes being built next to this power station.
It has a symbolic importance.
It has a space where you could have a bar mitzvah at the top.
(Laughter) And it's a power park.
There's 250 pavilions.
It's the world's biggest ever expo that had ever happened.
And 250 countries all competing.
(Laughter) But the thing that was true, the expo was about the future of cities, and particularly the Victorians pioneered integrating nature into the cities.
And the world's first public park of modern times was in Britain.
And everyone agrees that trees are beautiful, and I've never met anyone who says, "I don't like trees."
And the same with flowers.
And if a cloud goes past, you can see a cloud on the tips where it's letting the light through.
(Applause) So we're building these buildings.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) And I'm an academic, so I put audiences to sleep for free.
Now most of the time, you think of pain as a symptom of a disease, and that's true most of the time.
That was the experience of my patient, Chandler, whom you see in the photograph.
As you can see, she's a beautiful, young woman.
She was 16 years old last year when I met her, and she aspired to be a professional dancer.
And during the course of one of her dance rehearsals, she fell on her outstretched arm and sprained her wrist.
This is what her arm looked like when she came to my clinic about three months after her sprain.
The pain had spread from her wrist to her hands, to her fingertips, from her wrist up to her elbow, almost all the way to her shoulder.
The worst part was that she had allodynia, the medical term for the phenomenon that I just illustrated with the feather and with the torch.
And when you turn the switch on, the light goes on.
And when you turn the switch off, the light goes off.
So people imagine the nervous system is just like that.
If you hit your thumb with a hammer, these wires in your arm -- that, of course, we call nerves -- transmit the information into the junction box in the spinal cord where new wires, new nerves, take the information up to the brain where you become consciously aware that your thumb is now hurt.
Instead of it being the case that that junction box in the spinal cord is just simple where one nerve connects with the next nerve by releasing these little brown packets of chemical information called neurotransmitters in a linear one-on-one fashion, in fact, what happens is the neurotransmitters spill out in three dimensions -- laterally, vertically, up and down in the spinal cord -- and they start interacting with other adjacent cells.
These cells, called glial cells, were once thought to be unimportant structural elements of the spinal cord that did nothing more than hold all the important things together, like the nerves.
But it turns out the glial cells have a vital role in the modulation, amplification and, in the case of pain, the distortion of sensory experiences.
These glial cells become activated.
And that's why pain becomes its own disease.
The nervous system has plasticity.
And most importantly, what we do is we use a rigorous, and often uncomfortable, process of physical therapy and occupational therapy to retrain the nerves in the nervous system to respond normally to the activities and sensory experiences that are part of everyday life.
And I had lunch with her yesterday because she's a college student studying dance at Long Beach here, and she's doing absolutely fantastic.
The future holds the promise that new drugs will be developed that are not symptom-modifying drugs that simply mask the problem, as we have now, but that will be disease-modifying drugs that will actually go right to the root of the problem and attack those glial cells, or those pernicious proteins that the glial cells elaborate, that spill over and cause this central nervous system wind-up, or plasticity, that so is capable of distorting and amplifying the sensory experience that we call pain.
I've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence.
I study it because I think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs.
Since my my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky.
I needed some way to share the experience directly.
So we had to chase this in the submersible for quite sometime, because the top speed of this fish is one knot, which was the top speed of the submersible.
The light organs under the eyes are flashing.
For example, this shrimp releases its bioluminescent chemicals into the water just the way a squid or an octopus would release an ink cloud.
This little squid is called the fire shooter because of its ability to do this.
So there's a lot of animals in the open ocean -- most of them that make light.
And some of these animals are probably inspiration for the things you saw in "Avatar," but you don't have to travel to Pandora to see them.
There are starfish that can make light.
And there are brittle stars that produce bands of light that dance along their arms.
This looks like a plant, but it's actually an animal.
We call it the electronic jellyfish.
It's just 16 blue LEDs that we can program to do different types of displays.
And what you're seeing here is a bait box with a bunch of -- like the cockroaches of the ocean -- there are isopods all over it.
We basically have a chat room going on here, because once it gets started, everybody's talking.
(Laughter) Nope.
Thank you.
(Applause)
He took a look and said, "Oh, you're tying them wrong."
That's the weak form of the knot.
(Applause)
Recently, a wise media theorist Tweeted, "The 19th century culture was defined by the novel, the 20th century culture was defined by the cinema, and the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface."
Our lives are being driven by data, and the presentation of that data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories.
And you'll see everybody waking up on the East coast, followed by European flights coming in the upper right-hand corner.
You see San Francisco and Los Angeles start to make their journeys down to Hawaii in the lower left-hand corner.
And you can zoom in. This is taking a look at Atlanta.
You can see some of the chaos that's happening in New York with the air traffic controllers having to deal with all those major airports next to each other.
Moving across to the West coast, you see San Francisco and Los Angeles -- big low-traffic zones across Nevada and Arizona.
This is visualizing international communications.
So it's how New York communicates with other international cities.
This is Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical chess playing machine.
So I created this drawing tool.
And I said, "I'll pay you two cents for your contribution."
There were 662 rejected sheep that didn't meet "sheep-like" criteria and were thrown out of the flock.
(Laughter) The amount of time spent drawing ranged from four seconds to 46 minutes.
I expected people to be wondering, "Why did I draw a sheep?"
Sheep were the first animal to be raised from mechanically processed byproducts, the first to be selectively bred for production traits, the first animal to be cloned.
It's about your own interpretation and doing something different."
So this is a clip from Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times."
And this was the inspiration for a project that I worked on with my friend Takashi Kawashima.
And other people would draw stick figures or smiley faces.
This is a collaboration with my friend Daniel Massey.
So we resynthesized this song.
We made a music video for one of my favorite bands, Radiohead.
And he ended up talking to Rick Rubin, who was finishing up Johnny Cash's final album called "Ain't No Grave."
So what we did was cross-cut a bunch of archival footage of Johnny Cash, and at eight frames a second, we allowed individuals to draw a single frame that would get woven into this dynamically changing music video.
So I don't have time to play the entire thing for you, but I want to show you two short clips.
And I just thought it'd be wonderful, it'd be really nice to contribute something to his memory.
Chris and I were really amazed by the potential now with modern web browsers, where you have HTML5 audio and video and the power of JavaScript to render amazingly fast.
(Applause)
Actually, it's a really big idea.
This is a polio vaccine.
This is a great technology.
But it wasn't always that way.
Even here in California, if we were to go back just a few years, it was a very different story.
People were terrified of this disease.
They were terrified of polio, and it would cause public panic.
There was no cure, and there was no vaccine.
Twenty years later, they succeeded and developed the polio vaccine.
It was hailed as a scientific miracle in the late 1950s.
Finally, a vaccine that could stop this awful disease, and here in the United States it had an incredible impact.
Bruce Aylward: Oops. Jon, polio's almost been eradicated.
But the reality is that polio still exists today.
And this is the reason: in two countries that hadn't had this disease for more than probably a decade, on opposite sides of the globe, there was suddenly terrible polio outbreaks.
Hundreds of people died -- children as well as adults.
Polio is still a devastating, explosive disease.
So I want to tell you a little bit about what this partnership, the Polio Partnership, is trying to do.
So what we're looking for is a permanent solution.
We want a world in which every child, just like you guys, can take for granted a polio-free world.
So we are trying to wipe out this virus completely.
The risks are massive, but the pay-off -- economic, humanitarian, motivational -- it's absolutely huge.
And if we can finish polio eradication, the poorest countries in the world are going to save over 50 billion dollars in the next 25 years alone.
But smallpox eradication was hard; it was very, very hard.
And polio eradication, in many ways, is even tougher, and there's a few reasons for that.
The first is that, when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago, more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox.
It deteriorates so quickly in the tropics that we've had to put this special vaccine monitor on every single vial so that it will change very quickly when it's exposed to too much heat, and we can tell that it's not a good vaccine to use on a child -- it's not potent; it's not going to protect them.
Even then, kids need many doses of the vaccine.
We've had to create one of the largest social movements in history.
Now giving the polio vaccine is simple.
But reaching 500 million people is much, much tougher.
This is a group whose million-strong army of volunteers have been working to eradicate polio for over 20 years.
Now it took years to build up the infrastructure for polio eradication -- more than 15 years, much longer than it should have -- but once it was built, the results were striking.
Within a couple of years, every country that started polio eradication rapidly eradicated all three of their polio viruses, with the exception of four countries that you see here.
And then, by 1999, one of the three polio viruses that we were trying to eradicate had been completely eradicated worldwide -- proof of concept.
When we started, over 20 years ago, 1,000 children were being paralyzed every single day by this virus.
Last year, it was 1,000.
But the most exciting thing that the polio eradication program has been doing has been to force us, the international community, to reach every single child, every single community, the most vulnerable people in the world, with the most basic of health services, irrespective of geography, poverty, culture and even conflict.
And then to make the matters even worse, the virus started to spread out of these four places, especially northern India and northern Nigeria, into much of Africa, Asia, and even into Europe, causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades.
The brutal truth is, if we don't have the will or the skill, or even the money that we need to reach children, the most vulnerable children in the world, with something as simple as an oral polio vaccine, then pretty soon, more than 200,000 children are again going to be paralyzed by this disease every single year.
There's absolutely no question.
Umar also has polio.
Polio strikes the poorest communities in the world.
We're working closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross to ensure that we can reach every child.
Over 500,000 children are born in the two states that have never stopped polio -- Uttar Pradesh and Bihar -- 500,000 children every single month.
And as long as any child anywhere is paralyzed by this virus, it's a stark reminder that we are failing, as a society, to reach children with the most basic of services.
And for that reason, polio eradication: it's the ultimate in equity and it's the ultimate in social justice.
The huge social movement that's been involved in polio eradication is ready to do way more for these children.
Finishing polio eradication is the right thing to do.
And we are at a crossroads right now in this great effort over the last 20 years.
But if we blink now, we will lose forever the chance to eradicate an ancient disease.
Help us build the momentum so that very soon every child, every parent everywhere can also take for granted a polio-free life forever.
Thank you.
And is it easy to raise that money?
Thank you. (BA: Thank you.) (Applause)
If you're living in Iran, you're facing censorship, harassment, arrest, torture -- at times, execution.
Art is our weapon.
I envy sometimes the artists of the West for their freedom of expression.
It was after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
While I was absent from Iran, the Islamic Revolution had descended on Iran and had entirely transformed the country from Persian to the Islamic culture.
More so, I became very interested, as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions, I became immersed in the study of the Islamic Revolution -- how, indeed, it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women.
I found the subject of Iranian women immensely interesting, in the way the women of Iran, historically, seemed to embody the political transformation.
I was an outsider who had come back to Iran to find my place, but I was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the Islamic Revolution.
So my art became slightly more critical.
My knife became a little sharper.
Last year, I finished a film called "Women Without Men."
My obsession with this book, and the reason I made this into a film, is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female -- traditionally, historically in Iran -- and the question of four women who are all looking for an idea of change, freedom and democracy -- while the country of Iran, equally, as if another character, also struggled for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign interventions.
This film tried to find a balance between telling a political story, but also a feminine story.
These are some of the images and the characters of the film.
Now comes the green movement -- the summer of 2009, as my film is released -- the uprising begins in the streets of Tehran.
What is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film, the cry for democracy and social justice, repeats itself now again in Tehran.
It brought a lot of attention to all those Iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy.
If in the Islamic Revolution, the images of the woman portrayed were submissive and didn't have a voice, now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Tehran -- women who were educated, forward thinking, non-traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist.
These women and those young men united Iranians across the world, inside and outside.
And once again, they proved themselves.
And it's a great honor to be an Iranian woman and an Iranian artist, even if I have to operate in the West only for now.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
A few weeks ago, I had a chance to go to Saudi Arabia.
And the first thing I wanted to do as a Muslim was to go to Mecca and visit the Kaaba, the holiest shrine of Islam.
In other words, men and women were worshiping all together.
And I went there -- I noticed that there was a male section, which is carefully separated from the female section.
Ironic, and it's also, I think, quite telling, because the Kaaba and the rituals around it are relics from the earliest phase of Islam, that of prophet Muhammad.
What we call today Islamic law, and especially Islamic culture -- and there are many Islamic cultures, actually; the one in Saudi Arabia is much different from where I come from in Istanbul or Turkey.
Maybe some things are bad traditions and they need to be changed.
On the other hand, the Westerners who look at Islamic culture and see some troubling aspects should not readily conclude that this is what Islam ordains.
Maybe it's a Middle Eastern culture that became confused with Islam.
There is a practice called female circumcision.
But also the non-Muslim communities of North Africa -- the animists, some Christians and even a Jewish tribe in North Africa -- are known to practice female circumcision.
The same thing can be said for honor killings, which is a recurrent theme in the Western media -- and which is, of course, a horrible tradition.
And we see, truly, in some Muslim communities, that tradition.
We had a tragic case of an honor killing within Turkey's Armenian community just a few months ago.
And it is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called "Islamic regimes," such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and the worst case, the Taliban in Afghanistan, they are pretty authoritarian -- no doubt about that.
For example, in Saudi Arabia, there is a phenomenon called the religious police.
And the religious police imposes the supposed Islamic way of life on every citizen, by force -- like, women are forced to cover their heads -- wear the hijab, the Islamic head cover.
Maybe it's a problem of the political culture, and we have to think about how to change that political culture."
But one thing was curious: most of those problems turn out to be problems that emerged later, not from the very divine core of Islam, the Koran, but from, again, traditions and mentalities, or the interpretations of the Koran that Muslims made in the Middle Ages.
These things which make Islamic law, the troubling aspects of Islamic law, were developed into later interpretations of Islam.
And that's why, actually, in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire, which then covered the whole Middle East, made very important reforms -- reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status, accepting a constitution, accepting a representative parliament, advancing the idea of freedom of religion.
That's why the Ottoman Empire, in its last decades, turned into a proto-democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and freedom was a very important political value at the time.
And this is a question, I think, which needs to be discussed carefully.
In the early 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the whole Middle East was colonized.
And I think the West, at least some powers in the West, particularly the United States, made the mistake of supporting those secular dictators, thinking that they were more helpful for their interests.
In 1950, Turkey had the first free and fair elections, which ended the more autocratic secular regime, which was in the beginning of Turkey.
And the pious Muslims in Turkey saw that they could change the political system by voting.
They were asking for democracy; they were asking for freedom.
They said, "We want freedom; we want democracy.
But this is a promising era in the Muslim world.
They just should be allowed to work for that.
(Applause)
A blind person driving a vehicle safely and independently was thought to be an impossible task, until now.
So in 2007, our team won half a million dollars by placing third place in this competition.
What NFB wanted was not a vehicle that can drive a blind person around, but a vehicle where a blind person can make active decisions and drive.
So we had to throw everything out the window and start from scratch.
It was an absolutely amazing experience.
So with this success, we decided to take the next big step, to develop a real car that can be driven on real roads.
So how does it work?
Well, it's a rather complex system, but let me try to explain it, maybe simplify it.
For that, we use an initial measurement unit.
We also use two cameras to detect the lanes of the road.
The system is also smart enough to figure out the safest way to operate the car.
So for this, we developed many different types of non-visual user interface technology.
So these two devices, DriveGrip and SpeedStrip, are very effective.
A good example for this informational non-visual user interface is called AirPix.
So it's a small tablet, has many holes in it, and compressed air comes out, so it can actually draw images.
Actually, you can also change the frequency of the air coming out and possibly the temperature.
So it's actually a multi-dimensional user interface.
For this, we're showing a simulator, a blind person driving using the AirPix.
This simulator was also very useful for training the blind drivers and also quickly testing different types of ideas for different types of non-visual user interfaces.
So just a month ago, on January 29th, we unveiled this vehicle for the very first time to the public at the world-famous Daytona International Speedway during the Rolex 24 racing event.
Well there comes the first box.
(Applause) DH: So since we started this project, we've been getting hundreds of letters, emails, phone calls from people from all around the world.
But this vehicle is a prototype vehicle, and it's not going to be on the road until it's proven as safe as, or safer than, today's vehicle.
And together with this new type of interfaces, we can use these technologies and apply them to safer cars for sighted people.
Just imagine, in a classroom a teacher writes on the blackboard and a blind student can see what's written and read using these non-visual interfaces.
So today, the things I've showed you today, is just the beginning.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
It was a little bit too funky, and we wanted a more feminine point of view and employed a duck who did it in a much more fitting way -- fashion.
My studio in Bali was only 10 minutes away from a monkey forest, and monkeys, of course, are supposed to be the happiest of all animals.
And it turns out that men and women report very, very similar levels of happiness.
This is a very quick overview of all the studies that I looked at.
Black people are just as happy as white people are.
If you're ugly or if you're really, really good-looking it makes no difference whatsoever.
So now the woman on the right is actually much happier than the guy on the left -- meaning that, if you have a lot of friends, and you have meaningful friendships, that does make a lot of difference.
As well as being married -- you are likely to be much happier than if you are single.
A fellow TED speaker, Jonathan Haidt, came up with this beautiful little analogy between the conscious and the unconscious mind.
If I look at my own life, I'm born in 1962 in Austria.
If I would have been born a hundred years earlier, the big decisions in my life would have been made for me -- meaning I would have stayed in the town that I was born in; I would have very much likely entered the same profession that my dad did; and I would have very much likely married a woman that my mom had selected.
We live where we want to be -- at least in the West.
We become what we really are interested in.
And so it's quite surprising that many of us let our unconscious influence those decisions in ways that we are not quite aware of.
They get influenced by things that they're not aware of.
If I make this whole thing a little bit more personal and see what makes me happy as a designer, the easiest answer, of course, is do more of the stuff that I like to do and much less of the stuff that I don't like to do -- for which it would be helpful to know what it is that I actually do like to do.
It just came out six months ago, and it's getting unbelievable traction right now in Germany.
And I think that his widow is going to be very successful on her quest.
So in this case, it's an outside projection for Singapore on these giant Times Square-like screens.
And from that point of view we turned it into a lovely project.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
How many Creationists do we have in the room?
And yet many Darwinians are anxious, a little uneasy -- would like to see some limits on just how far the Darwinism goes.
Beaver dams, yes. Hoover Dam, no.
And yet people are interestingly resistant to the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to thinking -- to our thinking.
So you're out in the woods, or you're out in the pasture, and you see this ant crawling up this blade of grass.
Yeah, it's just a fluke. It's a lancet fluke.
It's a little brain worm.
It's a parasitic brain worm that has to get into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle.
Salmon swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds, and lancet flukes commandeer a passing ant, crawl into its brain, and drive it up a blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle.
The ant's brain has been hijacked by a parasite that infects the brain, inducing suicidal behavior.
Well, it may already have occurred to you that Islam means "surrender," or "submission of self-interest to the will of Allah."
Well, it's ideas -- not worms -- that hijack our brains.
Now, am I saying that a sizable minority of the world's population has had their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas?
(Laughter) There are a lot of ideas to die for.
Freedom, if you're from New Hampshire.
(Laughter) Justice. Truth. Communism.
And many for Catholicism. And many for Islam.
These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for.
Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others.
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
It's the subordination of genetic interest to other interests.
It is, on the one hand, a biological effect, and a very large one.
Now, what theories do we want to use to look at this?
Well, many theories. But how could something tie them together?
Richard Dawkins, whom you'll be hearing later in the day, invented the term "memes," and put forward the first really clear and vivid version of this idea in his book "The Selfish Gene."
Now here am I talking about his idea.
But it's everybody's idea now.
I'm responsible for what I say about memes.
Actually, I think we're all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but for their likely misuses.
So it is important, I think, to Richard, and to me, that these ideas not be abused and misused.
They're very easy to misuse. That's why they're dangerous.
But it is a problem.
So let me just point out: memes are like viruses.
I mean, a virus is -- you know, it's stuff! What's a meme made of?"
Yesterday, Negroponte was talking about viral telecommunications but -- what's a virus?
What's a meme made of? What are bits made of, Mom?
They're made of information, and can be carried in any physical medium.
Sometimes when people say, "Do memes exist?"
There are different species of memes.
Simple, beautiful furniture?
So the ideas can live on in spite of the fact that they're not being passed on genetically.
After all, the meme for Shaker-dom was essentially a sterilizing parasite.
There are other parasites that do this -- which render the host sterile.
It's part of their plan.
In Jared Diamond's wonderful book, "Guns, Germs and Steel," he talks about how it was germs, more than guns and steel, that conquered the new hemisphere -- the Western hemisphere -- that conquered the rest of the world.
And they just wiped out -- these pathogens just wiped out the native people, who had no immunity to them at all.
Yesterday, a number of people -- Nicholas Negroponte and others -- spoke about all the wonderful things that are happening when our ideas get spread out, thanks to all the new technology all over the world.
But among all those ideas that inevitably flow out into the whole world thanks to our technology, are a lot of toxic ideas.
Sayyid Qutb is one of the founding fathers of fanatical Islam, one of the ideologues that inspired Osama bin Laden.
These memes are spreading around the world and they are wiping out whole cultures.
But we should recognize that for many people in the world, they are a big deal.
Well now, how are we going to tell the good memes from the bad memes?
That is not the job of the science of memetics.
If you've had a friend who's died of AIDS, then you hate HIV.
But the way to deal with that is to do science, and understand how it spreads and why in a morally neutral perspective.
Get the facts.
And so I consider myself one of these people, along with most of the other experimental quantum physicists, who need a good deal of logic to string together these complex ideas.
And so that's where physics was at a few years ago; you needed quantum mechanics to describe little, tiny particles.
This is the first object that you can see that has been in a mechanical quantum superposition.
So what we're looking at here is a tiny computer chip.
And you can sort of see this green dot right in the middle.
This is a photograph of the object.
So what we're looking at is a little chunk of metal, and it's shaped like a diving board, and it's sticking out over a ledge.
And so I made this thing in nearly the same way as you make a computer chip.
For the last stuff, I had to build my own machine -- to make this swimming pool-shaped hole underneath the device.
This device has the ability to be in a quantum superposition, but it needs a little help to do it.
The fellow passengers for inanimate objects are not just people, but it's also the light shining on it and the wind blowing past it and the heat of the room.
We turned off the lights, and then we put it in a vacuum and sucked out all the air, and then we cooled it down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.
Instead of just sitting perfectly still, it was vibrating, and the way it was vibrating was breathing something like this -- like expanding and contracting bellows.
What does it mean for one thing to be both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time?
So let's think about the atoms.
That means that every atom is in two different places at the same time, which in turn means the entire chunk of metal is in two different places.
I think this is really cool.
(Applause) It was worth locking myself in a clean room to do this for all those years because, check this out, the difference in scale between a single atom and that chunk of metal is about the same as the difference between that chunk of metal and you.
And so I had to develop this new intuition, that it seems like all the objects in the elevator are really just quantum objects just crammed into a tiny space.
You hear a lot of talk about how quantum mechanics says that everything is all interconnected.
Well, that's not quite right.
It's more than that; it's deeper.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I was betting that I'd be able to find everything else I could possible want to wear once I got here to Palm Springs.
So let's start with Sunday.
This whole outfit, including the jacket, cost me $55, and it was the most expensive thing that I wore the entire week.
Monday: Color is powerful.
It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants.
Thursday: Confidence is key.
But it wasn't until I turned 30 that I really got what this meant.
Thank you.
(Applause) Friday: A universal truth -- five words for you: Gold sequins go with everything.
Because the lesson I'm trying to learn myself this week is that it's okay to let go.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
We have a lot of data, so we have a lot of power.
I think about World War II -- some of our great technologists then, some of our great physicists, studying nuclear fission and fusion -- just nuclear stuff.
Android.
(Laughter) Next question, a little bit harder.
Kant.
Mill.
We know more about mobile operating systems, but what we really need is a moral operating system.
How can we use numbers as the basis for a moral framework?
And Plato, he had a lot of the same concerns that we did.
I don't want opinions; I want knowledge.
I want to know the truth about justice -- like we have truths in math.
If you've got two of something, you add two more, you get four.
And therefore, it's not a matter of opinion.
What if, Plato thought, ethics was like math?
What if there were a pure form of justice?
That's as ambitious as we are.
If you think that way, you have a Platonist moral framework.
But don't give up.
What if morals, what if what makes something moral is just a matter of if it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain?
Let's take an example.
He said we should use our reason to figure out the rules by which we should guide our conduct, and then it is our duty to follow those rules.
Ethics is hard.
Ethics requires thinking.
Hannah Arendt said, "The sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who choose to be evil.
That's what she called the "banality of evil."
So let's do that. Let's think.
Do it over lunch.
Find an artist or a writer -- or, heaven forbid, find a philosopher and talk to them.
In fact, find somebody from the humanities.
Just a few days ago, right across the street from here, there was hundreds of people gathered together.
You're thinking about the relevance of 17th century French theater -- how does that bear upon venture capital?
And when you think in that way, you become more sensitive to the human considerations, which are crucial to making ethical decisions.
It's based on Norse legend.
We have so much power today, it is up to us to figure out what to do, and that's the good news.
This is our movie.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When I was growing up in Montana, I had two dreams.
I was very fortunate early in my career.
I basically practice for finding money on the street.
(Laughter) But it is that social thing that I guess attracted Michael Crichton.
Michael Crichton really was one of the first people to talk about bringing dinosaurs back to life.
You all know the story, right.
And I guess you inject it into maybe an ostrich egg, or something like that, and then you wait, and, lo and behold, out pops a little baby dinosaur.
Then the dinosaurs, being social, act out their socialness, and they get together, and they conspire.
(Laughter) (Applause) And probably a whole bunch of trees as well.
Back in 1993 when the movie came out, we actually had a grant from the National Science Foundation to attempt to extract DNA from a dinosaur, and we chose the dinosaur on the left, a Tyrannosaurus rex, which was a very nice specimen.
And one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, actually had the background to do this sort of thing.
That was -- here we have 65-million-year-old heme.
We don't really know how long dinosaurs lived, because we haven't found the oldest one yet.
And so here was the first soft tissue from a dinosaur.
But birds are dinosaurs.
Birds are living dinosaurs.
(Laughter) So this is our problem, as you can imagine.
The chicken is a dinosaur.
(Laughter) (Applause) But the sixth-graders demand it.
"Fix the chicken."
(Laughter) So that's what I'm here to tell you about: how we are going to fix a chicken.
That's where you take a gene out of one animal and stick it in another one.
You heard that occasionally children are born with tails, and it's because it's an ancestral characteristic.
Snakes are occasionally born with legs.
A fellow by the name of Matthew Harris at the University of Wisconsin in Madison actually figured out a way to stimulate the gene for teeth, and so was able to actually turn the tooth gene on and produce teeth in chickens.
We can make a chicken with teeth.
That's better than a glowing chicken.
If you look at dinosaur hands, a velociraptor has that cool-looking hand with the claws on it.
So that's the other gene we're looking for.
(Laughter) It's a cooler-looking chicken.
(Applause)
I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture.
In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven.
I went off on my own to become an artist, and I painted for 10 years, when I was offered a Fulbright to India.
I had to do something.
This fishing village was famous for sculpture.
I went for a walk on the beach, watching the fishermen bundle their nets into mounds on the sand.
For two years, I searched for a fiber that could survive ultraviolet rays, salt, air, pollution, and at the same time remain soft enough to move fluidly in the wind.
I found a brilliant aeronautical engineer who designs sails for America's Cup racing yachts named Peter Heppel.
(Laughter) I didn't know where to begin, but I said yes.
Fourteen years ago, I searched for beauty in the traditional things, in craft forms.
I got a call from a friend in Phoenix.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
There are billions of people in developing countries who don't have even a single city that would be willing to welcome them.
But the amazing thing about cities is they're worth so much more than it costs to build them.
In the summer of 2009, Honduras went through a wrenching constitutional crisis.
At the next regularly scheduled election, Pepe Lobo won in a landslide on a platform that promised reform, but reconciliation as well.
He asked Octavio to be his chief of staff.
Meanwhile, I was getting ready to give a talk at TEDGlobal.
Through a process of refinement, trial and error, a lot of user testing, I tried to boil this complicated concept of charter city down to the bare essentials.
We pay a lot of attention to new technologies, but it takes technologies and rules to get progress, and it's usually the rules that hold us back.
In the fall of 2010, a friend from Guatemala sent Octavio a link to the TEDTalk.
He showed it to Javier.
They said, "Let's present this to the leaders of our country."
So in December we met in Miami, in a hotel conference room.
But it was a fairly abstract discussion, and at some point when there was a pause, Octavio said, "Paul, maybe we could watch the TEDTalk."
(Laughing) So the TEDTalk laid out in very simple terms, a charter city is a place where you start with uninhabited land, a charter that specifies the rules that will apply there and then a chance for people to opt in, to go live under those rules or not.
This is a picture of Denver, and the outline is the new airport that was built in Denver.
This airport alone covers more than 100 square kilometers.
So I sat down, and they played the TEDTalk.
And shortly thereafter, on January 19th, they voted in the congress to amend their constitution to have a constitutional provision that allows for special development regions.
In a country which had just gone through this wrenching crisis, the vote in the congress in favor of this constitutional amendment was 124 to one.
All parties, all factions in society, backed this.
On February 17th they passed it again with another vote of 114 to one.
One is South Korea.
This is a picture of a big, new city center that's being built in South Korea -- bigger than downtown Boston.
Many of these are a father who has to leave his family behind to go get a job -- sometimes a single mother who has to get enough money to even pay for food or clothing.
So what kind of an idea is it to think about building a brand new city in Honduras?
What kind of an idea is it to think about insisting that every family have a choice of several cities that are competing to attract new residents?
This is an idea worth spreading.
(Applause)
And in the other case, the sperm is carrying an X chromosome, meeting the X chromosome of the egg.
So in one instance, you can have somebody who has an XY chromosomal basis, and that SRY gene on the Y chromosome tells the proto-gonads, which we all have in the fetal life, to become testes.
So in the fetal life, those testes are pumping out testosterone.
And this is a syndrome called androgen insensitivity syndrome.
Another example: a few years ago I got a call from a man who was 19 years old, who was born a boy, raised a boy, had a girlfriend, had sex with his girlfriend, had a life as a guy, and had just found out that he had ovaries and a uterus inside.
What he had was an extreme form of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia.
He had XX chromosomes, and in the womb, his adrenal glands were in such high gear that it created, essentially, a masculine hormonal environment.
Some people who have XX chromosomes develop what are called ovotestis, which is when you have ovarian tissue with testicular tissue wrapped around it.
It's also in terms of race, which turns out to be vastly more complicated than our terminology has allowed.
We look, for example, about the fact that we share at least 95 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees.
I know they were racists, I know they were sexist, but they were great.
It's because of what happened in 1776 with the Founding Fathers.
The monarchs of the old world didn't have a concept of DNA, but they did have a concept of birthright.
And it's really clear, if you look at the history of the Founding Fathers, a lot of them were very interested in science, and they were interested in the concept of a naturalistic world.
They were moving away from supernatural explanations, and they were rejecting things like a supernatural concept of power, where it transmitted because of a very vague concept of birthright.
Next came the successful Civil Rights Movement, where we found people like Sojourner Truth talking about, "Ain't I a woman?"
We see the same thing with the disability rights movement.
The problem is, of course, that, as we begin to look at all that commonality, we have to begin to question why we maintain certain divisions.
Simply by virtue of the fact that Mary was born prematurely three months, she comes into all sorts of rights three months earlier than Henry does -- the right to consent to sex, the right to vote, the right to drink.
It seems like what happens in our culture is a sort of pragmatic attitude: "We have to draw the line somewhere, so we will draw the line somewhere."
So for example, Texas has at one point decided that what it means to marry a man is to mean that you don't have a Y chromosome, and what it means to marry a woman means you have a Y chromosome.
But this is also very bizarre, because of the story I told you at the beginning about androgen insensitivity syndrome.
And I want to think about the possibilities of what democracy might look like, or might have looked like, if we had more involved the mothers.
And so if we think about that, we have an interesting situation in hands.
Years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of my graduate advisors who knew I was interested in feminism -- I considered myself a feminist, as I still do, asked a really strange question.
Feminism is all about undoing stereotypes about gender, so there's nothing feminine about feminism."
That is to say, there might be something, on average, different about female brains from male brains that makes us more attentive to deeply complex social relationships, and more attentive to taking care of the vulnerable.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And yet, despite everything going really well for John, he was struggling, fighting addiction and a gripping depression.
On the night of June 11th, 2003, he climbed up to the edge of the fence on the Manhattan Bridge and he leaped to the treacherous waters below.
Remarkably -- no, miraculously -- he lived.
Research shows that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail.
But the people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time.
I know John's story very well because I'm John.
It's a conversation worth having and an idea worth spreading.
Thank you.
(Applause)
A couple of years ago, when I was attending the TED conference in Long Beach, I met Harriet.
We were introduced because we both knew Linda Avey, one of the founders of the first online personal genomic companies.
And because we shared our genetic information with Linda, she could see that Harriet and I shared a very rare type of mitochondrial DNA, haplotype K1a1b1a, which meant we were distantly related.
When I met Harriet in person the next year at the TED conference, she'd gone online and ordered our own happy haplotype T-shirts.
What does it have to do with the future of health?
Well, the way I met Harriet is an example of how leveraging cross-disciplinary, exponentially growing technologies is affecting our future of health and wellness -- from low-cost gene analysis to the ability to do powerful bioinformatics to the connection of the Internet and social networking.
We often think linearly.
Many of these technologies, speaking as a physician and innovator, we can start to leverage, to impact the future of our own health and of health care, and to address many of the major challenges in health care today, ranging from the exponential costs to the aging population, the way we really don't use information very well today, the fragmentation of care and the often very difficult course of adoption of innovation.
And one of the major things we can do is move the curve to the left.
We spend most of our money on the last 20 percent of life.
What if we could incentivize physicians in the health care system and our own selves to move the curve to the left and improve our health, leveraging technology as well?
I mean, this is the iPhone 4.
I've been the track share for the medicine portion of a new institution called Singularity University, based in Silicon Valley.
We bring together each summer about 100 very talented students from around the world.
And coming up next month is FutureMed, a program to help cross-train and leverage technologies into medicine.
These mobile phones have over 20,000 different mobile apps available.
It's no secret that computers, through Moore's law, are speeding up faster and faster.
And now we can see inside of the brain at a resolution and ability never before available, and essentially learn how to reconstruct and maybe even reengineer or backwards engineer the brain, so we can better understand pathology, disease and therapy.
We can look inside with real-time fMRI in the brain at real time.
And by understanding these sorts of processes and these connections, we're going to understand the effects of medication or meditation and better personalize and make effective, for example, psychoactive drugs.
The scanners for these are getting smaller, less expensive and more portable.
Let's get personal.
Now there's essentially virtual colonoscopy.
This is an example of this paradigm shift.
We're moving to this integration of biomedicine, information technology, wireless and, I would say, mobile now -- this era of digital medicine.
Even my stethoscope is now digital, and of course, there's an app for that.
We're moving, obviously, to the era of the tricorder.
For about 5,000 dollars, I can have the power of a very powerful diagnostic device in my hand.
And now, of course, we're in the era of the iPad, even the iPad 2.
And as you saw just about a month ago, Watson from IBM beat the two champions in "Jeopardy."
We're now in the era of virtual visits.
This is the RP7; if I'm a hematologist, I can visit another clinic or hospital.
There's even mirrors that can pick up your pulse rate.
And I would argue, in the future, we'll have wearable devices in our clothes, monitoring us 24/7.
Probably in a few years, you'll look in your mirror and it'll be diagnosing you.
And I think some of these technologies will enable us to be more connected with our patients, to take more time and do the important human-touch elements of medicine, as augmented by these technologies.
So the surgeon can see inside the patient, through their lens, where the tumor is, where the blood vessels are.
This can be integrated with decision support.
Now, how about controlling other elements?
For those who have disabilities -- the paraplegic, there's the brain-computer interface, or BCI, where chips have been put on the motor cortex of completely quadriplegic patients, and they can control a cursor or a wheelchair or, potentially, a robotic arm.
These devices are getting smaller and going into more and more of these patients.
So we're really entering the era of wearable robotics, actually.
This is Aimee Mullins, who lost her lower limbs as a young child, and Hugh Herr, who's a professor at MIT, who lost his limbs in a climbing accident.
Clearly the obesity trend is exponentially going in the wrong direction, including with huge costs.
We get into even smaller micro-robots that will eventually, autonomously, move through your system, and be able to do things surgeons can't do in a much less invasive manner.
On the cardiac side, pacemakers are getting smaller and much easier to place, so no need to train an interventional cardiologist to place them.
This one is in prototyping by Medtronic; it's smaller than a penny.
How about enabling the pathologist to use their cell phone to see at a microscopic level and to lumber that data back to the cloud and make better diagnostics?
We can now leverage microfluidics, like this chip made by Steve Quake at Stanford.
If we go down the small pathway a little bit further, we're entering the era of nanomedicine, the ability to make devices super-small, to the point where we can design red blood cells or microrobots that monitor our blood system or immune system, or even those that might clear out the clots from our arteries.
In genomics now, the genome cost about a billion dollars about 10 years ago, when the first one came out.
Then it gets interesting, when we start to crowd-source that information, and enter the era of true personalized medicine: the right drug for the right person at the right time, instead of what we're doing now, which is the same drug for everybody, blockbuster drug medications, which don't work for the individual.
My data indicates I've got about average risk for developing macular degeneration, a kind of blindness.
But if I take that same data, upload it to deCODEme, I can look at my risk for type 2 diabetes; I'm at almost twice the risk.
We're now entering the era of systems medicine, systems biology, where we can start to integrate all this information.
It should be on the market in a year or two.
I'm an oncologist and know that most of what we give is essentially poison.
We learned at Stanford and other places that we can discover cancer stem cells, the ones that seem to be really responsible for disease relapse.
The cancer stem cells remain, and the tumor can return months or years later.
We're now learning to identify the cancer stem cells and identify those as targets and go for the long-term cure.
We're entering the era of personalized oncology, the ability to leverage all of this data together, analyze the tumor and come up with a real, specific cocktail for the individual patient.
I've studied a lot about stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells are particularly powerful.
Geron, last year, started the first trial using human embryonic stem cells to treat spinal cord injuries.
Still a phase I trial, but evolving.
We've been using adult stem cells in clinical trials for about 15 years to approach a whole range of topics, particularly cardiovascular disease.
I invented a device called the MarrowMiner, a much less invasive way for harvesting bone marrow.
It's now been FDA approved; hopefully on the market in the next year.
Where is stem-cell therapy going?
If you think about it, every cell in your body has the same DNA you had when you were an embryo.
We can now reprogram your skin cells to actually act like a pluripotent embryonic stem cell and utilize those, potentially, to treat multiple organs in the same patient, making personalized stem cell lines.
We're integrating this now with a whole era of cellular engineering, and integrating exponential technologies for essentially 3D organ printing, replacing the ink with cells, and essentially building and reconstructing a 3D organ.
So in closing, as you think about technology trends and how to impact health and medicine, we're entering an era of miniaturization, decentralization and personalization.
But often it's too late, and it's stage III or IV cancer, for example.
Thanks very much.
(Applause) Take a bow, take a bow.
We call them the Elders because a half a billion years ago they tripled the amount of oxygen in the air, which led to an explosion of life, which led to all of us.
We call them the Elders, but you probably know them as plankton.
A couple of years ago, I was giving a talk about an invention I made -- it was a 3D microscope.
He realized that my microscope could solve a big problem he was having.
(Laughter) So we started working together, studying these amazing creatures.
This is the world without plankton.
You see, plankton generate two-thirds of our oxygen using the sun.
For now.
Simone Bianco: As many of you know, since 1950, the average surface temperature of the earth has increased by one degree Centigrade due to all the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the air.
Now, while this temperature increase may not seem like a big deal to us, it is to plankton.
Indirect measurements have shown that the global phytoplankton population may have decreased by as much as 40 percent between 1950 and 2010 because of climate change.
Because the plankton that are here today clean that carbon out of the air.
Our theory is that plankton are tiny, and it's really, really hard to care about something you cannot see.
So to do this, we're going to bring you scuba diving with plankton.
Martin Short is one of my all-time favorite actors.
I've always been inspired by science fiction.
As an inventor, I try and turn fantasy into reality.
And I once invented this glove which let me travel and help people like you explore the virtual world.
I have an image sensor like the kind in your cell phone, behind the lens.
(Laughter) Because I love plankton.
(Laughter) And underneath I have a light, an LED, which is going to cast shadows of the plankton on the image sensor.
And now this silver thing is an XY plotter, so I can move the image sensor to follow the plankton as they swim.
Now comes the fantasy part.
(Laughter) I put a tilt sensor on this helmet so I can control the microscope with my head.
And now let's look at the video from this image sensor.
These are all plankton.
This is in that little tray, and with my head, I can move the microscope.
SB: Yes.
Alright, let's find something.
Think about what will happen if, you know, our garbage collectors didn't come anymore, if they disappeared.
Oh, look at that.
(Laughter) But ... right?
TZ: I agree.
And it's able to sense and react to its environment.
With our friends in the Center for Cellular Construction and the help of the National Science Foundation, we are using Stentor to sense the presence of contamination in food and water, which I think is really cool.
They convert solar light and carbon dioxide into the oxygen that is filling your lungs right now.
TZ: (Exhales) SB: Yay! (Laughter) You know, there's something interesting.
About a billion years ago, ancient plants got their photosynthesis capability by incorporating tiny, tiny plankton into their cells.
So now you've seen how vital plankton are to our lives and how much we need them.
Oh, yes, I know it's sad, yes.
(Laughter) In the game of plankton, you win or you die.
(Laughter) Now, what amazes me is, we have known about global warming for over a century.
Yes, yes, I know, I know, our world is based on fossil fuels, but we can adjust our society to run on renewable energy from the Sun to create a more sustainable and secure future.
That's good for the little creatures here, the plankton, and that good for us -- here's why.
Look at these creatures, they're swimming around, they're looking for a place to eat and reproduce.
Which leads to conflicts all around the oil resources.
Fossil fuels are like a global cigarette.
Audience: Now.
But let's instead use our neocortex, our new brain, to save the Elders, some of the oldest creatures on the earth.
And let's apply science to harness the energy that has fueled the Elders for millions of years -- the sun.
Thank you.
(Applause)
My mother was a philanthropist.
That word is in my language, Maragoli, spoken in western Kenya, and now you speak my language.
Mutual responsibility for caring for one another.
I grew up in a farming community in western Kenya.
I remember vividly the many times that neighbors would go to a neighbor's home -- a sick neighbor's home -- and harvest their crop for them.
And often, the community would come together to contribute money to send a neighbor's child to school -- not only in the country but to universities abroad as well.
The first surgeon in my country came from that rural village.
(Applause) So ...
And then I grew up, went to universities back at home and abroad, obtained a few degrees here and there, became organized and took up international jobs, working in development, humanitarian work and philanthropy.
So let me tell you how.
What could we achieve for each other?
What could we achieve for medical science?
So give up the walls.
Every idea counts -- small or big counts.
It is a privilege to give more.
(Applause) And this is the time for women to give more for women.
It is the time to give more for women.
A woman in 1990 came to the Global Fund with a big idea -- a woman from Mexico by the name of Lucero González.
She wanted to begin a fund that would support a movement that would be rooted in the communities in Mexico.
Today, 25 years later, Semillas, the name of the fund, has raised and spent, within the community, 17.8 million dollars.
(Applause) They have impacted over two million people, and they work with a group of 600,000 women in Mexico.
And I tell you, long after the lights have gone off Mexico, Semillas will be there with the communities, with the women, for a very long time.
Thirty years ago, there was very little funding that went directly to women's hands in their communities.
Today we celebrate 168 women's funds all over the world, 100 of which are in this country.
You find it in indigenous communities, in rural communities.
One: if you want to solve the world's biggest problems, invest in women and girls.
(Applause) Not only do they expand the investment, but they care for everyone in the community.
Women who know how to protect themselves know what it means to make a difference.
And the second reason that I'm asking you to invest in women and girls is because this is the smartest thing you could ever do at this particular time.
And if we are going to have over 350 trillion dollars by 2030, those dollars need to be in the hands of women.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater.
And I think it was a great place to grow up as an artist because I grew up around quirky, colorful characters who were great at making with their hands.
For instance, me and my sister, when we were little, we would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains.
But when I was little, I remember, he would kill flies in our house with my BB gun.
(Laughter) And so this is what I did.
I figured out their bios, their passions in life and their art styles, and I started making their work.
So for example, in realist paintings, it ranges from this, which is kind of old masters style, to really realistic still-life, to this type of painting where I'm painting with a single hair.
And probably the best part of this piece is at dusk and dawn when the twilight wedge has fallen and the ground's dark, but there's still the light above, bright above.
So this piece was great fun because it was two days of digging in soft dirt.
And in her most recent project, it's called "Weather I Made."
(Applause) And so this is five-foot, five-inches of frost that she left behind.
So the next artist, this is a group of Japanese artists, a collective of Japanese artists -- (Laughter) in Tokyo.
(Laughter) Which is one of the best compliments ever.
This artist is Gus Weinmueller, and he's doing a project, a large project, called "Art for the Peoples."
This project is called "Love Nests."
What he did was to get wild birds to make his art for him.
This one's called "Mixtape Love Song's Nest."
(Laughter) And this one's called "Lovemaking Nest."
(Laughted) Next is Sylvia Slater.
And so they're valuable. This is precious metals and gemstones.
This is by a duo, Michael Abernathy and Bud Holland.
There's another pile of leaves.
Like this is a painting of a snake in a box.
(Laughter) The next artist is Hazel Clausen.
And that's the symbol of their culture.
This is a typical angora embroidery for them.
This is one of their founders, Gert Schaeffer.
The next is a collective of artists called the Silver Dobermans, and their motto is to spread pragmatism one person at a time.
The next artist is K. M. Yoon, a really interesting South Korean artist.
Next is Maynard Sipes.
Next is an Australian artist, Janeen Jackson, and this is from a project of hers called "What an Artwork Does When We're Not Watching."
And that's my cousin and my sister's dog, Gabby.
And she's one of the most prolific of all these hundred artists, even though she's going to be 90 next year.
Next is by Vera Sokolova.
And I have to say, Vera kind of scares me.
(Laughter) And she's an optometrist in St. Petersburg, and she plays with optics.
(Laughter) And this is by Cicily Bennett, and it's from a series of short films.
And after this one, there's 77 other artists.
(Applause) Thank you. Thanks.
(Applause)
I'm here today to start a revolution.
Now before you get up in arms, or you break into song, or you pick a favorite color, I want to define what I mean by revolution.
By revolution, I mean a drastic and far-reaching change in the way we think and behave -- the way we think and the way we behave.
We're last place in Europe in innovation.
So it's no surprise, guys, that 62 percent of Bulgarians are not optimistic about the future.
It's not a conspiracy I have got against Bulgaria. These are facts.
We need a drastic change in the way we think and behave to transform Bulgaria for the better, for ourselves, for our friends, for our family and for our future.
How did this happen?
We don't value play.
(Applause) Be serious.
(Laughter) (Applause) And here's how it works.
But then what happens in step three?
(Laughter) And we said, "He's five."
But I'm sorry, the problems of today are not the problems of the Industrial Revolution.
We need adaptability, the ability to learn how to be creative and innovative.
We create robotic workers that we treat like assets, to lever and just throw away.
Kittens play. We all know kittens play.
But what you may not know is that kittens deprived of play are unable to interact socially.
And a final really interesting study -- it's been shown, a correlation between play and brain size.
The more you play, the bigger the brains there are.
Dolphins, pretty big brains, play a lot.
Humans. We play sports.
We play musical instruments.
We dance, we kiss, we sing, we just goof around.
We're designed to do that continuously -- to play and play a lot and not stop playing.
It is a huge benefit.
Just like there's benefits to animals, there's benefits to humans.
It's been shown to promote pre-frontal cortex development where a lot of cognition is happening.
It's not fiction, it's not story tales, it's not make-believe; it's cold, hard science.
These are the benefits to play.
Little exercise just for a second: close your eyes and try to imagine a world without play.
What does this world look like?
Now imagine your workplace.
We have this concept that the opposite of play is work.
"Oh, my colleagues see me laughing. I must not have enough work," or, "Oh, I've got to hide because my boss might see me.
The opposite of play is not work.
The opposite of play is depression. It's depression.
In fact, play improves our work.
Just like there's benefits for humans and animals, there's benefits for play at work.
A doctor might be serious, but laughter's still a great medicine.
It does work in Bulgaria, you guys. Two reasons.
One, play is universal.
I asked them all.
And you can say, "Well how do you know they're happy?"
Rediscover that because you're the leaders, the innovation leaders, the thought leaders.
Fear is the enemy of play.
(Laughter) So in summary, we need a drastic change in the way we think and behave, but we don't need a workers' revolution.
We don't need a workers' revolution.
But what you need to do is fan the flames of the revolution.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As an artist, connection is very important to me.
Through my work I'm trying to articulate that humans are not separate from nature and that everything is interconnected.
I first went to Antarctica almost 10 years ago, where I saw my first icebergs.
My heart beat fast, my head was dizzy, trying to comprehend what it was that stood in front of me.
Each iceberg has its own individual personality.
As an iceberg melts, I am breathing in its ancient atmosphere.
As the iceberg melts, it is releasing mineral-rich fresh water that nourishes many forms of life.
And some of the ice is over 100,000 years old.
You can see on the left side a small boat.
This is an average-size Greenlandic iceberg.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Accelerometers on each hand read hand position.
(Applause)
The second place that I feel free is after scoring a goal on the soccer pitch.
For instance, I'm a theater maker who loves sports.
We talk about it abstractly and even divisively, like "protect our freedom," "build this wall," "they hate us because of our freedom."
We have all these systems that are beautifully designed to incarcerate us or deport us, but how do we design freedom?
The project is called "Moving and Passing."
Imagine that you are a 15-year-old kid from Honduras now living in Harlem, or you're a 13-year-old girl born in DC to two Nigerian immigrants.
You've just been practicing dribbling through cones for, like, 15 minutes, and then, all of a sudden, a marching band comes down the field.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Imagining a solo cello concert, one would most likely think of Johann Sebastian Bach unaccompanied cello suites.
As a child studying these eternal masterpieces, Bach's music would intermingle with the singing voices of Muslim prayers from the neighboring Arab village of the northern Kibbutz in Israel where I grew up.
Late at night, after hours of practicing, I would listen to Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday as the sounds of tango music would be creeping from my parents' stereo.
It all became music to me.
I still start every day practicing playing Bach.
But as I was moving away from the traditional classical repertoire and trying to find new ways of musical expression, I realized that with today's technological resources, there's no reason to limit what can be produced at one time from a single string instrument.
My cello and my voice are layered to create this large sonic canvas.
I want to create endless possibilities with this cello.
I become the medium through which the music is being channeled, and in the process, when all is right, the music is transformed and so am I.
By birth and by choice, I've been involved with the auto industry my entire life, and for the past 30 years, I've worked at Ford Motor Company.
What happens when the number of vehicles on the road doubles, triples, or even quadruples?
And that went on for about two years, until -- I think I was about 12 -- my dad brought home a Lincoln Mark III.
My dad finished dinner early that evening.
And my first car was a 1975 electric-green Mustang.
My great grandfather was Henry Ford, and on my mother's side, my great grandfather was Harvey Firestone.
So when I was born, I guess you could say expectations were kind of high for me.
But my great grandfather, Henry Ford, really believed that the mission of the Ford Motor Company was to make people's lives better and make cars affordable so that everyone could have them.
And as a young boy, I used to go up to Northern Michigan and fish in the rivers that Hemingway fished in and then later wrote about.
As a high-schooler, I started to read authors like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey, and I really began to develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world.
I joined Ford after college, after some soul searching whether or not this is really the right thing to do.
And I really discovered that my professors weren't completely wrong.
There were some within Ford who believed that all this ecological nonsense should just disappear and that I needed to stop hanging out with "environmental wackos."
(Laughter) Of course, I had no intention of doing that, and I kept speaking out about the environment, and it really was the topic that we now today call sustainability.
And that is the freedom of mobility that my great grandfather brought to people is now being threatened, just as the environment is.
Today there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world, and within our lifetime, that number's going to grow to about nine billion.
When we look at the population growth in terms of cars, it becomes even clearer.
But with more people and greater prosperity around the world, that number's going to grow to between two and four billion cars by mid century.
Today the average American spends about a week a year stuck in traffic jams, and that's a huge waste of time and resources.
Today the average driver in Beijing has a five-hour commute.
And last summer -- many of you probably saw this -- there was a hundred-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in China.
In the decades to come, 75 percent of the world's population will live in cities, and 50 of those cities will be of 10 million people or more.
Frankly, four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam.
My great grandfather once said before he invented the Model T, "If I had asked people then what they wanted, they would have answered, 'We want faster horses.'" So the answer to more cars is simply not to have more roads.
And to connect our country after World War II, we didn't build more two-lane highways, we built the interstate highway system.
We are going to build smart cars, but we also need to build smart roads, smart parking, smart public transportation systems and more.
We don't want to waste our time sitting in traffic, sitting at tollbooths or looking for parking spots.
Pedestrian zones and dedicated traffic lanes are going to be created, and all of this will cut down the average rush hour commute to get across town in New York from about an hour today at rush hour to about 20 minutes.
Now if you look at Hong Kong, they have a very interesting system called Octopus there.
Very soon, the same systems that we use today to bring music and entertainment and GPS information into our vehicles are going to be used to create a smart vehicle network.
But very soon we're going to see the days when cars are essentially talking to each other.
This is the kind of technology that will merge millions of individual vehicles into a single system.
Companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, they all need to understand this is a huge business opportunity, as well as an enormous social problem.
And just as these groups embrace the green energy challenge -- and it's really been amazing to me to watch how much brain power, how much money and how much serious thought has, really over the last three years, just poured into the green energy field.
This isn't going to be solved by any one person or one group.
Since the Model T, most people never traveled more than 25 miles from home in their entire lifetime.
And since then, the automobile has allowed us the freedom to choose where we live, where we work, where we play and frankly when we just go out and want to move around.
(Applause)
I'm a savant, or more precisely, a high-functioning autistic savant.
I want to talk to you briefly about perception.
When he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name, Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him -- little details that other people seem to miss.
Every time I read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life, I'm reminded of why I too became a writer.
In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding.
And in terms of the line of poetry, why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit?
I'm asking you to do this because I believe our personal perceptions, you see, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge.
Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.
I'm an extreme example of this.
One is a flash of white light.
Three is green.
Four is blue.
Five is yellow.
And here is one of my paintings.
It's a multiplication of two prime numbers.
But it's not only numbers that I see in colors.
And this is an opening phrase from the novel "Lolita."
And Nabokov was himself synesthetic.
Another example: a little bit more mathematical.
If some of you play chess, you'll know that 64 is a square number, and that's why chessboards, eight by eight, have 64 squares.
What about 75?
Well if 100, if we think of 100 as being like a square, 75 would look like this.
64 becomes 6,400.
Easy when you know how.
(Laughter) The second question was an Icelandic word.
Words, like numbers, express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world.
And poets, like other artists, play with those intuitive understandings.
The hare itself, the animal -- not a cat, not a dog, a hare -- why a hare?
So in these few minutes, I hope I've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things and to show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities.
The world is richer, vaster than it too often seems to be.
Thank you.
(Applause)
You know, what I do is write for children, and I'm probably America's most widely read children's author, in fact.
And I always tell people that I don't want to show up looking like a scientist.
And you know, an epiphany is usually something you find that you dropped someplace.
That's a painting of a circle.
About three or four years ago, I got a phone call in the middle of the night from that teacher, Mrs. Posten, who said, "I need to see you.
I'm disappointed that we never got to know each other as adults.
Well, the next day we were in Cleveland.
We took a look at her, we laughed, we cried, and we knew that she needed to be in a hospice.
And just as the woman who wanted to know me as an adult got to know me, she turned into a box of ashes and was placed in my hands.
And what had happened was the circle had closed, it had become a circle -- and that epiphany I talked about presented itself.
The epiphany is that death is a part of life.
She saved my life; I and my partner saved hers.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And indeed, most people associate space with silence.
How can we tell the difference between the sound of the Sun and the sound of a pulsar?
Well the answer is the science of radio astronomy.
Radio astronomers study radio waves from space using sensitive antennas and receivers, which give them precise information about what an astronomical object is and where it is in our night sky.
And just like the signals that we send and receive here on Earth, we can convert these transmissions into sound using simple analog techniques.
So today, I'm going to tell you a short story of the history of the universe through listening.
Now this story doesn't start with vast telescopes or futuristic spacecraft, but a rather more humble technology -- and in fact, the very medium which gave us the telecommunications revolution that we're all part of today: the telephone.
It's 1876, it's in Boston, and this is Alexander Graham Bell who was working with Thomas Watson on the invention of the telephone.
A key part of their technical set up was a half-mile long length of wire, which was thrown across the rooftops of several houses in Boston.
Thomas Watson spent hours listening to the strange crackles and hisses and chirps and whistles that his accidental antenna detected.
Now you have to remember, this is 10 years before Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves -- 15 years before Nikola Tesla's four-tuned circuit -- nearly 20 years before Marconi's first broadcast.
We didn't have the technology to transmit.
So what were these strange noises?
As he correctly guessed, some of these sounds were caused by activity on the surface of the Sun.
So whilst inventing the technology that would usher in the telecommunications revolution, Watson had discovered that the star at the center of our solar system emitted powerful radio waves.
Fast-forward 50 years, and Bell and Watson's technology has completely transformed global communications.
But going from slinging some wire across rooftops in Boston to laying thousands and thousands of miles of cable on the Atlantic Ocean seabed is no easy matter.
And so before long, Bell were looking to new technologies to optimize their revolution.
Radio could carry sound without wires.
But there was one persistent noise that Jansky couldn't identify, and it seemed to appear in his radio headset four minutes earlier each day.
Jansky had made a historic discovery, that celestial objects could emit radio waves as well as light waves.
Fifty years on from Watson's accidental encounter with the Sun, Jansky's careful listening ushered in a new age of space exploration: the radio astronomy age.
Over the next few years, astronomers connected up their antennas to loudspeakers and learned about our radio sky, about Jupiter and the Sun, by listening.
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using the horn antenna at Bell's Holmdel laboratory to study the Milky Way with extraordinary precision.
But the noise didn't disappear.
This was the first experimental evidence that the Big Bang existed and the universe was born at a precise moment some 14.7 billion years ago.
So our story ends at the beginning -- the beginning of all things, the Big Bang.
This is the noise that Penzias and Wilson heard -- the oldest sound that you're ever going to hear, the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
My name is Joshua Walters.
I'm a performer.
(Beatboxing) (Laughter) (Applause) But as far as being a performer, I'm also diagnosed bipolar.
When I was 16 in San Francisco, I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ.
Maybe you thought that was scary, but actually there's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you're Jesus Christ.
(Bugle sound) There's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive -- at least the hypomanic edge part of it.
Now if you don't know what hypomania is, it's like an engine that's out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks.
Some of them committed suicide.
So maybe, you know, there's no such thing as crazy, and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Sergey Brin: I want to discuss a question I know that's been pressing on many of your minds.
Audience: Yes.
But here you can see around the world how people are using Google.
In the U.S. and Spain, it was popular at the same time.
And what that means is we want to have more people who are healthy and educated.
Now does anybody know who this is?
And now we've grown to over 100,000 members.
Larry Page: Thank you, Sergey.
I think usually, as companies get bigger, they find it really hard to have small, innovative projects.
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.
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.
We also have a lot of engineers in those meetings, and they don't always do their laundry as much as they should.
But anyway, every year we've taken the whole company on a ski trip.
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."
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.
So thank you.
Civilization as we know it has ceased to exist -- no books, no electronic devices, no Facebook or Twitter.
Well perhaps some rectangular pieces of plastic with strange symbols on them.
This is no hypothetical question.
It occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers, covering what is now Pakistan, Northwestern India and parts of Afghanistan and Iran.
A king? A god?
The symbols are most commonly found on seals.
Well let me show you.
If you look at a map of India today, you'll see that most of the languages spoken in North India belong to the Indo-European language family.
So some people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient Indo-European language such as Sanskrit.
These people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient form of the Dravidian language family, which is the language family spoken in much of South India today.
And the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket of Dravidian-speaking people in the North, actually near Afghanistan, and they say that perhaps, sometime in the past, Dravidian languages were spoken all over India and that this suggests that the Indus civilization is perhaps also Dravidian.
I've always been fascinated by the Indus script ever since I read about it in a middle school textbook.
My career path led me to become a computational neuroscientist, so in my day job, I create computer models of the brain to try to understand how the brain makes predictions, how the brain makes decisions, how the brain learns and so on.
Are you ready?
Languages contain patterns.
The Indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns.
And this in turn tends to be followed by this quotation marks-like symbol.
And this is very similar to a Q and U example.
What we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol.
How many of you have ever spilled coffee on a keyboard?
What about the Indus script?
Now what about the Indus script?
We found that the Indus script actually falls within the range of the linguistic scripts.
It shows that the Indus script shares an important property of language.
The same thing happens in the case of the Indus script.
This suggests that the same script, the Indus script, could be used to write different languages.
The results we have so far seem to point to the conclusion that the Indus script probably does represent language.
That's our next big challenge.
So you'll notice that many of the symbols look like pictures of humans, of insects, of fishes, of birds.
Most ancient scripts use the rebus principle, which is, using pictures to represent words.
And so seven stars would stand for "elu meen," which is the Dravidian word for the Big Dipper star constellation.
Today, we can write a word such as TED in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script, because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century.
The Mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century, but the Indus civilization remains silent.
I can't wait to find out.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to be sharing with you how, four years ago, I almost died -- found out I was, in fact, already almost dead -- and what I then found out about what's called the e-Patient movement.
I had been blogging under the name "Patient Dave," and when I discovered this, I just renamed myself e-Patient Dave.
Regarding the word "patient": When I first started a few years ago getting involved in health care and attending meetings as just a casual observer, I noticed that people would talk about patients as if it was somebody who's not in the room here -- somebody out there.
But I'm here to tell you: "patient" is not a third-person word.
So when you hear what I'm going to talk about here today, first of all, I want to say that I am here on behalf of all the patients that I have ever met, all the ones I haven't met.
One of the senior doctors at my hospital, Charlie Safran, and his colleague, Warner Slack, have been saying for decades that the most underutilized resource in all of health care is the patient.
This is from July, 1969.
I was a freshman in college, and this was when we first landed on the Moon.
The world was changing.
A few weeks later, Woodstock happened.
That fall of 1969, the Whole Earth Catalog came out.
It was a hippie journal of self-sufficiency.
We think of hippies of being just hedonists, but there's a very strong component -- I was in that movement -- a very strong component of being responsible for yourself.
This book's title's subtitle is "Access to Tools."
In the 1980s, this young doctor, Tom Ferguson, was the medical editor of the Whole Earth Catalog.
Well, I got an X-ray, and the next morning -- you may have noticed, those of you who have been through a medical crisis will understand this.
For me, it was 9am on January 3, 2007.
The phone rang and it was my doctor.
He said, "Your shoulder is going to be fine, but Dave, there's something in your lung."
It turns out there were five of these things in both my lungs.
My wife came with me.
She's a veterinarian, so she's seen lots of ultrasounds.
(Laughter) This is an MRI image.
(Laughter) I went home.
Before I met her, I went through some suboptimal search results.
A cancer, a tumor, is something you grow out of your own tissue.
Almost all patients are incurable."
And this is the diagram of stage 4 kidney cancer from the drug I eventually got.
I fainted and landed on it, and it broke.
And what I read was that my median survival was 24 weeks.
If you wonder why patients are motivated and want to help, think about this.
Well, my doctor prescribed a patient community, ACOR.org, a network of cancer patients, of all amazing things.
There is no cure, but there's something that sometimes works -- it usually doesn't -- called high-dosage interleukin.
It's the power of patient networks.
Anyway, this is the way the numbers unfolded.
The punch line is that a year and a half later, I was there when this magnificent young woman, my daughter, got married.
And when she came down those steps, and it was just her and me for that moment, I was so glad that she didn't have to say to her mother, "I wish Dad could have been here."
Now, I want to talk briefly about a couple of other patients who are doing everything in their power to improve health care.
This is Regina Holliday, a painter in Washington DC, whose husband died of kidney cancer a year after my disease.
Well, as it said in my introduction, I've gotten somewhat known for saying that patients should have access to their data.
(Laughter) Think about the possibility.
Here's a website, VisibleBody.com, that I stumbled across.
And I thought, "You know, I wonder what my psoas muscle is?"
What did Google come out with this year?
Now there's Google Body browser.
This is Kelly Young, a rheumatoid arthritis patient from Florida.
RA patients, as they call themselves -- her blog is "RA Warrior" -- have a big problem, because 40 percent of them have no visible symptoms.
And the radiologist's report said, "No cancer found."
And she's now actively engaged on her blog in looking for assistance in getting better care.
We are, you are, the most underused resource in health care.
What she was able to do was because she had access to the raw data.
Well at TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee himself, inventor of the Web, gave a talk where he said the next big thing is not to have your browser find other people's articles about the data, but the raw data.
And he got them chanting by the end of the talk, "Raw data now! Raw data now!"
And I ask you, three words, please, to improve health care: Let patients help!
Thank you.
(Applause) For all the patients around the world watching this on the Webcast, God bless you, everyone. Let patients help.
And it was originally a freight line that ran down 10th Ave.
So we exchanged business cards, and we kept calling each other and decided to start this organization, Friends of the High Line.
At the time, there was a lot of opposition.
So far it's cost about 150 million.
We did a design competition, selected a design team.
And the first section ends at 20th St. right now.
And the Whitney is moving downtown and is building their new museum right at the base of the High Line.
And this has been designed by Renzo Piano.
The High Line used to be covered in billboards, and so we've taken a playful take where, instead of framing advertisements, it's going to frame people in views of the city.
But what really, I think, makes the High Line special is the people.
But you see that happening on the High Line, and I think that's the power that public space can have to transform how people experience their city and interact with each other.
(Applause)
A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30 days.
Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days.
It turns out 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit -- like watching the news -- from your life.
This was part of a challenge I did to take a picture every day for a month.
And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day.
(Laughter) Even last year, I ended up hiking up Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa.
I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days.
No. I wrote it in a month.
It's awful.
No, no, if I want to, I can say, "I'm a novelist."
(Laughter) So here's one last thing I'd like to mention.
When I gave up sugar for 30 days, day 31 looked like this.
(Laughter) So here's my question to you: What are you waiting for?
(Applause)
I've been interested in food for a long time.
I taught myself to cook with a bunch of big books like this.
I went to chef school in France.
In the last 20 years, people have realized that science has a tremendous amount to do with food.
In fact, understanding why cooking works requires knowing the science of cooking -- some of the chemistry, some of the physics and so forth.
There's also a tremendous number of techniques that chefs have developed, some about new aesthetics, new approaches to food.
There's a chef in Spain named Ferran Adria.
None of the techniques that these people have developed over the course of the last 20 years is in any of those books.
In order to learn them, you have to go work in those restaurants.
Is there a way we can show people food in a way they have not seen it before?
The idea here is to explain what happens when you steam broccoli.
This shaped wok doesn't work very well; this caught fire three times.
The New York Times ran a piece after my book was delayed and it was called "The Wait for the 30-Hour Hamburger Just Got Longer."
Because our hamburger recipe, our ultimate hamburger recipe, if you make the buns and you marinate the meat and you do all this stuff, it does take about 30 hours.
And it turns out, the best way to cut things in half is to actually cut them in half.
So we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world.
(Laughter) We cut a $5,000 restaurant oven in half.
We would glue a piece of Pyrex or heat-resistant glass in front.
The great thing is, when you cut something in half, you have another half.
So it's very much like in a Hollywood movie where a guy flies through the air, supported by wires, and then they take the wires away digitally so you're flying through the air.
What happens when you have your wok cut in half is the oil goes down into the fire and whoosh!
One of our cooks lost his eyebrows that way.
This is Fourier's law of heat conduction.
It's a partial differential equation.
We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it.
But you probably don't know that much about James Watt.
We also did a lot of calculation.
I personally wrote thousands of lines of code to write this cookbook.
Here's a calculation that shows how the intensity of a barbecue, or other radiant heat source, goes as you move away from it.
So as you move vertically away from this surface, the heat falls off.
That horn-shaped region is what we call the sweet spot.
So that's the place where you really want to cook.
You know, there's two ways you can make a product.
And it's really simple, as you can see here.
The lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it.
Now watch closely. This is popcorn. I'll explain it here.
The popcorn is illustrating a key thing in physics.
We have a very high-speed camera, which we had lots of fun with on the book.
The key physics principle here is when water boils to steam it expands by a factor of 1,600.
We have a chapter on gels.
2,438 pages.
(Applause)
Evolution works that way.
And there is as many different kinds of pollen as there are flowering plants.
And that's actually rather useful for forensics and so on.
Most pollen that causes hay fever for us is from plants that use the wind to disseminate the pollen, and that's a very inefficient process, which is why it gets up our noses so much.
So we're aware, obviously, of the relationship between insects and plants.
The plant gets something, and the hawk-moth spreads the pollen somewhere else.
Plants have evolved to create little landing strips here and there for bees that might have lost their way.
There are markings on many plants that look like other insects.
Orchids: there are 20,000, at least, species of orchids -- amazingly, amazingly diverse.
And basically what the insect has to do -- we're in the middle of the flower -- it has to stick its little proboscis right into the middle of that and all the way down that nectar tube to get to the nectar.
Now this is a plant.
This flower with its black dots: they might look like black dots to us, but if I tell you, to a male insect of the right species, that looks like two females who are really, really hot to trot.
The other thing it does is that this plant mimics another orchid that has a wonderful store of food for insects.
(Laughter) Here we see ylang ylang, the component of many perfumes.
And the flowers don't really have to be that gaudy.
So flies love this.
I don't know what a dead horse actually smells like, but this one probably smells pretty much like it.
It's really horrible.
For anyone here from Brazil, you'll know about this plant.
So instead of having starch, which is the food of plants, it takes something rather similar to brown fat and burns it at such a rate that it's burning fat, metabolizing, about the rate of a small cat.
And that's twice the energy output, weight for weight, than a hummingbird -- absolutely astonishing.
Now most pollinators that we think about are insects, but actually in the tropics, many birds and butterflies pollinate.
And many of the tropical flowers are red, and that's because butterflies and birds see similarly to us, we think, and can see the color red very well.
Insects see green, blue and ultraviolet, and they see various shades of ultraviolet.
So what is an insect seeing?
And this is what it looks like with visible light.
Most bees don't perceive red.
Now we don't know exactly what a bee sees, any more than you know what I'm seeing when I call this red.
Here's another little flower -- different range of ultraviolet frequencies, different filters to match the pollinators.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
This is a police photo. That's actually my car.
We're less than a mile from one of the largest hospitals in Los Angeles, called Cedars-Sinai.
And the police are waiting for the fire department to arrive to cut apart the vehicle to extract the body of the driver.
Now you also continue to watch as consciousness evolved to the point that here in India, in Madhya Pradesh, there's one of the two oldest known pieces of rock art found.
There's the Egyptian god Horus, which symbolizes prosperity, wisdom and health.
So watching all of this show from outer space, you think we get it, we understand that the most precious resource on the blue planet is our consciousness.
What you find in the United States is an injury every 20 seconds -- that's one and a half million every year -- stroke every 40 seconds, Alzheimer's disease, every 70 seconds somebody succumbs to that.
We find that the number two source of disability is depression in the age group of 15 to 44.
I discovered during my recovery the third leading cause of death amongst teenagers is suicide.
If I talk about migraine, 40 percent of the population suffer episodic headaches.
We're talking about a society that is retreating into depression and disassociation when we are potentially confronting the next great catastrophic climate shift.
So what you'd be wondering, watching the Human Show, is are we going to confront and address the catastrophic climate shift that may be heading our way by growing our consciousness, or are we going to continue to retreat?
It's not my EEG at Cedars; it's your EEG tonight and last night.
Neurological damage, 10 years of rehab, requires a long-term perspective.
Here's my brain.
That is the consequence of more than a third of the right side of my brain being destroyed by the stroke.
And during that process -- it took many years -- one of the doctors said that my recovery, my degree of advance, since the amount of head injury I'd suffered, was miraculous.
And that was when I started to write a book, because I didn't think it was miraculous.
Indeed, the mind can redefine itself, and this is demonstrated by two specialists called Hagen and Silva back in the 1970's.
The global perspective is that up to 30 percent of children in school have learning weaknesses that are not self-correcting, but with appropriate treatment, they can be screened for and detected and corrected and avoid their academic failure.
I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to talk about the various subtests.
And you can see here there are three columns.
Then I underwent cognitive training.
Now the Journal of the National Medical Association gave my memoir a full clinical review, which is very unusual.
I'm not a doctor. I have no medical background whatsoever.
But they felt the evidences that there was important, valuable information in the book, and they commented about it when they gave the full peer review to it.
That was a fair question because my memoir was simply how I found solutions that worked for me.
Here's somebody, what they did as they went through cognitive training at ages seven and 11.
And this person is particularly interesting.
But that person could be identified as having a learning disability.
The craniomandibular system is critical to that.
Up to 30 percent of the population have a disorder, disease or dysfunction in the jaw that affects the entire body.
I still had migraine headaches.
The next issue that resolved was that, if 90 percent of head and neck pain is caused by imbalance, the other 10 percent, largely -- if you set aside aneurysms, brain cancer and hormonal issues -- is the circulation.
There's a big pipe with the blood flowing through it, and around that pipe are the nerves drawing their nutrient supply from the blood.
If that some place else where it bulges is inside the biggest nerve in your body, your brain, you get a vascular migraine.
This is an MRI MRA MRV, a volumetric MRI.
A vascular surgeon removed most of the first rib on both sides of my body.
All consciousness is about communication.
And here, by great fortune, one of my father's clients had a husband who worked at the Alfred Mann Foundation for Scientific Research.
Alfred Mann is a brilliant physicist and innovator who's fascinated with bridging gaps in consciousness, whether to restore hearing to the deaf, vision to the blind or movement to the paralyzed.
I've brought with me, from Southern California, the FM device.
An FM device in the cortex of the brain, the motor cortex, will send signals in real time to the motor points in the relevant muscles so that the person will be able to move their arm, let's say, in real time, if they've lost control of their arm.
And other FM devices implanted in fingertips, on contacting a surface, will send a message back to the sensory cortex of the brain, so that the person feels a sense of touch.
A radio device is controlling every step I take, and a sensor picks up my foot for me every time I walk.
And when I came out of my coma, I recognized my family, but I didn't remember my own past.
And during my time in coma, she had been laid to rest in her hometown of Phoenix.
Thank you very much.
And then I was amazed at what role technology played in your recovery.
And that's my friend. I mean, I charge it every night.
Underneath my heel, there is a sensor that detects when my foot leaves the ground -- what's called the heel lift.
And it accelerates the amount and level of the stimulation.
But there's millions of deaf people in the world, and the Cochlear implant has given hearing to thousands of deaf people now.
(Applause)
As an elementary school teacher, my mom did everything she could to ensure I had good reading skills.
My reading ability improved, but these forced reading lessons didn't exactly inspire a love of reading.
(Laughter) We read two novels and wrote two book reports that semester.
(Laughter) My high school was over 70 percent black and Latino, but this advanced English class had white students everywhere.
This personal encounter with institutionalized racism altered my relationship with reading forever.
Instead of fixating on skills and moving students from one reading level to another, or forcing struggling readers to memorize lists of unfamiliar words, we should be asking ourselves this question: How can we inspire children to identify as readers?
He looks at me and responds, "I'm not a mathematician, I'm a math genius!"
According to the US Department of Education, more than 85 percent of black male fourth graders are not proficient in reading.
85 percent!
Before going on stage, I assess an audience.
Are they white, are they Latino?
(Laughter) As a society, we're creating reading experiences for children that are the equivalent of telling bar jokes in a church.
And then we wonder why so many children don't read.
Educator and philosopher Paulo Freire believed that teaching and learning should be two-way.
Students shouldn't be viewed as empty buckets to be filled with facts but as cocreators of knowledge.
Many of the children's books promoted to black boys focus on serious topics, like slavery, civil rights and biographies.
Less than two percent of teachers in the United States are black males.
And a majority of black boys are raised by single mothers.
What cultural factors, what social cues are present that would lead a young black boy to conclude that reading is even something he should do?
Lots of black boys go to the barber shop once or twice a month.
Barbershop Books connects reading to a male-centered space and involves black men and boys' early reading experiences.
This identity-based reading program uses a curated list of children's books recommended by black boys.
These are the books that they actually want to read.
Scholastic's 2016 Kids and Family Report found that the number one thing children look for when choosing a book is a book that will make them laugh.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good morning everybody.
And we feed them -- sterilely of course -- with what we call cell culture media -- which is like their food -- and we grow them in incubators.
Let's take the example of the heart, the topic of a lot of my research.
These electrodes act like mini pacemakers to get the cells to contract in the lab.
Let's take the example of electrical stimulation.
It's about the size of a mini marshmallow.
But that brings me to lesson number two: cells do all the work.
But it's also worth noting that cells also mediate our experience of life.
Behind every sound, sight, touch, taste and smell is a corresponding set of cells that receive this information and interpret it for us.
May none of your non-cancer cells become endangered species.
Thank you.
(Applause)
After cutting her arm with a broken glass, she fell into a fitful, exhausted sleep on the railway station platform.
When she saw her reflection in the mirror, she started to cry.
She tightened her jacket -- well, fastened her jacket tightly to cover the blood.
I'm Pam. What can I call you?
Pam: I'm glad you called.
I was running away from home, sleeping rough on the streets in London.
I was being sexually abused by my father and his friends.
I was self-harming every day. I was suicidal.
The first time I called Samaritans, I was 12 and absolutely desperate.
It's a 24/7 confidential helpline in the UK for anyone who might be feeling desperate or suicidal.
During my teenage years, when I was most desperate, Samaritans became my lifeline.
I had become a survivor of abuse rather than a victim.
And at 21, I contacted Samaritans again.
This time because I wanted to become a volunteer.
Wanted to pay something back to the organization that had really saved my life.
I guess it's a simple concept that can be applied across all areas of life.
So in the 1980s, when I called Samaritans, child abuse was a subject no one wanted to talk about.
And it was a topic of shame, and no one really wanted to talk about it.
It can lead to higher blood pressure, higher levels of depression, and actually aligned to mortality rates that might be more associated with alcohol abuse or smoking cigarettes.
Loneliness is actually more harmful that smoking 15 cigarettes.
It's also associated with higher levels of dementia.
So a recent study also found that lonely people are twice at risk of Alzheimer's disease.
Of course, there's many people that live alone who are not lonely.
But being a caregiver for a partner that maybe has dementia can be a very lonely place.
And a recent landmark study gave us a very good, clear definition of what loneliness is.
And it happens when there's a mismatch between the quality and the quantity of relationships that we have and those that we want.
But for me, a volunteer giving up their time and listening to me without judgment in a confidential way, had such a huge, life-changing effect for me.
So I started paying back by my 25 years volunteering with Samaritans.
And then, in 2013, picking up on that whole issue and the new stigma of loneliness, I launched a new national helpline in the UK for older people, called The Silver Line, which is there to support lonely and isolated older people.
Some might be calling up because they're reporting abuse.
And some quite simply, as I was, may have simply just given up on life.
I guess it's a really simple idea, setting up a helpline.
We also, for people that like the written word, offer Silver Letters, and we write pen-pal letters to older people who still enjoy receiving a letter.
My favorite group is the music group, where people, every week, play musical instruments down the phone to each other.
(Laughter) But they do have fun.
Woman: Hello, Alan. Good morning.
Alan: Hello.
Alan: Oh, how are you this morning?
So Silver Line, I guess, are now helping older people in the same way that Samaritans has helped me.
How often do we really ever listen without giving advice?
It's actually quite hard.
And now it's come full circle, because actually, people that are calling Silver Line and needing a catcher are now becoming catchers themselves by putting something back and becoming volunteers and becoming part of our family.
And people generally ask me why.
And everyone needs a catcher at some point in their lives.
So that's Pam.
Because it can be and so often is the power to save a life.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So I begin with an advertisement inspired by George Orwell that Apple ran in 1984.
(Video) Big Brother: We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause.
Narrator: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.
Technology created by innovative companies will set us all free.
Fast-forward more than two decades: Apple launches the iPhone in China and censors the Dalai Lama out along with several other politically sensitive applications at the request of the Chinese government for its Chinese app store.
The American political cartoonist Mark Fiore also had his satire application censored in the United States because some of Apple's staff were concerned it would be offensive to some groups.
The German magazine Stern, a news magazine, had its app censored because the Apple nannies deemed it to be a little bit too racy for their users, and despite the fact that this magazine is perfectly legal for sale on newsstands throughout Germany.
And more controversially, recently, Apple censored a Palestinian protest app after the Israeli government voiced concerns that it might be used to organize violent attacks.
We have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies.
In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation-states.
But now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace.
And their decisions about software coding, engineering, design, terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives.
And these platforms were certainly very helpful to activists in Tunisia and Egypt this past spring and beyond.
As Wael Ghonim, the Google-Egyptian-executive by day, secret-Facebook-activist by night, famously said to CNN after Mubarak stepped down, "If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet."
But overthrowing a government is one thing and building a stable democracy is a bit more complicated.
On the left there's a photo taken by an Egyptian activist who was part of the storming of the Egyptian state security offices in March.
But some of the files were left behind intact, and activists, some of them, found their own surveillance dossiers full of transcripts of their email exchanges, their cellphone text message exchanges, even Skype conversations.
And one activist actually found a contract from a Western company for the sale of surveillance technology to the Egyptian security forces.
And Egyptian activists are assuming that these technologies for surveillance are still being used by the transitional authorities running the networks there.
And in Tunisia, censorship actually began to return in May -- not nearly as extensively as under President Ben Ali.
But you'll see here a blocked page of what happens when you try to reach certain Facebook pages and some other websites that the transitional authorities have determined might incite violence.
In protest over this, blogger Slim Amamou, who had been jailed under Ben Ali and then became part of the transitional government after the revolution, he resigned in protest from the cabinet.
But there's been a lot of debate in Tunisia about how to handle this kind of problem.
In fact, on Twitter, there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution who said, "Well actually, we do want democracy and free expression, but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds because it's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy.
But the problem is, how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions and how do you make sure that they do not abuse their power?
Welcome to democracy, our Tunisian and Egyptian friends.
In fact, in the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks.
Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, despite the fact that Wikileaks had not been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime.
This is a map of social networks worldwide, and certainly Facebook has conquered much of the world -- which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you like the way Facebook manages its service.
But borders do persist in some parts of cyberspace.
In Brazil and Japan, it's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons.
But if you look at China, Vietnam and a number of the former Soviet states, what's happening there is more troubling.
You have a situation where the relationship between government and local social networking companies is creating a situation where, effectively, the empowering potential of these platforms is being constrained because of these relationships between companies and government.
Now in China, you have the "great firewall," as it's well-known, that blocks Facebook and Twitter and now Google+ and many of the other overseas websites.
But that's only half of the story.
The other part of the story are requirements that the Chinese government places on all companies operating on the Chinese Internet, known as a system of self-discipline.
In plain English, that means censorship and surveillance of their users.
And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009 where the Internet Society of China presented awards to the top 20 Chinese companies that are best at exercising self-discipline -- i.e. policing their content.
And Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China's dominant search engine, was one of the recipients.
But this is a website called Rospil that's an anti-corruption site.
And earlier this year, there was a troubling incident where people who had made donations to Rospil through a payments processing system called Yandex Money suddenly received threatening phone calls from members of a nationalist party who had obtained details about donors to Rospil through members of the security services who had somehow obtained this information from people at Yandex Money.
This has a chilling effect on people's ability to use the Internet to hold government accountable.
So the important question, I think, is not this debate over whether the Internet is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys.
The most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the Internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner.
Because I think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and I would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us.
So the question is, we know how to hold government accountable.
You have situations, for instance, in France where president Sarkozy tells the CEO's of Internet companies, "We're the only legitimate representatives of the public interest."
But then he goes and champions laws like the infamous "three-strikes" law that would disconnect citizens from the Internet for file sharing, which has been condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression as being a disproportionate violation of citizens' right to communications, and has raised questions amongst civil society groups about whether some political representatives are more interested in preserving the interests of the entertainment industry than they are in defending the rights of their citizens.
And here in the United Kingdom there's also concern over a law called the Digital Economy Act that's placing more onus on private intermediaries to police citizen behavior.
So what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric Internet in the future, we need a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement.
It was the result of decades of sustained activism, shareholder advocacy and consumer advocacy.
But it's going to require innovation that's not only going to need to focus on politics, on geopolitics, but it's also going to need to deal with questions of business management, investor behavior, consumer choice and even software design and engineering.
Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So identity was primarily defined by ethnicity, and the nation-state reflected that.
If we look at Islamists, if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists, one thing they've been very good at, one thing that they've actually been exceeding in, is communicating across borders, using technologies to organize themselves, to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena.
I was, by the way -- I'm an Essex lad, born and raised in Essex in the U.K.
But having been born in Essex, at the age of 16, I joined an organization.
At the age of 17, I was recruiting people from Cambridge University to this organization.
At the age of 21, I was co-founding this organization in Pakistan.
At the age of 22, I was co-founding this organization in Denmark.
I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used.
But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation-state.
But even if you look across the mood music in Europe of late, far-right fascism is also on the rise.
A form of anti-Islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it's transnational.
Because the Internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world.
If you look at the rise of far-right fascism across Europe of late, you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics, yet the phenomenon is transnational.
In others, kosher and halal meat are being banned, as we speak.
If any of you remembers the Christmas Day bomb plot: there's a man called Anwar al-Awlaki.
As an American citizen, ethnically a Yemeni, in hiding currently in Yemen, who inspired a Nigerian, son of the head of Nigeria's national bank.
This Nigerian student studied in London, trained in Yemen, boarded a flight in Amsterdam to attack America.
Again with the example of the far right: that we find, ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization.
And a social movement is comprised, in my view, it's comprised of four main characteristics.
I'll talk you through one example, and that's the example that everyone here will be aware of, and that's the example of Al-Qaeda.
Incidentally, the difference between ideas and narratives: the idea is the cause that one believes in; and the narrative is the way to sell that cause -- the propaganda, if you like, of the cause.
So the ideas and the narratives of Al-Qaeda come to your mind immediately.
One of their leaders was killed in Pakistan recently.
And that's the power of social movements.
However, if I ask your minds to focus currently on Pakistan, and I ask you to think of the symbols and the leaders for democracy in Pakistan today, you'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies.
And I believe that's for four reasons.
Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power, or have societies that are leading globalized, powerful societies, powerful countries.
The second, I believe, is political correctness.
And the third, democratic choice in Muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice, meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party, but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party -- wanting to rule by military dictatorship.
And then you have a third party saying, "Vote for us; we'll establish a theocracy."
And then people say, "We've tried democracy. It doesn't really work.
And the fourth reason, I believe, is what I've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance.
So roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice, not merely as a political choice.
Is it just about a lack of education?
Statistically, they are educated, on average, above the education levels of Western society.
Anecdotally, we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor, well Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia.
And what I believe is missing is genuine grassroots activism on the ground, in addition to international aid, in addition to education, in addition to health.
And what's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture -- which is necessarily more than just elections.
But without freedom of speech, you can't have free and fair elections.
Without freedom of belief, you don't have the right to join organizations.
So what's needed is those organizations on the ground advocating for the democratic culture itself to create the demand on the ground for this culture.
Well, Egypt is a good starting point.
What happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal, and that was to remove the leader.
Because it's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator.
But generally, the trends that start in Egypt have historically spread across the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa region.
(Applause)
Has anyone ever been to Aspen, Colorado?
I went to Aspen recently and stumbled into this song.
"No."
And this man, Archie Cochrane, is a prisoner of war and a doctor, and he has a problem.
He said he heard suspicious laughter.
Now some of you will be wondering what marmite is.
It looks like crude oil.
Now you've got to imagine at the moment -- forget this photo, imagine this guy with this long ginger beard and this shock of red hair.
If we don't supply vitamins to the prisoners, it's a war crime."
And the next morning, supplies of vitamin B12 are delivered to the camp, and the prisoners begin to recover.
I see it in the politicians we vote for -- people who, in the face of an incredibly complicated world, are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works.
Well let me give you an example.
You know Hans: the Mick Jagger of TED.
And just a piece of context -- the societies in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services.
This baby was produced through trial and error.
What is evolution?
And it's not just biological systems that produce miracles through trial and error.
So let's say you wanted to make detergent.
How do you do it?
How do you design that nozzle?
Now Unilever did this and it didn't work -- too complicated.
Even this problem, too complicated.
But the geneticist Professor Steve Jones describes how Unilever actually did solve this problem -- trial and error, variation and selection.
And after 45 generations, you have this incredible nozzle.
Now this process of trial and error is actually far more common in successful institutions than we care to recognize.
I could give you all kinds of facts and figures about the U.S. economy, but I think the most salient one is this: ten percent of American businesses disappear every year.
Ten percent of Americans don't disappear every year.
Now I've been sort of banging on about this for the last couple of months, and people sometimes say to me, "Well Tim, it's kind of obvious.
Obviously trial and error is very important.
When schools stop doing that all the time, I will admit that, yes, it's obvious that trial and error is a good thing.
(Applause) Until then, until then I'm going to keep banging on about trial and error and why we should abandon the God complex.
Because it's so hard to admit our own fallibility.
And after the trial had been running for a little while, he gathered together all his colleagues around his table, and he said, "Well, gentlemen, we have some preliminary results.
But Cochrane would do that kind of thing.
And the reason he would do that kind of thing is because he understood it feels so much better to stand there and say, "Here in my own little world, I am a god, I understand everything.
It isn't easy.
So shortly after the war, this young man, Yutaka Taniyama, developed this amazing conjecture called the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture.
It turned out to be absolutely instrumental many decades later in proving Fermat's Last Theorem.
In fact, it turns out it's equivalent to proving Fermat's Last Theorem.
You prove one, you prove the other.
Taniyama tried and tried and tried and he could never prove that it was true.
And shortly before his 30th birthday in 1958, Yutaka Taniyama killed himself.
His friend, Goro Shimura -- who worked on the mathematics with him -- many decades later, reflected on Taniyama's life.
He said, "He was not a very careful person as a mathematician.
He made a lot of mistakes.
I tried to emulate him, but I realized it is very difficult to make good mistakes."
Thank you.
(Applause)
This picture shows a revolution started by women, and it shows women and men leading a mixed protest.
I just wanted to show that over 60 percent of the Yemeni population are 15 years and below.
Yemenis are using cartoons and art, paintings, comics, to tell the world and each other about what's going on.
The Yemen Times already has a strong reputation in Yemen as an independent English language newspaper.
I've guessed you've already noticed this by now.
It was very hard at first.
My father was assassinated.
And in times of revolution or change like today, it is very important for independent media to have a voice.
I'm not so old.
You spoke about the responsibility of the press.
NA: Well there is a saying that says, "You fear what you don't know, and you hate what you fear."
I am an example, and there are others like me.
YemenTimes.com.
(Applause)
I'm pretty sure that one day we'll be writing history books hundreds of years from now. This time our generation will be remembered as the generation that got online, the generation that built something really and truly global.
But yes, it's also true that the Internet has problems, very serious problems, problems with security and problems with privacy.
This here is Brain.
This is a floppy disk -- five and a quarter-inch floppy disk infected by Brain.A.
It's the first virus we ever found for PC computers.
That's the boot sector of an infected floppy, and if we take a closer look inside, we'll see that right there, it says, "Welcome to the dungeon."
And Basit and Amjad are first names, Pakistani first names.
(Laughter) Now, 1986.
Now it's 2011.
The PC virus problem is 25 years old now.
This is from the city of Lahore, which is around 300 kilometers south from Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was caught.
(Laughter) You want to guess who opened the door?
(Laughter) (Applause) So here standing up is Basit.
Sitting down is his brother Amjad.
And I got some sort of satisfaction from learning that both Basit and Amjad had had their computers infected dozens of times by completely unrelated other viruses over these years.
So there is some sort of justice in the world after all.
What I'm running here is a system that enables me to run age-old programs on a modern computer.
What we have here is a list of old viruses.
(Siren noise) And the last example, guess what the Walker virus does?
Today, viruses are a global problem.
Well today, it's the organized criminal gangs writing these viruses because they make money with their viruses.
So if you are a virus writer and you're capable of infecting Windows computers, but you don't know what to do with them, you can sell those infected computers -- somebody else's computers -- to these guys.
Well there's multiple different ways, such as banking trojans, which will steal money from your online banking accounts when you do online banking, or keyloggers.
Every single email you write is saved and sent to the criminals.
But the thing that they're actually looking for most are sessions where you go online and do online purchases in any online store.
And here's an example of a file we found from a server a couple of weeks ago.
Once you gain access to other people's credit card information, you can just go online and buy whatever you want with this information.
They are both right now on the run.
U.S. officials, just a couple of weeks ago, froze a Swiss bank account belonging to Mr. Jain, and that bank account had 14.9 million U.S. dollars on it.
We know that online criminals are hiring programmers, hiring testing people, testing their code, having back-end systems with SQL databases.
I mean, the Internet is international.
That's why we call it the Internet.
How do you actually track them down?
Let me give you an example.
And that code has been encrypted, so let's decrypt it.
It has been encrypted with XOR function 97.
And I know, it doesn't really look much different from the original.
And that's a backdoor which will take over your computer.
And on this blog, he blogs about his life, about his life in St. Petersburg -- he's in his early 20s -- about his cat, about his girlfriend.
And if you actually take a look at the scene picture, you can see that the plate of the Mercedes is O600KO78RUS.
(Laughter) So what happens when online criminals are caught?
The vast majority of the online crime cases, we don't even know which continent the attacks are coming from.
I wish it would be easier; unfortunately it isn't.
You've all heard about things like Stuxnet.
That's a Siemens S7-400 PLC, programmable logic [controller].
We have become very reliant on Internet, on basic things like electricity, obviously, on computers working.
And this really is something which creates completely new problems for us.
It's actually very basic stuff -- thinking about continuity, thinking about backups, thinking about the things that actually matter.
What we need is more global, international law enforcement work to find online criminal gangs -- these organized gangs that are making millions out of their attacks.
That's much more important than running anti-viruses or running firewalls.
What actually matters is actually finding the people behind these attacks, and even more importantly, we have to find the people who are about to become part of this online world of crime, but haven't yet done it.
We have to find the people with the skills, but without the opportunities and give them the opportunities to use their skills for good.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And the journey to that place of understanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me, and it's given me an insight into the whole notion of self, which I think is worth sharing with you today.
And that self becomes the vehicle for navigating our social world.
But the self is a projection based on other people's projections.
So this whole interaction with self and identity was a very difficult one for me growing up.
I grew up on the coast of England in the '70s.
My dad is white from Cornwall, and my mom is black from Zimbabwe.
And it is important.
And at 16, I stumbled across another opportunity, and I earned my first acting role in a film.
It was the first time that I existed inside a fully-functioning self -- one that I controlled, that I steered, that I gave life to.
Dr. Phyllis Lee gave me my interview, and she asked me, "How would you define race?"
Because there's actually more genetic difference between a black Kenyan and a black Ugandan than there is between a black Kenyan and, say, a white Norwegian.
In other words, race has no basis in biological or scientific fact.
We've created entire value systems and a physical reality to support the worth of self.
But it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death.
The self's struggle for authenticity and definition will never end unless it's connected to its creator -- to you and to me.
In those moments, I'm connected to everything -- the ground, the air, the sounds, the energy from the audience.
And I've played everything from a vengeful ghost in the time of slavery to Secretary of State in 2004.
And when I realized and really understood that my self is a projection and that it has a function, a funny thing happened.
But I'm not ashamed of my self.
And over time and with practice, I've tried to live more and more from my essence.
And if you can do that, incredible things happen.
Because, hey, if we're all living in ourselves and mistaking it for life, then we're devaluing and desensitizing life.
So here's a note to self: The cracks have started to show in our constructed world, and oceans will continue to surge through the cracks, and oil and blood, rivers of it.
(Applause)
This is a photograph by the artist Michael Najjar, and it's real, in the sense that he went there to Argentina to take the photo.
The photo was made when we were deep in the valley over there.
This is the Hang Seng index for Hong Kong.
And this is art. This is metaphor.
And I was thinking about this, of all places, on a transatlantic flight a couple of years ago, because I happened to be seated next to a Hungarian physicist about my age and we were talking about what life was like during the Cold War for physicists in Hungary.
And to understand that, you have to understand a little bit about how stealth works.
So we didn't use a radar; we built a black box that was looking for electrical signals, electronic communication.
And he said, "Well there's 2,000 physicists on Wall Street now, and I'm one of them."
And he said, "It's funny you ask that, because it's actually called black box trading.
And it's also sometimes called algo trading, algorithmic trading."
And algorithmic trading evolved in part because institutional traders have the same problems that the United States Air Force had, which is that they're moving these positions -- whether it's Proctor & Gamble or Accenture, whatever -- they're moving a million shares of something through the market.
And so they have to find a way -- and they use algorithms to do this -- to break up that big thing into a million little transactions.
And the magic and the horror of that is that the same math that you use to break up the big thing into a million little things can be used to find a million little things and sew them back together and figure out what's actually happening in the market.
All they had was just a monitor in front of them that had the numbers on it and just a red button that said, "Stop."
And that's the thing, is that we're writing things, we're writing these things that we can no longer read.
There's a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don't know what, and they reach into all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms.
A few hours later, it had gone up to 23.6 million dollars, plus shipping and handling.
And so Netflix has gone through several different algorithms over the years.
Pragmatic Chaos is, like all of Netflix algorithms, trying to do the same thing.
But the difficulty of the problem and the fact that we don't really quite have it down, it doesn't take away from the effects Pragmatic Chaos has.
And what you see here, or what you don't really see normally, is that these are the physics of culture.
These are two algorithms competing for your living room.
And the idea that architecture itself is somehow subject to algorithmic optimization is not far-fetched.
You feel it most when you're in a sealed metal box, a new-style elevator; they're called destination-control elevators.
And it uses what's called a bin-packing algorithm.
And this is what we're designing for.
We're designing for this machine dialect.
Because the algorithms of Wall Street are dependent on one quality above all else, which is speed.
And just to give you a sense of what microseconds are, it takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse.
But if you're a Wall Street algorithm and you're five microseconds behind, you're a loser.
So if you were an algorithm, you'd look for an architect like the one that I met in Frankfurt who was hollowing out a skyscraper -- throwing out all the furniture, all the infrastructure for human use, and just running steel on the floors to get ready for the stacks of servers to go in -- all so an algorithm could get close to the Internet.
And you think of the Internet as this kind of distributed system.
And the truth is I don't really understand a lot of what they're talking about.
It involves light cones and quantum entanglement, and I don't really understand any of that.
But I can read this map, and what this map says is that, if you're trying to make money on the markets where the red dots are, that's where people are, where the cities are, you're going to have to put the servers where the blue dots are to do that most effectively.
And the thing that you might have noticed about those blue dots is that a lot of them are in the middle of the ocean.
So that's what we'll do: we'll build bubbles or something, or platforms.
(Laughter) And it's not the money that's so interesting actually.
But now there's this third co-evolutionary force: algorithms -- the Boston Shuffler, the Carnival.
And we will have to understand those as nature, and in a way, they are.
(Applause)
It is a dream of mankind to fly like a bird.
Birds are very agile.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) (Applause ends) (Applause) So we can now look at the SmartBird.
Also, we see how we measure the aerodynamic efficiency.
We had knowledge about the electromechanical efficiency and then we can calculate the aerodynamic efficiency.
Thank you.
The question today is not: Why did we invade Afghanistan?
The question is: why are we still in Afghanistan one decade later?
Why are we spending $135 billion?
How has this happened?
Because this isn't the 1990s anymore.
If the Al-Qaeda base was to be established near Ghazni, we would hit them very hard, and it would be very, very difficult for the Taliban to protect them.
When I walked across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-2002, what I saw was scenes like this.
But he was also considerably more conservative, considerably more anti-foreign, considerably more Islamist than we'd like to acknowledge.
This man, for example, Mullah Mustafa, tried to shoot me.
But 18 months later, I asked him why he had tried to shoot me.
Now this is not to say Afghanistan is a place full of people like Mullah Mustafa.
I ran a center at Harvard from 2008 to 2010, and there were people like Michael Semple there who speak Afghan languages fluently, who've traveled to almost every district in the country.
Andrew Wilder, for example, born on the Pakistan-Iranian border, served his whole life in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Paul Fishstein who began working there in 1978 -- worked for Save the Children, ran the Afghan research and evaluation unit.
The first thing we need to change is the structures of our government.
Very, very sadly, our foreign services, the United Nations, the military in these countries have very little idea of what's going on.
In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008, an embassy of 350 people, there were only three people who could speak Dari, the main language of Afghanistan, at a decent level.
It isn't.
The national army has shrunk.
The crime rates in Bosnia today are lower than they are in Sweden.
If what we're interested in is regional stability, Egypt is far more important.
Why mountain rescue?
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Rory, you mentioned Libya at the end.
They have been expanding, urbanization has been expanding, at an exponential rate in the last 200 years so that by the second part of this century, the planet will be completely dominated by cities.
It's now more than 82 percent.
China's building 300 new cities in the next 20 years.
However, cities, despite having this negative aspect to them, are also the solution.
And so there's an urgent need for a scientific theory of cities.
So my provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious scientific theory of cities.
And scientific theory means quantifiable -- relying on underlying generic principles that can be made into a predictive framework.
Are there universal laws?
Is London a great big whale?
Is Edinburgh a horse?
Is Microsoft a great big anthill?
We use them metaphorically -- the DNA of a company, the metabolism of a city, and so on -- is that just bullshit, metaphorical bullshit, or is there serious substance to it?
And if that is the case, how come that it's very hard to kill a city?
And if you have a serious theory, you should be able to predict when Google is going to go bust.
That's called growth.
Very, very bad for economies and companies and cities in our present paradigm.
So let's first talk about biology.
And the reason for this is because of networks.
All of life is controlled by networks -- from the intracellular through the multicellular through the ecosystem level.
But they are networks, and the most important network of cities is you.
And here's scaling of cities.
And what you see is a scaling phenomenon.
Just to show you what we plotted, here is income, GDP -- GDP of the city -- crime and patents all on one graph.
If you double the size of a city from 100,000 to 200,000, from a million to two million, 10 to 20 million, it doesn't matter, then systematically you get a 15 percent increase in wages, wealth, number of AIDS cases, number of police, anything you can think of.
Well I don't have time to tell you about all the mathematics, but underlying this is the social networks, because this is a universal phenomenon.
This 15 percent rule is true no matter where you are on the planet -- Japan, Chile, Portugal, Scotland, doesn't matter.
Always, all the data shows it's the same, despite the fact that these cities have evolved independently.
Something universal is going on.
The universality, to repeat, is us -- that we are the city.
On the right is the speed of walking in a bunch of European cities, showing that increase.
But it has a terrible catch, and the catch is that this system is destined to collapse.
And it's destined to collapse for many reasons -- kind of Malthusian reasons -- that you run out of resources.
So there's this continuous cycle of innovation that is necessary in order to sustain growth and avoid collapse.
And the question is: Can we, as socio-economic beings, avoid a heart attack?
So if you tell me the size of some company, some small company, I could have predicted the size of Walmart.
And then this is repeated across the entire spectrum of companies.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Audience: Yes.
(Laughter) OK, this was having a lot of issues for me, I was having a lot of issues at my job and I'd come home every day from work and my wife would ask me the same question.
See, we were spending about 40 percent of my income on childcare.
(Laughter) I was like, "Why would you say something like that?"
(Laughter) Fast-forward six months, I'd been a stay-at-home dad for about a week.
(Laughter) I was standing in my bathroom, looking into the mirror (Laughter) crying, tears -- (Laughter) running all down my face.
Child: I don't know.
If you take kids to park every day then that means they get dirty every day.
(Laughter) And a higher probability of getting peed on, and no one likes getting peed on, even if it's from a baby.
And they did this study and it said, that at two hours a day, prisoners get more outside time than children.
I though I knew that the best way to teach kids right from wrong was to discipline them, because that would make sure they understood right from wrong, the pain, the fear -- that would teach them.
But the truth is, the best way to teach my children right from wrong is to teach them.
A lot of these images you're seeing are coming from my YouTube channel, "Beleaf in Fatherhood."
See, I was an artist, so I'd write songs for other artists.
And it can't be that hard to have dinner ready when I get home, right?"
(Laughter) He was trying to confide in me -- (Laughter) I said, "You have no idea what you're talking about."
Because finally, I was standing in their shoes.
No one can deny that family is one of the biggest foundations in anyone's life.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This is Hermann Goering.
And what he really wanted was something by Vermeer.
So he finally found an art dealer, a Dutch art dealer named Han van Meegeren, who sold him a wonderful Vermeer for the cost of what would now be 10 million dollars.
And he said, "I'll prove it.
Bring me a canvas and some paint, and I will paint a Vermeer much better than I sold that disgusting Nazi.
And then the charges of treason were dropped.
There's a lot more to be said about van Meegeren, but I want to turn now to Goering, who's pictured here being interrogated at Nuremberg.
But you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had when he was told that his favorite painting was actually a forgery.
(Laughter) And he killed himself soon afterwards.
In particular, "The Supper at Emmaus" which was viewed as Vermeer's finest masterpiece, his best work -- people would come [from] all over the world to see it -- was actually a forgery.
Many sociologists like Veblen and Wolfe would argue that the reason why we take origins so seriously is because we're snobs, because we're focused on status.
But what's more interesting is how it tastes to you will depend critically on what you think you're eating.
Everybody, of course, drinks exactly the same wine.
But if you believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree.
It's not just that you say it's more pleasurable, you say you like it more, you really experience it in a different way.
(Laughter) A particularly dramatic example of this comes from a neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome.
As a third example, consider consumer products.
You can put shoes on your feet; you can play golf with golf clubs; and chewed up bubble gum doesn't do anything at all for you.
The bubble gum was chewed up by pop star Britney Spears and sold for several hundreds of dollars.
(Laughter) The shoes are perhaps the most valuable of all.
(Applause) Now this attraction to objects doesn't just work for celebrity objects.
Then we asked other groups of subjects -- we gave them different restrictions and different conditions.
(Laughter) So let's go back to art.
In the case of artwork, the history is special indeed.
The philosopher Denis Dutton in his wonderful book "The Art Instinct" makes the case that, "The value of an artwork is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation."
I think this approach can explain differences in people's taste in art.
I've been focusing now on the visual arts, but I want to give two examples from music.
This is Joshua Bell, a very famous violinist.
And the Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment.
He actually made 20 dollars more than that, but he didn't count it.
(Laughter) (Applause) The second example from music is from John Cage's modernist composition, "4'33"."
(Laughter) For a dollar 99, you can listen to that silence, which is different than other forms of silence.
And they gave them a series of painful electric shocks.
It hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose.
(Applause)
Others worry about peace and security, stability in the world.
We saw the food riots in 2008, after what I call the silent tsunami of hunger swept the globe when food prices doubled overnight.
You may be surprised to know that a child could be saved every 22 seconds if there was breastfeeding in the first six months of life.
But in Niger, for example, less than seven percent of the children are breastfed for the first six months of life, exclusively.
In Mauritania, less than three percent.
And this is made with chickpeas, dried milk and a host of vitamins, matched to exactly what the brain needs.
Technology is transforming the face of food vulnerability in places where you see classic famine.
We now deliver food in over 30 countries over cell phones, transforming even the presence of refugees in countries, and other ways.
What if from the women in Africa who cannot sell any food -- there's no roads, there's no warehouses, there's not even a tarp to pick the food up with -- what if we give the enabling environment for them to provide the food to feed the hungry children elsewhere?
The fact is studies show that the cost of malnutrition and hunger -- the cost to society, the burden it has to bear -- is on average six percent, and in some countries up to 11 percent, of GDP a year.
And if you look at the 36 countries with the highest burden of malnutrition, that's 260 billion lost from a productive economy every year.
Well, the World Bank estimates it would take about 10 billion dollars -- 10.3 -- to address malnutrition in those countries.
Not only that, transforming hunger is an opportunity, but I think we have to change our mindsets.
And I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say, "No more.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm a writer-director who tells social-change stories, because I believe stories touch and move us.
Stories change us.
When I write and direct plays, I'm amplifying voices of disadvantaged groups, I'm fighting the self-censorship that has kept many Ugandan artists away from social, political theater since the persecution of artists by former Ugandan president, Idi Amin.
Conversations are important because they inform and challenge our minds to think, and change starts with thinking.
I believe no one is ignorant.
I know that listening to one another will not magically solve all problems.
With my first play, "Silent Voices," based on interviews with victims of the Northern Uganda war between the government and Joseph Kony's LRA rebel group, I brought together victims, political leaders, religious leaders, cultural leaders, the Amnesty Commission and transitional justice leadership for critical conversations on issues of justice for war crime victims -- the first of its kind in the history of Uganda.
He explained that his was a laughter of embarrassment and a recognition of his own embarrassment.
He saw himself in the actors onstage and saw the meaninglessness of his past actions.
Listen to one another's truths.
When I lived in the USA, many of my American friends would be shocked at my ignorance at fancy Western dishes like lasagna, for instance.
(Laughter) And my question to them would be, "Well, do you know malakwang?"
And they would tell me about lasagna.
It makes for a better meal.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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 grandmother was on a train to Auschwitz, the death camp.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I stumbled across something called "cancer stem cells."
And this is really what I want to talk to you about today -- about cancer.
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.
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.
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.
We're removing the cancer cells, but we're revealing the previous damage that the body has tried to fix.
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.
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.
So these articles were saying, you know, "Skeletal -- metastasis to skeletal muscle -- is very rare."
Meaning that you have muscle cells, but they're not dividing, so it doesn't seem like a good target for cancer to hijack.
And furthermore, that nervous tissue -- brain -- gets cancer, and brain cells are also terminally differentiated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
Muscle is constantly being used -- constantly being damaged.
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?
These cells are so versatile, these cancer cells are so versatile -- we just have to manipulate them in the right way.
(Applause)
(Laughter) Let's define listening as making meaning from sound.
And sound places us in time as well, because sound always has time embedded in it.
Conscious listening always creates understanding, and only without conscious listening can these things happen.
So I'd like to share with you five simple exercises, tools you can take away with you, to improve your own conscious listening.
It's about enjoying mundane sounds.
(Dryer) It's a waltz -- one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three.
(Coffee grinder) Wow!
So, mundane sounds can be really interesting -- if you pay attention.
This is listening positions -- the idea that you can move your listening position to what's appropriate to what you're listening to.
You can use this in listening, in communication.
Now sound is my passion, it's my life.
That's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill.
And if we can teach listening in our schools, we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous, scary world that I talked about, and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time, or at least capable of doing it.
(Applause)
By the end of this year, there'll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites.
The one thing that all of them have in common is that they're going to die.
What first got me thinking about this was a blog post authored earlier this year by Derek K. Miller, who was a science and technology journalist who died of cancer.
Right now there are 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute.
There are 200 million Tweets being posted every day.
And the average Facebook user is creating 90 pieces of content each month.
But today we're all creating this incredibly rich digital archive that's going to live in the cloud indefinitely, years after we're gone.
Now we're already seeing some services that are designed to let us decide what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts after we die.
So what that service does, quite simply, is let you create a message or a video that can be posted to Facebook after you die.
Another service right now is called 1,000 Memories.
And what this lets you do is create an online tribute to your loved ones, complete with photos and videos and stories that they can post after you die.
Now a lot of you are probably familiar with Deb Roy who, back in March, demonstrated how he was able to analyze more than 90,000 hours of home video.
You can imagine what something like this might look like five, 10 or 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve.
Taking it a step further, MIT's media lab is working on robots that can interact more like humans.
Finally, think back to this famous scene from election night 2008 back in the United States, where CNN beamed a live hologram of hip hop artist will.i.am into their studio for an interview with Anderson Cooper.
What if we were able to use that same type of technology to beam a representation of our loved ones into our living rooms -- interacting in a very lifelike way based on all the content they created while they were alive?
I think that's going to become completely possible as the amount of data we're producing and technology's ability to understand it both expand exponentially.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And we also have more than five billion of these devices here.
And with these mobile phones, we transmit more than 600 terabytes of data every month.
And one of the issues is capacity.
And radio waves are limited.
And it's this limitation that doesn't cope with the demand of wireless data transmissions and the number of bytes and data which are transmitted every month.
These 1.4 million cellular radio masts, or base stations, consume a lot of energy.
These radio waves penetrate through walls.
But on the other hand, we have 14 billion of these: light bulbs, light.
And light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
X-rays, useful when you go to hospitals.
Infrared -- due to eye safety regulations, can be only used with low power.
And in the middle there, we have this visible light spectrum.
It's light, and light has been around for many millions of years.
I compared the radio waves spectrum -- the size of it -- with the size of the visible light spectrum.
And multiply that by 10,000, then you end up at 14 billion.
14 billion is the number of light bulbs installed already.
So we have the infrastructure there.
Look at the ceiling, you see all these light bulbs.
An LED is a semiconductor. It's an electronic device.
And the technology we have developed -- it's called SIM OFDM.
There's a receiver.
(Applause) Once again.
And you see, even light from the ceiling comes down here to the receiver.
And the answer is yes.
And there's only data where there is light.
Cars have LED-based headlights, LED-based back lights, and cars can communicate with each other and prevent accidents in the way that they exchange information.
We call it, in fact, a Li-Fi, light-fidelity.
And it's this symbiosis that I personally believe could solve the four essential problems that face us in wireless communication these days.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Instead, when you speak, you're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television.
And just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood, you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else's brain to suit your interests.
And so they just do the same thing over and over and over again.
It's not even clear that our very close genetic relatives, the Neanderthals, had social learning.
Sure enough, their tools were more complicated than those of Homo erectus, but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species, the Neanderthals, lived in Eurasia.
And as a result, our ideas do accumulate, and our technology progresses.
I mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago.
But in fact, it turns out that some time around 200,000 years ago, when our species first arose and acquired social learning, that this was really the beginning of our story, not the end of our story.
And the reason that dilemma arose is, it turns out, that social learning is visual theft.
Social learning really is visual theft.
Had we chosen this option, sometime around 200,000 years ago, we would probably still be living like the Neanderthals were when we first entered Europe 40,000 years ago.
And small groups are more prone to accidents and bad luck.
Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation -- for reaching agreements, for striking deals and for coordinating our activities.
Now whereas other species are confined to places that their genes adapt them to, with social learning and language, we could transform the environment to suit our needs.
Language really is the voice of our genes.
Now having evolved language, though, we did something peculiar, even bizarre.
Currently, there are about seven or 8,000 different languages spoken on Earth.
If we go to the island of Papua New Guinea, we can find about 800 to 1,000 distinct human languages, different human languages, spoken on that island alone.
There are places on that island where you can encounter a new language every two or three miles.
And we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures, we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups.
In fact, it's a map of Facebook friendship links.
And that communication, that connectivity around the world, that globalization now raises a burden.
The European Union is now spending over one billion euros annually translating among their 23 official languages.
That's something on the order of 1.45 billion U.S. dollars on translation costs alone.
The European Union employs a permanent staff of about 2,500 translators.
And in 2007 alone -- and I'm sure there are more recent figures -- something on the order of 1.3 million pages were translated into English alone.
And so if language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft, if language really is the conduit of our cooperation, the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas, in our modern world, we confront a question.
And so our modern world now is confronting us with a dilemma.
Thank you.
Svante found that the FOXP2 gene, which seems to be associated with language, was also shared in the same form in Neanderthals as us.
So many of you will be familiar with the idea that there's this gene called FOXP2 that seems to be implicated in some ways in the fine motor control that's associated with language.
The reason why I don't believe that tells us that the Neanderthals had language is -- here's a simple analogy: Ferraris are cars that have engines.
My car has an engine, but it's not a Ferrari.
(Applause)
Humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors, where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye: microorganisms.
Buildings are complex ecosystems that are an important source of microbes that are good for us, and some that are bad for us.
What determines the types and distributions of microbes indoors?
Buildings are colonized by airborne microbes that enter through windows and through mechanical ventilation systems.
The fate of microbes indoors depends on complex interactions with humans, and with the human-built environment.
And today, architects and biologists are working together to explore smart building design that will create healthy buildings for us.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time in buildings that are extremely controlled environments, like this building here -- environments that have mechanical ventilation systems that include filtering, heating and air conditioning.
Given the amount of time that we spend indoors, it's important to understand how this affects our health.
At the Biology and the Built Environment Center, we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the DNA out of microbes in the air.
And we also sampled the outdoor air.
But being less diverse is not necessarily good for our health.
If you look at the y-axis of this graph, you'll see that, in the mechanically ventilated air, you have a higher probability of encountering a potential pathogen, or germ, than if you're outdoors.
And when you're outdoors, that type of air has microbes that are commonly associated with plant leaves and with dirt.
It matters because the health care industry is the second most energy intensive industry in the United States.
Hospitals use two and a half times the amount of energy as office buildings.
And this model may not necessarily be the best for our health.
So just as we manage national parks, where we promote the growth of some species and we inhibit the growth of others, we're working towards thinking about buildings using an ecosystem framework where we can promote the kinds of microbes that we want to have indoors.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I worried that [if] I took my hat off I wouldn't be here anymore.
I actually had a therapist who once said to me, "Eve, you've been coming here for two years, and, to be honest, it never occurred to me that you had a body."
All this time I lived in the city because, to be honest, I was afraid of trees.
As I had no reference point for my body, I began to ask other women about their bodies -- in particular, their vaginas, because I thought vaginas were kind of important.
This led to me writing "The Vagina Monologues," which led to me obsessively and incessantly talking about vaginas everywhere I could.
One night on stage, I actually entered my vagina.
I began to see my body like a thing, a thing that could move fast, like a thing that could accomplish other things, many things, all at once.
I began to see my body like an iPad or a car.
I was greedy.
If I was tired, I drank more espressos.
If I was afraid, I went to more dangerous places.
My father was really kind to me on my 16th birthday, for example.
Actually, these stories compelled me around the world, and I've been to over 60 countries.
I heard about women being molested in their beds, flogged in their burqas, left for dead in parking lots, acid burned in their kitchens.
In the middle of my traveling, I turned 40 and I began to hate my body, which was actually progress, because at least my body existed enough to hate it.
But the more I talked about it, the more objectified and fragmented my body became.
Then I went somewhere else.
I went to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I heard an 80-year-old woman whose legs were broken and pulled out of her sockets and twisted up on her head as the soldiers raped her like that.
There are thousands of these stories, and many of the women had holes in their bodies -- holes, fistula -- that were the violation of war -- holes in the fabric of their souls.
All the stories began to bleed together.
The raping of the Earth, the pillaging of minerals, the destruction of vaginas -- none of these were separate anymore from each other or me.
My body had not only become a driven machine, but it was responsible now for destroying other women's bodies in its mad quest to make more machines to support the speed and efficiency of my machine.
Then I got cancer -- or I found out I had cancer.
I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was the crisis in the world, and it wasn't happening later, it was happening now.
Suddenly, my cancer was a cancer that was everywhere, the cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer that gets inside people who live down the streets from chemical plants -- and they're usually poor -- the cancer inside the coal miner's lungs, the cancer of stress for not achieving enough, the cancer of buried trauma, the cancer in caged chickens and polluted fish, the cancer in women's uteruses from being raped, the cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness.
Before cancer, the world was something other.
Now I am swimming in it.
Now I lay down in the grass and I rub my body in it, and I love the mud on my legs and feet.
And when it rains hard rain, I scream and I run in circles.
And I am there with the three million in the streets of Port-au-Prince.
And the fire that burned in me on day three through six of chemo is the fire that is burning in the forests of the world.
In my second chemo, my mother got very sick and I went to see her.
And a few weeks later, I was in New Orleans, and this beautiful, spiritual friend told me she wanted to do a healing for me.
And I was honored.
And I went to her house, and it was morning, and the morning New Orleans sun was filtering through the curtains.
And my friend was preparing this big bowl, and I said, "What is it?"
The flowers make it beautiful, and the honey makes it sweet."
And in the name of connectedness, she said, "Oh, it's the Gulf of Mexico."
And the other women arrived and they sat in a circle, and Michaela bathed my head with the sacred water.
And she sang -- I mean her whole body sang.
And the other women sang and they prayed for me and my mother.
It was the greed and recklessness that led to the drilling explosion.
It was my whole self melting into Michaela's lap.
It was finding my place and the huge responsibility that comes with connection.
It was the continuing devastating war in the Congo and the indifference of the world.
It was the Congolese women who are now rising up.
It was a thousand hallelujahs and a million oms.
It was energy, love and joy.
It was all these things in the water, in the world, in my body.
(Applause)
Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school.
And as you all know, boys are five times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention deficit disorder -- and therefore we drug them with Ritalin.
(Laughter) And every year there's research done on self-reported shyness among college students.
The old shyness was a fear of rejection.
And the problem is the industry is supplying it.
As you remember, Cindy Gallop said men don't know the difference between making love and doing porn.
The average boy now watches 50 porn video clips a week.
(Laughter) And the porn industry is the fastest growing industry in America -- 15 billion annually.
(Applause)
Most of you are probably like me -- lucky.
While making "Unprisoned," I met a woman who used to be like us -- Sheila Phipps.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people who deserve to be in prison.
There's a lot of criminals out here.
But there are a lot of innocent people that's in jail.
EA: Sheila's son, McKinley, is one of those innocent people.
He was convicted solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony, and decades of research have shown that eyewitness testimony isn't as reliable as we once believed it to be.
Scientists say that memory isn't precise.
Since 1989, when DNA testing was first used to free innocent people, over 70 percent of overturned convictions were based on eyewitness testimony.
Despite this, McKinley is still in prison.
(Recording) Kortney Williams: My brother missed my high school graduation because the night before, he went to jail.
because there was no evidence.
EA: According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the number of young people with a father incarcerated rose 500 percent between 1980 and 2000.
Over five million of today's children will see a parent incarcerated at some point in their childhoods.
By the time they reach the age of 14, one in four black children will see their dad go off to prison.
That's compared to a rate of one in 30 for white children.
One key factor determining the future success of both inmates and their children is whether they can maintain ties during the parent's incarceration, but prisoners' phone calls home can cost 20 to 30 times more than regular phone calls, so many families keep in touch through letters.
You still taking me to prom?
I really miss you.
I won first place in the science fair.
Anissa wrote these letters to her brother when she was a sophomore in high school.
She keeps the letters he writes to her tucked into the frame of her bedroom mirror, and reads them over and over again.
I'd like to think that there's a good reason why Anissa's brother is locked up.
(Recording) Danny Engelberg: You walk into that courtroom and you're just -- I've been doing this for a quite a while, and it still catches your breath.
Woman: I think it was about 85 percent African-American that was sitting there.
EA: How does a young black person growing up in America today come to understand justice?
Another "Unprisoned" story was about a troupe of dancers who choreographed a piece called "Hoods Up," which they performed in front of city council.
Dawonta White was in the seventh grade for that performance.
(Recording) Dawonta White: We was wearing black with hoodies because Trayvon Martin, when he was wearing his hoodie, he was killed.
So we looked upon that, and we said we're going to wear hoodies like Trayvon Martin.
He feels judged based on things other black people may have done.
But if it's not our responsibility to question those assumptions, whose responsibility is it?
There's a synagogue here that's taken on learning about mass incarceration, and many congregants have concluded that because mass incarceration throws so many lives into chaos, it actually creates more crime -- makes people less safe.
Congregant Teri Hunter says the first step towards action has to be understanding.
And so it is our responsibility as Jews and as members of this community to educate our community -- at least our congregation -- to the extent that we're able.
We elect the district attorneys, the judges and the legislators who operate these systems for we the people.
As a society, we are more willing to risk locking up innocent people than we are to let guilty people go free.
Prosecutors decide whether or not to take legal action against the people police arrest and they decide what charges to file, directly impacting how much time a defendant potentially faces behind bars.
We all want justice.
Our criminal legal system operates for we the people.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Consider the following statement: human beings only use 10 percent of their brain capacity.
(Laughter) The truth is, human beings use 100 percent of their brain capacity.
So to solve this problem of overload, evolution devised a solution, which is the brain's attention system.
We can think of attention as the leader of the brain.
And over the last 15 years, I've been studying the human brain's attention system.
First, how does attention control our perception?
A very poignant example of how our attention ends up getting utilized.
He was actually on a bridge, in Florida.
You see, he'd just returned from Iraq.
And while his body was on that bridge, his mind, his attention, was thousands of miles away.
And I'm really glad that he didn't take his life.
Because he, as a leader, knew that he wasn't the only one that was probably suffering; many of his fellow marines probably were, too.
But before I tell you about what mindfulness training is, or the results of that study, I think it's important to understand how attention works in the brain.
So what we do in the laboratory is that many of our studies of attention involve brain-wave recordings.
These electrodes pick up the ongoing brain electrical activity.
We call it the N170 component.
Our hypotheses about attention were as follows: if attention is indeed doing its job and affecting perception, maybe it works like an amplifier.
Within 170 milliseconds of actually seeing a face.
So in some of our other studies, we wanted to see, OK, great -- not great, actually, bad news that stress does this to the brain -- but if it is the case that stress has this powerful influence on attention through external distraction, what if we don't need external distraction, what if we distract ourselves?
Even though it's quite plain to see that it was upside down.
And what we found was that, very similar to external stress and external distraction in the environment, internal distraction, our own mind wandering, also shrinks the gap of attention.
They tell us that attention is very powerful in terms of affecting our perception.
Even though it's so powerful, it's also fragile and vulnerable.
What about in the real world?
Where is your attention right now?
Here's the prediction.
(Laughter) It's a challenge, so pay attention, please.
And we land in this mental time-travel mode of the past or the future very frequently.
We don't just reflect on the past when we rewind, we end up being in the past ruminating, reliving or regretting events that have already happened.
Or under stress, we fast-forward the mind.
Mindfulness has to do with paying attention to our present-moment experience with awareness.
We track their attention at the beginning of some kind of high-stress interval, and then two months later, we track them again, and we want to see if there's a difference.
Over a high-stress interval, unfortunately, the reality is if we don't do anything at all, attention declines, people are worse at the end of this high-stress interval than before.
But if we offer mindfulness training, we can protect against this.
And this last point is actually important to realize, because of what it suggests to us is that mindfulness exercises are very much like physical exercise: if you don't do it, you don't benefit.
But if you do engage in mindfulness practice, the more you do, the more you benefit.
As I mentioned to you at the beginning, his marines were involved in the very first project that we ever did, offering mindfulness training.
We had offered them the mindfulness training right before they were deployed to Iraq.
He said in many ways, he felt that the mindfulness training program we offered gave them a really important tool to protect against developing post-traumatic stress disorder and even allowing it to turn into post-traumatic growth.
And it ended up that Captain Davis and I -- you know, this was about a decade ago, in 2008 -- we've kept in touch all these years.
He was promoted to major, he actually then ended up retiring from the Marine Corps.
And as fate would have it, just a few months ago, Captain Davis suffered a massive heart attack, at the age of 46.
I know that the doctors who worked on me, they saved my heart, but mindfulness saved my life.
And here it is.
Pay attention to your attention.
Pay attention to your attention and incorporate mindfulness training as part of your daily wellness toolkit, in order to tame your own wandering mind and to allow your attention to be a trusted guide in your own life.
Thank you.
(Applause)
We're understanding, in fact, that those of us who live in the developed world need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions.
And I think this is what we've done with climate change.
And the reason why is that we live on a planet that is rapidly urbanizing.
However, it's hard sometimes to remember the extent of that urbanization.
By mid-century, we're going to have about eight billion -- perhaps more -- people living in cities or within a day's travel of one.
It may be possible that we are not even able to build that much clean energy.
So if we're seriously talking about tackling climate change on an urbanizing planet, we need to look somewhere else for the solution.
This is a Mapnificent map that shows me, in this case, how far I can get from my home in 30 minutes using public transportation.
This is Google Walking Maps.
I asked how to do the greater Ridgeway, and it told me to go via Guernsey.
(Laughter) But the technologies are getting better, and we're starting to really kind of crowdsource this navigation.
Water is energy intensive.
Because right now, our economy by and large operates as Paul Hawken said, "by stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP."
And if we have another eight billion or seven billion, or six billion, even, people, living on a planet where their cities also steal the future, we're going to run out of future really fast.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
For as long as I can remember, I have felt a very deep connection to animals and to the ocean.
On June 23, 2000, a ship named the Treasure sank off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, spilling 1,300 tons of fuel, which polluted the habitats of nearly half the entire world population of African penguins.
And exactly six years and three days earlier, on June 20, 1994, a ship named the Apollo Sea sank near Dassen Island, oiling 10,000 penguins, half of which died.
Now when the Treasure sank in 2000, it was the height of the best breeding season scientists had ever recorded for the African penguin, which at the time, was listed as a threatened species.
And soon, nearly 20,000 penguins were covered with this toxic oil.
The local seabird rescue center, named SANCCOB, immediately launched a massive rescue operation, and this soon would become the largest animal rescue ever undertaken.
I was a penguin aquarist at the New England Aquarium.
So two days later, I was on a plane headed for Cape Town with a team of penguin specialists.
Last week, a 10-year-old girl asked me: "What did it feel like when you first walked into that building and saw so many oiled penguins?"
So the day after we arrived, two of us from the aquarium were put in charge of room two.
So in wildlife rescue as in life, we learn from each previous experience, and we learn from both our successes and our failures.
And the main thing learned during the Apollo Sea rescue in '94 was that most of those penguins had died due to the unwitting use of poorly ventilated transport boxes and trucks, because they just had not been prepared to deal with so many oiled penguins at once.
And as a result, during the Treasure rescue, just 160 penguins died during the transport process, as opposed to 5,000.
So penguins learn from previous experience, too.
This is critically important, because one year ago, the African penguin was declared endangered.
So what did I learn from this intense and unforgettable experience?
And when we come together and work as one, we can achieve extraordinary things.
And truly, to be a part of something so much larger than yourself is the most rewarding experience you can possibly have.
My mission as The Penguin Lady is to raise awareness and funding to protect penguins.
And we ultimately will be affected, because, as Sylvia Earle says, "The oceans are our life-support system."
And the two main threats to penguins today are overfishing and global warming.
(Applause)
I was basically concerned about what was going on in the world.
And when I was 12, I became an actor.
I was told I was dyslexic.
And at that point, I read a book by Frank Barnaby, this wonderful nuclear physicist, and he said that media had a responsibility, that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward.
And then I thought, well maybe I could do something.
Maybe I could become a filmmaker.
So I started thinking about peace, and I was obviously, as I said to you, very much moved by these images, trying to make sense of that.
And that was when I had the idea.
That might shift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues that humanity faces -- if we did it just for a day.
So obviously we didn't have any money.
And we started writing letters to everybody.
And I wanted it to be the 21st of September because it was my granddad's favorite number.
He saw the bomb go off at Nagasaki.
So we began this journey, and we launched it in 1999.
And we wrote to heads of state, their ambassadors, Nobel Peace laureates, NGOs, faiths, various organizations -- literally wrote to everybody.
And I remember the first letter.
And actually, let me go back to that slide, because when we launched it in 1999 -- this idea to create the first ever day of ceasefire and non-violence -- we invited thousands of people.
Well not thousands -- hundreds of people, lots of people -- all the press, because we were going to try and create the first ever World Peace Day, a peace day.
So anyway, we began the journey.
(Laughter) Yeah, I'm not worried about it now.
I met Mandela at the Arusha peace talks, and so on and so on and so on -- while I was building the case to prove whether this idea would make sense.
76 countries in the last 12 years, I've visited.
I've recorded about 900 hours of their thoughts.
I felt that I was presenting a case on behalf of the global community to try and create this day.
And then on the seventh of September, I was invited to New York.
And now I was thinking, "Well, the press it really going to hear this story."
Kofi Annan invited me on the morning of September the 11th to do a press conference.
The world was never told there was a day of global ceasefire and nonviolence.
And so I went back to London, and I went and saw this chap, Jude Law.
I said, "I'm going to go to Afghanistan." He said, "Really?"
And I could sort of see a little look in his eye of interest.
One is you've got to have a great idea.
And we did, and we traveled around, and we spoke to elders, we spoke to doctors, we spoke to nurses, we held press conferences, we went out with soldiers, we sat down with ISAF, we sat down with NATO, we sat down with the U.K. government.
And I got home, and I remember one of the team bringing in a letter to me from the Taliban.
And days later, 1.6 million children were vaccinated against polio as a consequence of everybody stopping.
They were the people who believed in peace and the possibilities of it, etc., etc. -- and they made it real.
And then there was this other statement that came out from the U.N. Department of Security and Safety saying that, in Afghanistan, because of this work, the violence was down by 70 percent.
70 percent reduction in violence -- in what everyone said was completely impossible and you couldn't do.
On the Day of Peace, there's thousands of football matches all played, from the favelas of Brazil to wherever it might be.
He said, "It's absolutely possible."
It's all about the individuals.
It's all about partnerships.
And there's a wonderful man sitting in this audience, and I don't know where he is, who said to me a few days ago -- because I did a little rehearsal -- and he said, "I've been thinking about this day and imagining it as a square with 365 squares, and one of them is white."
Thank you TED. Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thanks a lot.
(Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you.
You know, I like to call it "the national automobile slum."
You can call it suburban sprawl.
The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good.
And your ability to define space and to create places that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design.
You know, this happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage two miles north of my town.
It has something that is terribly important -- it has what's called an active and permeable membrane around the edge.
The beer goes in and out, the waitresses go in and out, and that activates the center of this place and makes it a place that people want to hang out in.
This was the winner of an international design award in, I think, 1966, something like that.
This is the back of Boston City Hall, the most important, you know, significant civic building in Albany -- excuse me -- in Boston.
We're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal.
Please respect us, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal.
We are entering an epochal period of change in the world, and -- certainly in America -- the period that will be characterized by the end of the cheap oil era.
We're going have to grow more food closer to where we live.
The age of the 3,000 mile Caesar salad is coming to an end.
Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings.
So thank you very much.
Planetary systems outside our own are like distant cities whose lights we can see twinkling, but whose streets we can't walk.
And what we're looking for is the tiny dimming of light that is caused by a planet passing in front of one of these stars and blocking some of that starlight from getting to us.
In just over two years of operations, we've found over 1,200 potential new planetary systems around other stars.
That distance is really important because it tells us how much light the planet receives overall.
And that distance and knowing that amount of light is important because it's a little like you or I sitting around a campfire: You want to be close enough to the campfire so that you're warm, but not so close that you're too toasty and you get burned.
This is our star. This is our Sun.
They also cause the light from the star to vary.
And we can measure this very, very precisely with Kepler and trace their effects.
However, these are just the tip of the iceberg.
Just think, even when it's cloudy outside, these kind of events are happening in the sky above you all the time.
So when we want to learn whether a planet is habitable, whether it might be amenable to life, we want to know not only how much total light it receives and how warm it is, but we want to know about its space weather -- this high-energy radiation, the UV and the X-rays that are created by its star and that bathe it in this bath of high-energy radiation.
And so, we can't really look at planets around other stars in the same kind of detail that we can look at planets in our own solar system.
But what we can do in the meantime is measure the light from our stars and learn about this relationship between the planets and their parent stars to suss out clues about which planets might be good places to look for life in the universe.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So the type of magic I like, and I'm a magician, is magic that uses technology to create illusions.
I borrowed these three iPods from people here in the audience to show you what I mean.
And I'm going to use them to tell you a little bit about my favorite subject: deception.
(Music) One of my favorite magicians is Karl Germain.
Now polls show that men tell twice as many lies as women -- assuming the women they asked told the truth.
(Laughing) We deceive to gain advantage and to hide our weaknesses.
Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance.
Some people deceive for money.
Let's play a game.
Self-deception.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart.
Compulsive gamblers are experts at self-deception.
(Slot machine) They believe they can win.
Bad experiences are quickly forgotten.
Which is why in this vast and lonely cosmos, we are so wonderfully optimistic.
Our self-deception becomes a positive illusion -- why movies are able to take us onto extraordinary adventures; why we believe Romeo when he says he loves Juliet; and why single notes of music, when played together, become a sonata and conjure up meaning.
Its composer, called Debussy, said that art was the greatest deception of all.
Art is a deception that creates real emotions -- a lie that creates a truth.
But I decided not to have this treatment.
A few years ago, I was running some of my own experiments in the lab.
(Applause)
And the genetic information is contained in the form of a sequence of four bases abbreviated with the letters A, T, C and G.
And the information is there twice -- one on each strand -- which is important, because when new cells are formed, these strands come apart, new strands are synthesized with the old ones as templates in an almost perfect process.
And these mutations accumulate approximately as a function of time.
And if you're then interested in the history of a piece of DNA, or the whole genome, you can reconstruct the history of the DNA with those differences you observe.
So we can now, in a matter of hours, determine a whole human genome.
Each of us, of course, contains two human genomes -- one from our mothers and one from our fathers.
And what you can then also begin to do is to say, "How are these genetic differences distributed across the world?"
And if you do that, you find a certain amount of genetic variation in Africa.
And if you look outside Africa, you actually find less genetic variation.
Yet the people inside Africa have more genetic variation.
Moreover, almost all these genetic variants we see outside Africa have closely related DNA sequences that you find inside Africa.
So what I often like to say is that, from a genomic perspective, we are all Africans.
And since there are many genetic variants, and they have different such gradients, this means that if we determine a DNA sequence -- a genome from one individual -- we can quite accurately estimate where that person comes from, provided that its parents or grandparents haven't moved around too much.
But does this then mean, as many people tend to think, that there are huge genetic differences between groups of people -- on different continents, for example?
There is, for example, a project that's underway to sequence a thousand individuals -- their genomes -- from different parts of the world.
So an interesting question is, what happened when we met?
What happened to the Neanderthals?
And to begin to answer such questions, my research group -- since over 25 years now -- works on methods to extract DNA from remains of Neanderthals and extinct animals that are tens of thousands of years old.
And this then, in conjunction with these methods that allow very many DNA molecules to be sequenced very rapidly, allowed us last year to present the first version of the Neanderthal genome, so that any one of you can now look on the Internet, on the Neanderthal genome, or at least on the 55 percent of it that we've been able to reconstruct so far.
And the way to ask that question is to look at the Neanderthal that comes from Southern Europe and compare it to genomes of people who live today.
Then, significantly more often, does a Neanderthal match the European rather than the African.
The same is true if we look at a Chinese individual versus an African, the Neanderthal will match the Chinese individual more often.
This may also be surprising because the Neanderthals were never in China.
So the model we've proposed to explain this is that when modern humans came out of Africa sometime after 100,000 years ago, they met Neanderthals.
Presumably, they did so first in the Middle East, where there were Neanderthals living.
So that today, the people living outside Africa have about two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals.
So having now a Neanderthal genome on hand as a reference point and having the technologies to look at ancient remains and extract the DNA, we can begin to apply them elsewhere in the world.
And we found that this individual shared a common origin for his DNA sequences with Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago.
And further back, 800,000 years ago is there a common origin with present day humans.
We call this group of humans, that we then described for the first time from this tiny, tiny little piece of bone, the Denisovans, after this place where they were first described.
So we can then ask for Denisovans the same things as for the Neanderthals: Did they mix with ancestors of present day people?
If we ask that question, and compare the Denisovan genome to people around the world, we surprisingly find no evidence of Denisovan DNA in any people living even close to Siberia today.
So this presumably means that these Denisovans had been more widespread in the past, since we don't think that the ancestors of Melanesians were ever in Siberia.
We don't know quite where the borders between these people were, but we know that in Southern Siberia, there were both Neanderthals and Denisovans at least at some time in the past.
Then modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa, came out of Africa, presumably in the Middle East.
Presumably, modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
Why aren't Palestinians using nonviolent resistance?
These leaders are trying to forge a massive national nonviolent movement to end the occupation and build peace in the region.
This divide between what's happening on the ground and perceptions abroad is one of the key reasons why we don't have yet a Palestinian peaceful resistance movement that has been successful.
I believe that what's mostly missing for nonviolence to grow is not for Palestinians to start adopting nonviolence, but for us to start paying attention to those who already are.
(Music) Palestinian Woman: We were told the wall would separate Palestine from Israel.
Israeli Soldier: A nonviolent protest is not going to stop the [unclear].
Protester: This is a peaceful march.
We can do it!
Julia Bacha: When I first heard about the story of Budrus, I was surprised that the international media had failed to cover the extraordinary set of events that happened seven years ago, in 2003.
The residents, after 10 months of peaceful resistance, convinced the Israeli government to move the route of the barrier off their lands and to the green line, which is the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
The resistance in Budrus has since spread to villages across the West Bank and to Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem.
This silence carries profound consequences for the likelihood that nonviolence can grow, or even survive, in Palestine.
But that's true for adults too.
In fact, the behavior of entire communities and countries can be influenced, depending on where the international community chooses to focus its attention.
I believe that at the core of ending the conflict in the Middle East and bringing peace is for us to transform nonviolence into a functional behavior by giving a lot more attention to the nonviolent leaders on the ground today.
On the Israeli side, there is a new peace movement called Solidariot, which means solidarity in Hebrew.
Now imagine the power that big media players could have if they started covering the weekly nonviolent demonstrations happening in villages like Bil'in, Ni'lin, Wallajeh, in Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan -- the nonviolent leaders would become more visible, valued and effective in their work.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I believe that soon our buildings and machines will be self-assembling, replicating and repairing themselves.
So I'm going to show you what I believe is the current state of manufacturing, and then compare that to some natural systems.
So in the current state of manufacturing, we have skyscrapers -- two and a half years [of assembly time], 500,000 to a million parts, fairly complex, new, exciting technologies in steel, concrete, glass.
We have exciting machines that can take us into space -- five years [of assembly time], 2.5 million parts.
But on the other side, if you look at the natural systems, we have proteins that have two million types, can fold in 10,000 nanoseconds, or DNA with three billion base pairs we can replicate in roughly an hour.
So there's all of this complexity in our natural systems, but they're extremely efficient, far more efficient than anything we can build, far more complex than anything we can build.
So there's something super interesting about natural systems.
So I'm going to show you a number of projects that my colleagues and I at MIT are working on to achieve this self-assembling future.
The first two are the MacroBot and DeciBot.
So these are the brilliant scientists, engineers, designers that worked on this project.
Can we really scale this up? Can we really embed robotics into every part?
You have one tetrahedron which is the gate that's going to do your computing, and you have two input tetrahedrons.
And now it starts moving in three-dimensional space -- so up or down.
On the right-hand side, [0,0] input is a 1 output, which goes up.
And so what that really means is that our structures now contain the blueprints of what we want to build.
So that means that we can have some form of self-replication.
If you have errors, you can replace a part.
So what does this tell us about the future?
And from that you have new possibilities for computing.
That's amazing parallel and distributed computing power, new design possibilities.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Compassion has many faces.
A line that the Dalai Lama once said, he said, "Love and compassion are necessities.
They are not luxuries.
I looked into her face.
I looked into the face of her son sitting next to her, and his face was just riven with grief and confusion.
Every year or so, I have the privilege of taking clinicians into the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau.
They touched me when I was four and I lost my eyesight and was partially paralyzed.
And my family brought in a woman whose mother had been a slave to take care of me.
She had phenomenal strength.
But first, compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering.
But that is not enough, because compassion, which activates the motor cortex, means that we aspire, we actually aspire to transform suffering.
And if we're so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering.
But compassion has another component, and that component is really essential.
Now I worked with dying people for over 40 years.
And you know, we have a society, a world, that is paralyzed by fear.
This is called resilience.
Another, which has been discovered by various researchers at Emory and at Davis and so on, is that compassion enhances our immune system.
But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity.
(Applause) If compassion is so good for us, why don't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is to really transform suffering?
He said, "I'm out of here."
He puts out his tongue in order to remove the maggots, so as not to harm them.
And at that moment, the dog transformed into the Buddha of love and kindness.
The women in this room are lotuses in a sea of fire.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And I'd like to review just how unintended consequences play the part that they do.
Let's go to 40,000 years before the present, to the time of the cultural explosion, when music, art, technology, so many of the things that we're enjoying today, so many of the things that are being demonstrated at TED were born.
Now let's advance to 10,000 years before the present.
What about the origins of agriculture?
What would our ancestors 10,000 years ago have said if they really had technology assessment?
Even now, our choices are having unintended effects.
Historically, for example, chopsticks -- according to one Japanese anthropologist who wrote a dissertation about it at the University of Michigan -- resulted in long-term changes in the dentition, in the teeth, of the Japanese public.
There is evidence that the human mouth and teeth are growing smaller all the time.
In the ancient world there was a lot of respect for unintended consequences, and there was a very healthy sense of caution, reflected in the Tree of Knowledge, in Pandora's Box, and especially in the myth of Prometheus that's been so important in recent metaphors about technology.
So were the followers of Hippocrates.
More recently, Harvey Cushing, who really developed neurosurgery as we know it, who changed it from a field of medicine that had a majority of deaths resulting from surgery to one in which there was a hopeful outlook, he was very conscious that he was not always going to do the right thing.
Now if we look forward a bit to the 19th century, we find a new style of technology.
And the first people who saw that were the telegraphers of the mid-19th century, who were the original hackers.
Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, was a big investor in the most complex machine of all times -- at least until 1918 -- registered with the U.S. Patent Office.
The patent had 64 pages of text and 271 figures.
Now there is something else, though, in the early 20th century that made things even more complicated.
And that was that safety technology itself could be a source of danger.
The lesson of the Titanic, for a lot of the contemporaries, was that you must have enough lifeboats for everyone on the ship.
However, there was another case, the Eastland, a ship that capsized in Chicago Harbor in 1915, and it killed 841 people -- that was 14 more than the passenger toll of the Titanic.
And that again proves that when you're talking about unintended consequences, it's not that easy to know the right lessons to draw.
So the 20th century, then, saw how much more complex reality was, but it also saw a positive side.
Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but even by 1940, no commercially and medically useful quantities of it were being produced.
Now when we come to the period after the Second World War, unintended consequences get even more interesting.
And my favorite example of that occurred beginning in 1976, when it was discovered that the bacteria causing Legionnaires disease had always been present in natural waters, but it was the precise temperature of the water in heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems that raised the right temperature for the maximum reproduction of Legionella bacillus.
They commissioned a group of their best scientists to investigate, and what they found was that all these tape drives were located near ventilation ducts.
One other very positive consequence of 20th century technology, though, was the way in which other kinds of calamities could lead to positive advances.
It was the origin of the Xerox copier, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.
And Chester Carlson, the inventor, was a patent attorney.
The mentor of Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, developed his system of value investing as a result of his own losses in the 1929 crash.
So this means that we need to take a different view of unintended consequences.
We need to learn, for example, from Dr. Cushing, who killed patients in the course of his early operations.
The message, then, for me, about unintended consequences is chaos happens; let's make better use of it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Now this may seem a bit ambitious, but when you look at yourself, you look at your hands, you realize that you're alive.
And as an inorganic chemist, my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic, living world and the inorganic, dead world.
And when I talk about Darwinian evolution, I mean one thing and one thing only, and that is survival of the fittest.
And this seems quite a profound question.
And as a chemist, we're not used to profound questions every day.
And in fact, the smallest unit of matter that can evolve independently is, in fact, a single cell -- a bacteria.
So this raises three really important questions: What is life?
Is biology special?
Biologists seem to think so.
And you can see, it's kind of pollinating, germinating, growing.
And all these crystals here under the microscope were dead a few minutes ago, and they look alive.
But when I saw this, I was really fascinated, because it seemed lifelike.
And this is dead.
Let's see if we can actually make life.
In fact, we were the only people in the universe.
Now, that's a bit boring.
And in fact, let's take that one step further.
And in a universe where carbon exists and organic biology, then we have all this wonderful diversity of life.
We're awfully careful in the lab to try and avoid various biohazards.
Well what about matter?
Chemists are trying to study the molecules to look at disease.
You have regulation; information is transcribed; catalysts are made; stuff is happening.
But what does a cell do?
And Darwin himself mused in a letter to a colleague that he thought that life probably emerged in some warm little pond somewhere -- maybe not in Scotland, maybe in Africa, maybe somewhere else.
I'm not a politician, I'm a scientist.
The other thing we need to think about is the emergence of chemical complexity.
This seems most likely.
In my own laboratory, the way we're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats.
This is how I remember what I need as a chemist.
Because if I want evolution, I need containers to compete.
"This is my car, and I'm going to drive around and show off my car."
So what we're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic Lego kit of molecules.
And so forgive the molecules on the screen, but these are a very simple kit.
And we can aggregate them together and make literally thousands and thousands of really big nano-molecular molecules the same size of DNA and proteins, but there's no carbon in sight.
And so with this Lego kit, we have the diversity required for complex information storage without DNA.
And just a few months ago in my lab, we were able to take these very same molecules and make cells with them.
If we can somehow encourage these molecules to talk to each other and make the right shapes and compete, they will start to form cells that will replicate and compete.
So you imagine, if we're able to create a self-sustaining artificial life form, not only will this tell us about the origin of life -- that it's possible that the universe doesn't need carbon to be alive; it can use anything -- we can then take [it] one step further and develop new technologies, because we can then use software control for evolution to code in.
The real issue in cellular biology is we are never going to understand everything, because it's a multidimensional problem put there by evolution.
Thank you very much.
Lee Cronin: So many people think that life took millions of years to kick in.
So the other thing that if we were able to create life that's not based on carbon, maybe we can tell NASA what really to look for.
Hi everyone.
It's a children's book for the iPad.
You can make the baby poop.
But you know, I have a problem with children's books: I think they're full of propaganda.
If you notice carefully, it's a homosexual couple bringing up a child.
Shake it, and you have a lesbian couple.
Basically, I was brought up to be a good Samaritan, and I am.
In fact, when there was a wedding in our neighborhood, all of us would paint our houses for the wedding.
You know the Hindus are killing us Muslims. Be careful."
You know, my work is inspired by events such as this.
I have another idea.
It's a children's book about Indian independence -- very patriotic.
But when you shake it, you get Pakistan's perspective.
(Applause) You have to separate fact from bias, right.
And my argument [is] that the only way for us to teach creativity is by teaching children perspectives at the earliest stage.
After all, children's books are manuals on parenting, so you better give them children's books that teach them perspectives.
I'm making an argument that art and creativity are very essential tools in empathy.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
There's a lot of exciting things happening in the design world and at IDEO this past year, and I'm pleased to get a chance to share some of those with you.
I didn't attend the first TED back in 1984 but I've been to a lot of them since that time.
I thought it [would] kind of be interesting to think back to that time when Richard got the whole thing started. Thank you very much, Richard; it's been a big, enjoyable part of my life, coming here.
That was a really good time.
This year -- maybe you could show the slides -- this year we're carrying this Treo, which we had a lot to do with and helped Handspring design it.
Lots of lives are being saved by those.
And, we're just about to announce the Zinio Reader product that I believe will make magazines even more enjoyable to read.
But something's happened in the last 18 years since Richard started TED, and that's that people like us -- I know people in other places have caught onto this for a long time, but for us, we've really just started ... we've kind of climbed Maslow's hierarchy a little bit -- and so we're now focused more and more on human-centered design, human-centeredness in an approach to design.
I have a few of them -- they're no more than a minute or a minute-and-a-half apiece -- but I thought you might be interested in seeing some of our work over the last year, and how it responds in video.
He wanted a new kind of store -- a new one -- a store that had a cultural role as well as a retail one.
It's been used a lot of places, but I particularly like the use here of liquid crystal displays in the changing room.
And a group at Itch, which is now part of IDEO, designed this interactive wall that's about four stories tall.
So you enter your information. Then, like the London tube system, the little trains go around with what you're thinking about.
Then when you exit the IMAX theatre on the fourth floor -- mostly teenagers coming out of there -- there's this big open space that has these tables in it that have interactive games which are quite fun, also designed by Durrell [Bishop] and Andrew [Hirniak] of Itch.
This is CBS Sunday Morning that aired about two weeks ago.
In the second group's scenario, the walls are alive and actually give Dilbert a group hug.
These are all very low-budget videos, like quick prototypes.
And we're announcing a new product here tonight, which is the first time this has ever been shown in public.
It's called Spyfish, and it's a company called H2Eye, started by Nigel Jagger in London.
This product, it has two cameras.
You throw it over the side of your boat and you basically scuba dive without getting wet.
And so we spent a lot of time -- this has been going on for about seven or eight years, this project -- and [we're] just ready to start building them.
It can dive to 500 feet, to where sunlight does not penetrate, and is equipped with powerful lights.
(Narrator: And this central box connects the whole system together.
The fluid graphics and ambient sounds combine to help you completely lose yourself underwater.) (Applause) DK: And the last thing I'll talk about is ApproTEC, which is a project that I'm very excited about.
ApproTEC is a company started by Dr. Martin Fisher, who's a good friend of mine. He's a Ph.D. from Stanford.
He found himself in Kenya on a Fulbright and he had a very interesting insight, which is that he said, "There must be entrepreneurs in Kenya; there must be entrepreneurs everywhere."
So he decided to start manufacturing products in Kenya with Kenyan manufacturers -- designed by people like us, but taken there.
And just the sales of the products -- this is a non-profit -- the sales of these products is now .6% of the GDP of Kenya.
So we're in the process of helping them design deep-well, low-cost manual pumps in order for these people who have a quarter acre of land to be able to grow crops in the off-season.
What they do now is: they can grow crops in the rainy season but they can't grow them in the off-season.
So with seed-squeezers, and pumps, and hay-balers and very straightforward things that we're designing -- my students are doing this as class projects and IDEO has donated their time to do this kind of work -- it's really amazing to see his success, Martin's.
(Laughter) (Applause) So we saw a lot of interesting things being designed today in this session, and from all the different presenters.
And in my own practice, from product to ApproTEC, it's really exciting that we're taking a more human-centered approach to design, that we're including behaviors and personalities in the things we do, and I think this is great.
My topic is economic growth in China and India.
You may say this is not fair, because I'm selecting two countries to make a case against democracy.
The first question there is why China has grown so much faster than India.
Over the last 30 years, in terms of the GDP growth rates, China has grown at twice the rate of India.
Look at the skyline of Shanghai.
The picture on India is the Dharavi slum of Mumbai in India.
The idea there behind these two pictures is that the Chinese government can act above rule of law.
So let me call it the Shanghai model of economic growth, that emphasizes the following features for promoting economic development: infrastructures, airports, highways, bridges, things like that.
Just how important are infrastructures for economic growth?
If you believe that infrastructures are very important for economic growth, then you would argue a strong government is necessary to promote growth.
If you believe that infrastructures are not as important as many people believe, then you will put less emphasis on strong government.
So to illustrate that question, let me give you two countries.
And for the sake of brevity, I'll call one country Country 1 and the other country Country 2.
Country 1 has a systematic advantage over Country 2 in infrastructures.
Country 1 has more telephones, and Country 1 has a longer system of railways.
Actually the country with more telephones is the Soviet Union, and the data referred to 1989.
The picture there is Khrushchev.
And Country 2 is China.
Yes, today China has a huge infrastructure advantage over India.
But for many years, until the late 1990s, China had an infrastructure disadvantage vis-a-vis India.
In developing countries, the most common mode of transportation is the railways, and the British built a lot of railways in India.
In fact, if you look at the evidence worldwide, the evidence is more supportive of the view that the infrastructure are actually the result of economic growth.
Is democracy bad for economic growth?
Country A, in 1990, had about $300 per capita GDP as compared with Country B, which had $460 in per capita GDP.
Both countries are in Asia.
In fact, Country A is democratic India, and Country B is Pakistan -- the country that has a long period of military rule.
That's because the two countries have about the same population size.
Those two countries are geographically similar.
By that comparison, democracy looks very, very good in terms of economic growth.
One reason is the East Asian Model.
In East Asia, we have had successful economic growth stories such as Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
And then you draw the conclusion the odds of winning the lottery are 100 percent.
The Philippines didn't succeed.
So the East Asian model has this massive selection bias -- it is known as selecting on a dependent variable, something we always tell our students to avoid.
So exactly why did China grow so much faster?
I will take you to the Cultural Revolution, when China went mad, and compare that country's performance with India under Indira Gandhi.
The question there is: Which country did better, China or India?
China was during the Cultural Revolution.
It turns out even during the Cultural Revolution, China out-perfomed India in terms of GDP growth by an average of about 2.2 percent every year in terms of per capita GDP.
This is the world development index indicator data in the early 1990s.
The adult literacy rate in China is 77 percent as compared with 48 percent in India.
In China, the definition of literacy is the ability to read and write 1,500 Chinese characters.
The gap between the two countries in terms of literacy is much more substantial than the data here indicated.
China held a huge advantage in terms of human capital vis-a-vis India.
On average, as a Chinese in 1965, you lived 10 years more than an average Indian.
So if you have a choice between being a Chinese and being an Indian, you would want to become a Chinese in order to live 10 years longer.
If you made that decision in 1965, the down side of that is the next year we have the Cultural Revolution.
So you have to always think carefully about these decisions.
Today, Indian women have a sizable life expectancy edge over Indian men.
But India still has a lot of work to do in terms of gender equality.
These are the two pictures taken of garment factories in Guangdong Province and garment factories in India.
60 to 80 percent of the workforce in China is women in the coastal part of the country, whereas in India, it's all men.
Financial Times printed this picture of an Indian textile factory with the title, "India Poised to Overtake China in Textile."
If you look at other East Asian countries, women there play a hugely important role in terms of economic take-off -- in terms of creating the manufacturing miracle associated with East Asia.
India still has a long way to go to catch up with China.
Then the issue is, what about the Chinese political system?
You talk about human capital, you talk about education and public health.
What about the political system?
Isn't it true that the one-party political system has facilitated economic growth in China?
It depends on a distinction that you draw between statics of the political system and the dynamics of the political system.
Sometimes a fixed effect can explain change, but a fixed effect only explains changes in interaction with the things that change.
In terms of the political changes, they have introduced village elections.
To me, the pace of political changes is too slow, too gradual.
But nevertheless, the system has moved in a more liberal direction, moved in a more democratic direction.
Indira Gandhi declared emergency rule in 1975.
The Indian government owned and operated all the TV stations.
A little-known fact about India in the 1990s is that the country not only has undertaken economic reforms, the country has also undertaken political reforms by introducing village self-rule, privatization of media and introducing freedom of information acts.
But China is a superstar in terms of economic growth.
But that doesn't mean that you're a bad basketball player.
Comparing with a superstar is the wrong benchmark.
Let's think about the future: the dragon vis-a-vis the elephant.
India has the right institutional conditions for economic growth, whereas China is still struggling with political reforms.
I believe that the political reforms are a must for China to maintain its growth.
And it's very important to have political reforms, to have widely shared benefits of economic growth.
I don't know whether that's going to happen or not, but I'm an optimist.
Hopefully, five years from now, I'm going to report to TEDGlobal that political reforms will happen in China.
And they're pretty scary.
But interestingly, they have a sense of humor.
These guys hacked into Fox News' Twitter account to announce President Obama's assassination.
Now you can imagine the panic that would have generated in the newsroom at Fox.
In fact, a friend of mine from the security industry told me the other day that there are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't.
I mean three companies providing cybersecurity services to the FBI have been hacked.
Anyway, this mysterious group Anonymous -- and they would say this themselves -- they are providing a service by demonstrating how useless companies are at protecting our data.
They claim that they are battling a dastardly conspiracy.
They say that governments are trying to take over the Internet and control it, and that they, Anonymous, are the authentic voice of resistance -- be it against Middle Eastern dictatorships, against global media corporations, or against intelligence agencies, or whoever it is.
The Web links everything, and very soon it will mediate most human activity.
Now this is a very complicated struggle.
But in order to try and explain the whole thing, I would need another 18 minutes or so to do it, so you're just going to have to take it on trust from me on this occasion, and let me assure you that all of these issues are involved in cybersecurity and control of the Internet one way or the other, but in a configuration that even Stephen Hawking would probably have difficulty trying to get his head around.
And as you see, in the middle, there is our old friend, the hacker.
Well, I say nothing, but actually there is one teeny weeny little research unit in Turin, Italy called the Hackers Profiling Project.
And they are doing some fantastic research into the characteristics, into the abilities and the socialization of hackers.
But I think they're doing very important work.
Now, so far I've mentioned the hackers Anonymous who are a politically motivated hacking group.
Well real organized crime on the Internet goes back about 10 years when a group of gifted Ukrainian hackers developed a website, which led to the industrialization of cybercrime.
And so CarderPlanet became a sort of supermarket for cybercriminals.
And it was this which completely revolutionized cybercrime on the Web.
He was making, on average a week, $150,000 -- tax free of course.
And often they're the most vulnerable element of all.
Dimitry Golubov, aka SCRIPT -- born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1982.
And he did a great job in it.
Then we have Renukanth Subramaniam, aka JiLsi -- founder of DarkMarket, born in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
As an eight year-old, he and his parents fled the Sri Lankan capital because Singhalese mobs were roaming the city, looking for Tamils like Renu to murder.
At 11, he was interrogated by the Sri Lankan military, accused of being a terrorist, and his parents sent him on his own to Britain as a refugee seeking political asylum.
At 13, with only little English and being bullied at school, he escaped into a world of computers where he showed great technical ability, but he was soon being seduced by people on the Internet.
He was convicted of mortgage and credit card fraud, and he will be released from Wormwood Scrubs jail in London in 2012.
And when he finally woke up to his situation and understood the implications, he was already in too deep.
Max Vision, aka ICEMAN -- mastermind of CardersMarket.
Born in Meridian, Idaho.
Max Vision was one of the best penetration testers working out of Santa Clara, California in the late 90s for private companies and voluntarily for the FBI.
Now in the late 1990s, he discovered a vulnerability on all U.S. government networks, and he went in and patched it up -- because this included nuclear research facilities -- sparing the American government a huge security embarrassment.
At his open prison, he came under the influence of financial fraudsters, and those financial fraudsters persuaded him to work for them on his release.
He set up his prosaically entitled newsgroup, bankfrauds@yahoo.co.uk before arriving in Britain in 2005 to take a Masters in chemical engineering at Manchester University.
And then finally, Cagatay Evyapan, aka Cha0 -- one of the most remarkable hackers ever, from Ankara in Turkey.
And the other thing is the high incidence of hackers like these who have characteristics which are consistent with Asperger's syndrome.
Now I discussed this with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen who's the professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: So your idea worth spreading is hire hackers.
How would someone get over that kind of fear that the hacker they hire might preserve that little teensy wormhole?
We want to work with you."
(Applause)
My name is Kate Hartman.
I teach courses in physical computing and wearable electronics.
Don't be ashamed.
So within my own work, I use a broad range of materials and tools.
And so it all started several years ago, late one night when I was sitting on the subway, riding home, and I was thinking.
And so I went home, and I made a prototype of this hat.
And so this really shifts the human/plant dynamic, because a single house plant can actually express its needs to thousands of people at the same time.
And so kind of thinking about scale, my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers -- of course.
And so glaciers are these magnificent beings, and there's lots of reasons to be obsessed with them, but what I'm particularly interested in is in human-glacier relations.
(Laughter) Because there seems to be an issue.
And so I actually live in Canada now, so I've been visiting one of my local glaciers.
They actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier.
When I meet a glacier for the very first time, what do I do?
Do I carve a message in the snow?
And so since we use devices to figure out how to relate to the world these days, I actually made a device called the Glacier Embracing Suit.
And once again, it's this invitation that asks people to lay down on the glacier and give it a hug.
And so my intent is to actually just take the next 10 years and go on a series of collaborative projects where I work with people from different disciplines -- artists, technologists, scientists -- to kind of work on this project of how we can improve human-glacier relations.
(Applause)
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the human genome.
(Applause) Chromosome one -- top left, bottom right -- are the sex chromosomes.
But in fact, if I were to place one base on each pixel of this 1280x800-resolution screen, we would need 3,000 screens to take a look at the genome.
(Laughter) And so 15 years, actually, and about four billion dollars later, the genome was sequenced and published.
That's the equivalent of you filling up your car with gas in 1998, waiting until 2011, and now you can drive to Jupiter and back twice.
This is expected to double, triple or maybe quadruple year over year for the foreseeable future.
In fact, there's one lab in particular that represents 20 percent of all that capacity: It's called the Beijing Genomics Institute.
So a woman, age 37, presents with stage 2 estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.
If you have this deleterious mutation in this gene, you're 90 percent likely to get cancer in your life.
Let me introduce you to the Beery twins, diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of two.
They had dopa-responsive dystonia.
Turns out the gentleman in this picture is a guy named Joe Beery, who was lucky enough to be the CIO of a company called Life Technologies.
What they found was a series of mutations in a gene called SPR, which is responsible for producing serotonin, among other things.
So on top of L-Dopa, they gave these kids a serotonin precursor drug, and they're effectively normal now.
At the time -- this was a few years ago -- it cost $100,000.
Today it's $10,000, next year, $1,000, the year after, $100, give or take a year.
And what they find is a single-point mutation in a gene responsible for controlling programmed cell death.
And that's a natural reaction, which causes some programmed cell death, but the gene that regulates that down is broken.
(Laughter) The prospect of using the genome as a universal diagnostic is upon us today.
So it turns out that the very same technology is also being used to grow new lines of corn, wheat, soybean and other crops that are highly tolerant of drought, of flood, of pests and pesticides.
Now, look -- as long as we continue to increase the population, we'll have to continue to grow and eat genetically modified foods.
This is a typewriter, a staple of every desktop for decades.
And then more general versions of word processors came about.
It was Bob Metcalfe inventing the Ethernet, and the connection of all these computers that fundamentally changed everything.
(Laughter) Look, this is where we are today.
This is the genomic revolution today. This is where we are.
Do you want to see if you're genetically compatible with your girlfriend?
(Laughter) Do you really want to elect a president whose genome suggests cardiomyopathy?
Imagine one more thing, that that software is able to ask both parties for mutual consent: "Would you be willing to meet your third cousin?"
(Laughter) Now this is probably a good thing, right?
OK, so experts think that one to three percent of you are not actually the father of your child.
(Laughter) Look -- (Laughter) These genomes, these 23 chromosomes, they don't in any way represent the quality of our relationships or the nature of our society -- at least not yet.
And so I urge you all to wake up and to tune in and to influence the genomic revolution that's happening all around you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The average American watches TV for almost 5 hours a day.
But my idea today is not to debate whether there's such a thing as good TV or bad TV; my idea today is to tell you that I believe television has a conscience.
We're talking about top-10 Nielsen-rated shows over the course of 50 years.
How does television evolve over time, and what does this say about our society?
We went back 50 years to the 1959/1960 television season.
Did you feel a sense of moral ambiguity?
So here you see, from 1960 to 2010, the 50 years of our study.
Moral ambiguity starts to climb.
Why?
The Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK is shot, the Civil Rights movement, race riots, the Vietnam War, MLK is shot, Bobby Kennedy is shot, Watergate.
Moral ambiguity becomes the dominant meme in television from 1990 for the next 20 years.
Comfort is no longer why we watch television.
Now look at this.
You'll see that every time fantasy and imagination shows rise, it maps to a spike in unemployment.
Do we want to see shows about people saving money and being unemployed?
Whether or not you're in my business, you have surely heard or read of the decline of the thing called the three-camera sitcom and the rise of reality TV.
We had a 2000 presidential election decided by the Supreme Court.
The 1950s: June Cleever in the original comfort show, "Leave it to Beaver."
Maude Findlay, the epitome of the irreverent 1970s, who tackled abortion, divorce, even menopause on TV.
Murphy Brown took on a vice president when she took on the idea of single parenthood.
So to you all, the women of TEDWomen, the men of TEDWomen, the global audiences of TEDWomen, thank you for letting me present my idea about the conscience of television.
(Applause)
And we also know that most of them were or are very poor -- did not live for very long.
Let's talk about the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today.
And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners: Europeans, North Americans, Australasians.
19 percent of the world's population today, Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth.
In fact, in 1500, the average Chinese was richer than the average North American.
It's based on purchasing power parity.
The average American is nearly 20 times richer than the average Chinese by the 1970s.
If you take the 10 countries that went on to become the Western empires, in 1500 they were really quite tiny -- five percent of the world's land surface, 16 percent of its population, maybe 20 percent of its income.
By 1913, these 10 countries, plus the United States, controlled vast global empires -- 58 percent of the world's territory, about the same percentage of its population, and a really huge, nearly three-quarters share of global economic output.
This is not a new question.
And you know what, it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners -- by the people in the rest of the world -- like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire -- who said in a book published in 1731, "Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?"
We took all the Germans, we divided them roughly in two, and we gave the ones in the East communism, and you see the result.
Within an incredibly short period of time, people living in the German Democratic Republic produced Trabants, the Trabbi, one of the world's worst ever cars, while people in the West produced the Mercedes Benz.
He was Adam Smith -- not Billy Connolly, not Sean Connery -- though he is very smart indeed.
Five, the consumer society.
Competition means, not only were there a hundred different political units in Europe in 1500, but within each of these units, there was competition between corporations as well as sovereigns.
Example: Benjamin Robins's extraordinary application of Newtonian physics to ballistics.
The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there.
That's what makes the difference between North America and South America.
That's the land grant on the bottom half of the slide.
Even in places like Senegal, beginning in the early 20th century, there were major breakthroughs in public health, and life expectancy began to rise.
You probably assume that because the iPhone was designed in California but assembled in China that the West still leads in terms of technological innovation.
In terms of patents, there's no question that the East is ahead.
Not only has Japan been ahead for some time, South Korea has gone into third place, and China is just about to overtake Germany.
Why?
It's open source.
The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese.
One obvious implication of modern economic history is that it's quite hard to transition to democracy before you've established secure private property rights.
And third, can China do without killer app number three?
Now this picture shows the demolition of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's studio in Shanghai earlier this year.
But I don't think his studio has been rebuilt.
Winston Churchill once defined civilization in a lecture he gave in the fateful year of 1938.
I once asked one of my colleagues at Harvard, "Hey, is South America part of the West?"
He was an expert in Latin American history.
That crisis, which has been the focus of so much attention, including by me, I think is an epiphenomenon.
(Laughter) So we assembled a team of experts, spanning Harvard, MIT, The American Heritage Dictionary, The Encyclopedia Britannica and even our proud sponsors, the Google.
Ladies and gentlemen, a picture is not worth a thousand words.
This is very, very low.
So it turns out there was a company across the river called Google who had started a digitization project a few years back that might just enable this approach.
What we're left with is a collection of five million books, 500 billion words, a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome -- a text which, when written out, would stretch from here to the Moon and back 10 times over -- a veritable shard of our cultural genome.
It's four words; we call that a four-gram.
Well the individual n-grams measure cultural trends.
And so I might say, "Yesterday, I throve."
Alternatively, I could say, "Yesterday, I thrived."
And he'd tell you, "Well most people say thrived, but some people say throve."
What you're seeing is year by year frequency of "thrived" and "throve" over time.
JM: You might also want to have a look at this particular n-gram, and that's to tell Nietzsche that God is not dead, although you might agree that he might need a better publicist.
(Laughter) And just like that, the bubble burst.
We are losing interest in the past more rapidly.
So for those of you who seek to be famous, we can learn from the 25 most famous political figures, authors, actors and so on.
So here you will become famous by the end of your 50s, and become very, very famous afterward.
(Laughter) If you do that, you might think, "Oh great. I'm going to do my best work when I'm in my 20s."
And of course, what we're seeing is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist in Nazi Germany.
This is distribution as seen in Germany -- very different, it's shifted to the left.
But then also many people on the far right who seem to benefit from propaganda.
It's kind of like genomics.
Culturomics is similar.
The great thing about culturomics is that everyone can do it.
And so you too can type in any word or phrase that you're interested in and see its n-gram immediately -- also browse examples of all the various books in which your n-gram appears.
It's not that strove for mediocrity, it's just that the S used to be written differently, kind of like an F.
This person was interested in the history of frustration.
There's various types of frustration.
We think that might have something to do with Reagan.
Google has started to digitize 15 million books.
That's 12 percent of all the books that have ever been published.
It's a sizable chunk of human culture.
And when that happens, that will transform the way we have to understand our past, our present and human culture.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
In October, I spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the [second] largest country in Africa.
In the past 10 years, five million people have died due to a war in the east.
In fact, the HIV prevalence rate is 1.3 percent among adults.
This might not sound like a large number, but in a country with 76 million people, it means there are 930,000 that are infected.
And due to the poor infrastructure, only 25 percent of those are receiving the life-saving drugs that they need.
But it is a place where sex workers and their clients come.
Now Damien knows all about condoms, but he doesn't sell them.
It's not surprising, because only three percent of people in the DRC use condoms.
But if what we're really trying to do is stop the spread of HIV, we need to think about the customer, the people whose behavior needs to change -- the couples, the young women, the young men -- whose lives depend on it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The Tasmanian devil has shown us that, not only can cancer be a contagious disease, but it can also threaten an entire species with extinction.
So first of all, what is a Tasmanian devil?
But not many people know that there actually is a real animal called the Tasmanian devil, and it's the world's largest carnivorous marsupial.
The Tasmanian devil got its name from the terrifying nocturnal scream that it makes.
[The] Tasmanian devil is found only on the island of Tasmania, which is that small island just to the south of the mainland of Australia.
And despite their ferocious appearance, Tasmanian devils are actually quite adorable little animals.
In fact, growing up in Tasmania, it always was incredibly exciting when we got a chance to see a Tasmanian devil in the wild.
The story begins in 1996 when a wildlife photographer took this photograph here of a Tasmanian devil with a large tumor on its face.
Animals, just like humans, sometimes get strange tumors.
The disease was first sighted in the northeast of Tasmania in 1996 and has spread across Tasmania like a huge wave.
But inevitably, these tumors progress towards being enormous, ulcerating tumors like this one here.
And our minds immediately turned to cervical cancer in women, which is spread by a virus, and to the AIDS epidemic, which is associated with a number of different types of cancer.
Cancer is a disease that affects millions of people around the world every year.
One in three people in this room will develop cancer at some stage in their lives.
I myself had a tumor removed from my large intestine when I was only 14.
Natural selection is survival of the fittest.
And when you have a population of fast-dividing cancer cells, if one of them acquires new mutations, which allow them to grow more quickly, acquire nutrients more successfully, invade the body, they'll be selected for by evolution.
That's why cancer is such a difficult disease to treat.
But that is where the Tasmanian devil cancer has acquired an absolutely amazing evolutionary adaptation.
This is Jonas.
He's a Tasmanian devil that we found with a large tumor on his face.
And being a geneticist, I'm always interested to look at DNA and mutations.
So I took this opportunity to collect some samples from Jonas' tumor and also some samples from other parts of his body.
In fact, Jonas and his tumor were as different from each other as you and the person sitting next to you.
What this told us was that Jonas' tumor did not arise from cells of his own body.
In fact, more genetic profiling told us that this tumor in Jonas actually probably first arose from the cells of a female Tasmanian devil -- and Jonas was clearly a male.
Well the next breakthrough came from studying hundreds of Tasmanian devil cancers from all around Tasmania.
We found that all of these cancers shared the same DNA.
They tend to bite each other, often quite ferociously and usually on the face.
So this Tasmanian devil cancer is perhaps the ultimate cancer.
But if this can happen in Tasmanian devils, why hasn't it happened in other animals or even humans?
He discovered this, a huge bleeding tumor at the base of Kimbo's penis.
And in fact, these same cells that are affecting Kimbo here are also found affecting dogs in New York City, in mountain villages in the Himalayas and in Outback Australia.
In fact, genetic profiling tells that it may be tens of thousands of years old, which means that this cancer may have first arisen from the cells of a wolf that lived alongside the Neanderthals.
Could cancers be contagious between people?
Well this is a question which fascinated Chester Southam, a cancer doctor in the 1950s.
And this is a photograph of Dr. Southam in 1957 injecting cancer into a volunteer, who in this case was an inmate in Ohio State Penitentiary.
(Laughter) it's probably extremely rare for cancers to be transferred between people.
However, under some circumstances, it can happen.
So just finally, cancer is an inevitable outcome of the ability of our cells to divide and to adapt to their environments.
In fact, I believe, given more knowledge of the complex evolutionary processes that drive cancer's growth, we can defeat cancer.
My personal aim is to defeat the Tasmanian devil cancer.
Let's prevent the Tasmanian devil from being the first animal to go extinct from cancer.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Basically, there's a major demographic event going on.
So what's really going on? Well, villages of the world are emptying out.
And here's the unromantic truth -- and the city air makes you free, they said in Renaissance Germany. So some people go to places like Shanghai but most go to the squatter cities where aesthetics rule.
They're people getting out of poverty as fast as they can.
They have home-brewed infrastructure and vibrant urban life.
One-sixth of the GDP in India is coming out of Mumbai.
Education is the main event that can happen in cities.
What's going on in the street in Mumbai?
But I have a problem with that belief, because I know that doodling has a profound impact on the way that we can process information and the way that we can solve problems.
In the 19th century, it was a corrupt politician.
And today, we have what is perhaps our most offensive definition, at least to me, which is the following: To doodle officially means to dawdle, to dilly dally, to monkey around, to make meaningless marks, to do something of little value, substance or import, and -- my personal favorite -- to do nothing.
(Laughter) Additionally, I've heard horror stories from people whose teachers scolded them, of course, for doodling in classrooms.
There is a powerful cultural norm against doodling in settings in which we are supposed to learn something.
And here's the truth: doodling is an incredibly powerful tool, and it is a tool that we need to remember and to re-learn.
There are four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I grew up white, secular and middle class in 1950s America.
So from a relatively young age, I found myself looking to fill an existential hole, to connect with something bigger than myself.
Yep, that was it.
(Laughter) So I got the fountain pen, but I didn't get the sense of belonging and confidence I was searching for.
A budding young naturalist who loved turtles, he immediately settled on the Galapagos.
And when my daughter, Katie, turned 13, she and I spent two weeks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where Katie learned for the first time that she was powerful and brave.
It's a beautiful bit of shared silence that brings us all together in the moment.
(Laughter) So recently, when my family asked me if I could please do something with the more than 250 boxes of stuff that I've collected over a lifetime, my ritual-making impulse kicked in.
(Laughter) I pictured my children opening up box after box and wondering why I'd kept any of that stuff.
(Laughter) And then I imagined them looking at a specific picture of me with a beautiful young woman, and asking, "Who on earth is that with Dad?"
So I started experimenting.
The results were terrific.
As these conversations established common ground, especially across generations, I realized I was opening a space for people to talk about things that really mattered to them.
People are living far longer now, and for the first time in human history, it's common for four generations to be living side by side.
I'm 71, and with a bit of luck, I've got 20 or 30 more years ahead of me.
(Applause)
I teach at Stanford.
This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
And Conan Doyle, writing about Bell, described the following exchange between Bell and his students.
And Bell then goes on to explain to the students.
And the nearest ferry crossing from Fife is from Burntisland.
And finally, she has a dermatitis on the fingers of her right hand, a dermatitis that is unique to the linoleum factory workers in Burntisland."
And it was followed a year or two later by Laennec discovering the stethoscope.
Later he renamed it the stethoscope.
In fact, some of you might well know that the barber pole, the red and white stripes, represents the blood bandages of the barber surgeon, and the receptacles on either end represent the pots in which the blood was collected.
But the arrival of auscultation and percussion represented a sea change, a moment when physicians were beginning to look inside the body.
This is a very famous painting: "The Doctor" by Luke Fildes.
Fildes' oldest son, Philip, died at the age of nine on Christmas Eve after a brief illness.
I've often wondered, what would Fildes have done had he been asked to paint this painting in the modern era, in the year 2011?
The real patient often wonders, where is everyone?
Who's in charge?
This is when I was in Texas.
And she found the place and decided to go there, went there.
I was also influenced by another experience that I had, again, when I was in Texas, before I moved to Stanford.
We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
And I remember having a very eerie sense that the patient and I had slipped back into a primitive ritual in which I had a role and the patient had a role.
And when I was done, the patient said to me with some awe, "I have never been examined like this before."
The good news, it's not cancer, it's not tuberculosis, it's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection.
The bad news is we don't know exactly what's causing this, but here's what you should do, here's what we should do."
"I recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin, unable to speak, his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications.
When he saw me on what turned out to be his last hours on this earth, his hands moved as if in slow motion.
I will see you through this.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Where it comes from is an organization called the Young Foundation, which, over many decades, has come up with many innovations in education, like the Open University and things like Extended Schools, Schools for Social Entrepreneurs, Summer Universities and the School of Everything.
You work by learning, and you learn by working.
We tried it out, first in Luton -- famous for its airport and not much else, I fear -- and in Blackpool -- famous for its beaches and leisure.
We started with two schools.
It's not perfect yet, but we think this is one idea which can transform the lives of thousands, possibly millions, of teenagers who are really bored by schooling.
(Applause)
I was born in Switzerland and raised in Ghana, West Africa.
I was free, I was happy.
The early 70s marked a time of musical and artistic excellence in Ghana.
In 1979, I witnessed my first military coup.
We the children had gathered at a friend's house.
There was a beaten up black and white television flickering in the background, and a former head of state and general was being blindfolded and tied to the pole.
The firing squad aimed, fired -- the general was dead.
Now this was being broadcast live.
And I had become ashamed of the other, the African in me.
And fortunately I decided in 2008 to return to Ghana, after 28 years of absence.
And there, I started by searching for the footprints in my childhood.
And I realized that, when I'd left the country, free and fair elections in a democratic environment were a dream.
And I was thinking, was Ghana searching for its identity like I was looking for my identity?
Was what was happening in Ghana a metaphor for what was happening in me?
Now in 1957, Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to gain its independence.
In the late 50s, Ghana and Singapore had the same GDP.
But maybe it was time to prove to myself, yes, it's important to understand the past, it is important to look at it in a different light, but maybe we should look at the strengths in our own culture and build on those foundations in the present.
And I asked one of the voters, I said, "Whom are you going to vote for?"
Now here's an interesting comparison.
So the people went back to the polls to determine their own president, not the legal system.
The defeated candidate gave up power and made way for Ghana to move into a new democratic cycle.
Ghana taught me to look at people differently and to look at myself differently.
And yes, we Africans can.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So I'm a doctor, but I kind of slipped sideways into research, and now I'm an epidemiologist.
Epidemiology is the science of how we know in the real world if something is good for you or bad for you.
This is somebody called Dr. Gillian McKeith, PhD, or, to give her full medical title, Gillian McKeith.
You go to the website, fill out the form, give them $60, it arrives in the post.
So: "Red wine can help prevent breast cancer."
And what you find is, of course: people who eat veg and olive oil have fewer wrinkles.
So we know that our beliefs and expectations can be manipulated, which is why we do trials where we control against a placebo, where one half of the people get the real treatment, and the other half get placebo.
What I've just shown you are examples of the very simple and straightforward ways that journalists and food supplement pill peddlers and naturopaths can distort evidence for their own purposes.
Twenty years ago, a new generation of antipsychotic drugs were brought in; the promise was they would have fewer side effects.
And so it's no surprise that overall, industry-funded trials are four times more likely to give a positive result than independently sponsored trials.
But -- and it's a big but -- (Laughter) it turns out, when you look at the methods used by industry-funded trials, that they're actually better than independently sponsored trials.
I prefer statistics, so that's what I'll do first.
This is a funnel plot.
This is a drug which I, myself, have prescribed to patients.
In fact, 76 percent of all of the trials that were done on this drug were withheld from doctors and patients.
We already have the data showing it reduces the duration of your flu by a few hours.
This is undoubtedly the single biggest ethical problem facing medicine today.
(Applause)
The history of civilization, in some ways, is a history of maps: How have we come to understand the world around us?
One of the most famous maps works because it really isn't a map at all.
[Small thing. Big idea.] [Michael Bierut on the London Tube Map] The London Underground came together in 1908, when eight different independent railways merged to create a single system.
The map they made is complicated.
Harry Beck was a 29-year-old engineering draftsman who had been working on and off for the London Underground.
They just want to get from station to station -- "Where do I get on? Where do I get off?"
He's taken this complicated mess of spaghetti, and he's simplified it.
Likewise, he spaced the stations equally, he's made every station color correspond to the color of the line, and he's fixed it all so that it's not really a map anymore.
In 1933, the Underground decided, at last, to give Harry Beck's map a try.
They realized they were onto something, they printed 750,000 more, and this is the map that you see today.
Focus on who you're doing this for.
The second principle is simplicity.
Who would've thought that an electrical engineer would be the person to hold the key to unlock what was then one of the most complicated systems in the world -- all started by one guy with a pencil and an idea.
The earliest ones that we can trace are from ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
The Middle Ages, you see a lot of monks that were wearing garments that were cape-like, with hoods attached, so therefore, "hoodies."
And then, of course, there's the legend, there's fantasy.
There's the image of the hoodie connected to the grim reaper.
So there's the dark side of the hoodie.
Of course, though, it was such a functional, comfortable garment that it was very rapidly adopted by workmen everywhere.
It was, at the same time, super-comfortable, perfect for the streets and also had that added value of anonymity when you needed it.
You can immediately think of wearing the hood up, and you feel this warmth and this protection, but at the same time, you can also feel the psychological aspects of it.
When Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American kid, was shot by a neighborhood vigilante, and Million Hoodie Marches happened all over the United States, in which people wore hoodies with the hood up and marched in the streets against this kind of prejudice.
It doesn't happen that often for a garment to have so much symbolism and history and that encompasses so many different universes as the hoodie.
It's made of wood with some layers of paint an eraser and a core, which is made out of graphite, clay and water.
The story of the pencil starts with graphite.
Meanwhile, over in America, in Concord, Massachusetts, it was Henry David Thoreau who came up with the grading scale for different hardnesses of pencil.
The softer the pencil, the more graphite it had in it, and the darker and smoother the line will be.
The firmer the pencil, the more clay it had in it and the lighter and finer it will be.
Originally, when pencils were handmade, they were made round.
There is a pencil for everyone, and every pencil has a story.
The Blackwing 602 is famous for being used by a lot of writers, especially John Steinbeck and Vladimir Nabokov.
The classic one that's been used for years is a horizontal bar.
Something happened in the 70s that is sometimes referred to as "the software crisis," where suddenly, computers were getting more complicated more quickly than anyone had been prepared for, from a design perspective.
That took five minutes.
[Progress...] But once you start thinking about the progress bar as something that's more about dulling the pain of waiting, well, then you can start fiddling around with the psychology.
So if you have a progress bar that just moves at a constant rate -- let's say, that's really what's happening in the computer -- that will feel to people like it's slowing down.
So the progress bar at least gives you the vision of a beginning and an end, and you're working towards a goal.
I think in some ways, it mitigates the fear of death.
It can be made out of rope, a clothesline, twine.
What's important is that it has a certain weight, and that they have that kind of whip sound.
It's not clear what the origin of the jump rope is.
Even formerly enslaved African children in the antebellum South jumped rope, too.
In the 1950s, in Harlem, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, you could see on the sidewalk, lots of girls playing with ropes.
Back from the 1950s to the 1970s, girls weren't supposed to play sports.
A lot has changed, but in that era, girls would rule the playground.
It's the thing that gets passed down over generations.
So, a jump rope, you can use it for all different kinds of things.
There are no bad buttons, there are only bad people.
Then about 3,000 years later, someone finally invented the buttonhole, and buttons were suddenly useful.
The button and the buttonhole is such a great invention.
The design of a button hasn't changed much since the Middle Ages.
It's one of the most enduring designs in history.
There's either a dome button with a little shank, or there's just this sort of round thing with either a rim or not a rim, either two holes or four holes.
Almost more important than the button is the buttonhole.
Before buttons, clothes were bigger -- they were more kind of amorphous, and people, like, wriggled into them or just kind of wrapped themselves in things.
But then fashion moved closer to the body as we discovered uses for the button.
I think the reason buttons have endured for so long, historically, is because they actually work to keep our clothes shut.
Zippers break; Velcro makes a lot of noise, and it wears out after a while.
When I was a kid, my mom knit me this beautiful sweater.
I didn't like it.
I think stairs may be one of the most emotionally malleable physical elements that an architect has to work with.
[Small thing. Big idea.] [David Rockwell on the Stairs] At its most basic, a stair is a way to get from point A to point B at different elevations.
Stairs have a common language.
People climbed using whatever was available: stepped logs, ladders and natural pathways that were worn over time.
Stairs can be made from all kinds of material.
There are linear stairs, there are spiraled stairs.
So for a second, think about stepping down a gradual, monumental staircase like the one in front of the New York Public Library.
That's a totally different experience than going down the narrow staircase to, say, an old pub, where you spill into the room.
Stairs add enormous drama.
Stairs can even be heroic.
I remember thinking to myself, "This is going to change everything about how we communicate."
[Small thing.] [Big idea.] [Margaret Gould Stewart on the Hyperlink] A hyperlink is an interface element, and what I mean by that is, when you're using software on your phone or your computer, there's a lot of code behind the interface that's giving all the instructions for the computer on how to manage it, but that interface is the thing that humans interact with: when we press on this, then something happens.
Designers today have a huge range of options.
The hyperlink uses what's called a markup language -- HTML.
And he had this idea called the "memex," where you could put together a personal library of all of the books and articles that you have access to.
And that idea of connecting sources captured people's imaginations.
In 1982, researchers at the University of Maryland developed a system they called HyperTIES.
Apple invented HyperCard in 1987.
These ideas and inventions, among others, inspired Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.
The hyperlink almost feels like a LEGO block, this very basic building block to a very complex web of connections that exists all around the world.
Because of the way that hyperlinks were first constructed, they were intended to be not only used by many people, but created by many people.
Honestly, I didn't think about it much myself.
When I was 10 years old, there was a girl in my class at school named Vicky.
mercilessly.
My clearest memory is standing in the empty hallway outside the fifth grade classrooms waiting for Vicky to come out of the bathroom, and I have a clipboard and a pen and a survey I've made up, asking about shampoo preferences, like I'm doing a study for science class or something.
And as classes let out, I ran down the hall shouting at all the other kids, "Sticky Vicky uses White Rain shampoo.
I reached out to friends and eventually social media, and I did everything I could to try to find Vicky.
(Laughter) I wrote a book about hate.
(Laughter) Now at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, "Why are y'all worried about hate?
You didn't hate Vicky.
Gordon Allport, the psychologist who pioneered the study of hate in the early 1900s, developed what he called a "scale of prejudice."
Isn't that all hate?
That is not just a coincidence.
That's hate.
I am defining hate in a broad way because I think we have a big problem.
What if you believe that group of people is inferior, but you don't say it?
(Laughter) But hating a Nazi is still hate, right?
What about hating someone who isn't as enlightened as you?
(Laughter) I'm not hateful, I'm just right, right?
(Laughter) Wrong.
me and you.
Let me give you just one example of the former terrorist I spent time with in the West Bank.
When Bassam Aramin was 16 years old, he tried to blow up an Israeli military convoy with a grenade.
He failed, fortunately, but he was still sentenced to seven years in prison.
When he was in prison, they showed a film about the Holocaust.
Up until that point, Bassam had thought the Holocaust was mostly a myth.
But when he saw what really happened, he broke down crying.
And eventually, after prison, Bassam went on to get a master's degree in Holocaust studies and he founded an organization where former Palestinian combatants and Israeli combatants come together, work together, try to find common ground.
Bassam says he still doesn't hate Israelis, even after the Israeli military -- shot and killed his [10]-year-old daughter, Abir, while she was walking to school.
(Sigh) Bassam even forgave the soldier who killed his daughter.
if a terrorist can learn to stop hating and still not hate when their child is killed, surely the rest of us can stop our habits of demeaning and dehumanizing each other.
And the good news is, we're also the ones who shape that culture, which means we can change it.
There are studies that teenagers who participate in racially integrated classes and activities reduce their racial bias.
In the United States, for instance, three-quarters of white people don't have any non-white friends.
That's it.
But it's hard.
The entire time I was traveling around the Middle East and Rwanda and across the United States, hearing these unbelievable stories of people in communities who had left entire histories of hate behind, I was still looking for Vicky.
It was so hard find her that I hired a private investigator and he found her.
The truth is, it became clear that the person I'm calling Vicky had gone to extraordinary lengths to hide her identity.
But anyway, a year after I began my journey, I wrote Vicky an apology.
Which is why I'm here.
(Applause)
The night before I was heading for Scotland, I was invited to host the final of "China's Got Talent" show in Shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in the stadium.
Susan Boyle.
It means "green onion for free."
My generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate in the historic transformation of China that has made so many changes in the past 20, 30 years.
I remember that in the year of 1990, when I was graduating from college, I was applying for a job in the sales department of the first five-star hotel in Beijing, Great Wall Sheraton -- it's still there.
I didn't have a clue what a sales department was about in a five-star hotel.
That was the first day I set my foot in a five-star hotel.
Around the same time, I was going through an audition -- the first ever open audition by national television in China -- with another thousand college girls.
So when it was my turn, I stood up and said, "Why [do] women's personalities on television always have to be beautiful, sweet, innocent and, you know, supportive?
How are they different, and what are the differences they are going to make to shape the future of China, or at large, the world?
First of all, who are they? [What] do they look like?
Well this is a girl called Guo Meimei -- 20 years old, beautiful.
She showed off her expensive bags, clothes and car on her microblog, which is the Chinese version of Twitter.
The controversy was so heated that the Red Cross had to open a press conference to clarify it, and the investigation is going on.
It shows us a general mistrust of government or government-backed institutions, which lacked transparency in the past.
And also it showed us the power and the impact of social media as microblog.
Sina.com, a major news portal, alone has more than 140 million microbloggers.
The most popular blogger -- it's not me -- it's a movie star, and she has more than 9.5 million followers, or fans.
About 80 percent of those microbloggers are young people, under 30 years old.
First of all, most of them were born in the 80s and 90s, under the one-child policy.
So it means young couples will have to support four parents who have a life expectancy of 73 years old.
In urban areas, college graduates find the starting salary is about 400 U.S. dollars a month, while the average rent is above $500.
Among the 200 million migrant workers, 60 percent of them are young people.
Last year, though, an appalling incident in a southern OEM manufacturing compound in China: 13 young workers in their late teens and early 20s committed suicide, just one by one like causing a contagious disease.
But then in the last two years, it goes up again to 39 percent, indicating a rising living cost.
The Gini coefficient has already passed the dangerous line of 0.4.
And so you see this whole society getting frustrated about losing some of its mobility.
So through some of the hottest topics on microblogging, we can see what young people care most about.
Similarly, many other issues concerning public safety is a hot topic on the Internet.
They have sorts of ingredients that you brush on a piece of chicken or fish, and it turns it to look like beef.
And this is a girl explicitly saying on a TV dating show that she would rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle.
A father posted his son's picture onto the Internet.
So happiness is the most popular word we have heard through the past two years.
Happiness is not only related to personal experiences and personal values, but also, it's about the environment.
How are we going to perform our social and political reform to keep pace with economic growth, to keep sustainability and stability?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And I was thinking about quarks and gluons and heavy ion collisions, and I was only 14 years old -- No, no, I wasn't 14 years old.
Later, I would work on evolutionary genetics, and I would work on systems biology.
But I'm going to tell you about something else today.
I'm going to tell you about how I learned something about life.
And I was actually a rocket scientist.
I wasn't really a rocket scientist, but I was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in sunny California, where it's warm; whereas now I am in the mid-West, and it's cold.
But it was an exciting experience.
And he said, "It's any measurable phenomenon that allows us to indicate the presence of life."
And he goes, "Right, that's life too. I know that."
So it's actually life, but it's actually not as we thought life would be.
And then, of course, NASA also had a big announcement, and President Clinton gave a press conference, about this amazing discovery of life in a Martian meteorite.
But the idea was taken very quickly a little bit further, when a scientist working at the Santa Fe Institute decided, "Why don't we try to package these little viruses in artificial worlds inside of the computer and let them evolve?"
And he designed this system, but it really didn't work, because his viruses were constantly destroying each other.
There's about 10,000 programs sitting here.
So I said, "Well, perhaps we should construct a biosignature based on life as a universal process.
So that we actually, to test this idea, first took a look at amino acids and some other carboxylic acids.
So I'm going to show you now a little experiment that we did.
And thank you very much.
(Applause)
So we've got triple the space, but we've become such good shoppers that we need even more space.
Secondly, our new mantra: small is sexy.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I hope, within the next 10 minutes, to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life.
And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth, that number well more than doubles.
Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage.
And it's becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams.
It's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals.
And the metals, we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world.
And these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we're already starting to see today.
Plastics are a whole other story: well less than 10 percent are recovered.
Most of it's incinerated or landfilled.
And there's more plastics produced and consumed around the world on a volume basis every year than steel.
They have different electrical and magnetic properties.
So it's very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials.
Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range.
And any plastic can be any color, as you probably well know.
This is a photo I took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in Mumbai, India.
They bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these, and people try very hard to separate the plastics, by color, by shape, by feel, by any technique they can.
And sometimes they'll resort to what's known as the "burn and sniff" technique where they'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic.
So about 20 years ago, I literally started in my garage tinkering around, trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other, and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends, in the mining world actually, and in the plastics world, and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world.
It's the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the Earth.
You breakdown the molecules, you recombine them in very specific ways, to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day.
And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry.
And these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic, replacing virgin plastic, to make their new products.
Thank you for your time.
(Applause)
I am a conductor, and I'm here today to talk to you about trust.
It's silent gesture.
If you hold it too loosely, it flies away."
Back in 2000, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa to form a new opera company.
And that showed me such a fundamental truth, that music making and other forms of creativity can so often go to places where mere words cannot.
And I think, in no small way, that's due to one fundamental fact: they're not bound to a system of notation.
A very simple tune based on three notes -- T, E, D.
So T is F.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's nearly time for tea.
Now there's a project that I'm initiating at the moment that I'm very excited about and wanted to share with you, because it is all about changing perceptions, and, indeed, building a new level of trust.
But the gift that my gorgeous daughter has given me, aside from her very existence, is that it's opened my eyes to a whole stretch of the community that was hitherto hidden, the community of disabled people.
And I found myself looking at the Paralympics and thinking how incredible how technology's been harnessed to prove beyond doubt that disability is no barrier to the highest levels of sporting achievement.
Of course there's a grimmer side to that truth, which is that it's actually taken decades for the world at large to come to a position of trust, to really believe that disability and sports can go together in a convincing and interesting fashion.
You can't tell me that there aren't millions of disabled people, in the U.K. alone, with massive musical potential.
It's going to be Britain's first ever national disabled orchestra.
It's called Paraorchestra.
Just me and four astonishingly gifted disabled musicians.
I'm 22, and I'm a left-handed pianist.
And I was born without my left hand -- right hand.
(Music) Clarence: I would rather be able to play an instrument again than walk.
(Music) (Applause) CH: I only wish that some of those musicians were here with us today, so you could see at firsthand how utterly extraordinary they are.
Paraorchestra is the name of that project.
Where there is no trust, the music quite simply withers away.
What is going on in this baby's mind?
In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture.
One thing that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure out what's going on in the mind of that other baby.
Anyone who's followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get.
Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli.
And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds.
They're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects.
And this is a bird on the cover of science who's learned how to use a tool to get food.
They depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years, which is a really long time in the life of a bird.
Whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months.
So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot.
There's something about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning.
Other creatures, like the crows, aren't very good at doing anything in particular, but they're extremely good at learning about laws of different environments.
My son is 23.
Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species -- kind of like caterpillars and butterflies -- except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
If this is true, if these babies are designed to learn -- and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that's what they're for -- we might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms.
And in fact, the baby's brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet.
But real computers are actually getting to be a lot better.
And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies might be doing the same thing.
This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others.
And using this very simple machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world.
But unconsciously, they're doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure.
So in these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments.
If you look at the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, what they really do is do a series of experiments.
And I think just the opposite is true.
So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention.
If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different.
But they're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once.
And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet.
And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you've been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters.
So what's it like to be a baby?
It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double-espressos.
We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves.
But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children.
(Applause)
Some people call this "citizen journalism," other people call it "collaborative journalism."
But really, it kind of means this: for the journalists, people like me, it means accepting that you can't know everything, and allowing other people, through technology, to be your eyes and your ears.
And I believe this can be a really empowering process.
So I'm going to explain this to you today with two cases, two stories that I've investigated.
And they both involve controversial deaths.
We were able to tell an alternative truth utilizing new technology, utilizing social media, particularly Twitter.
Essentially, what I'm talking about here is, as I said, citizen journalism.
So, to take the first case: this is Ian Tomlinson, the man in the foreground.
He was a newspaper vendor from London, and on the 1st of April 2009, he died at the G20 protests in London.
He had an encounter with a man behind him, and as you can see, the man behind him has covered his face with a balaclava.
But I can tell you now, he was PC Simon Harwood, a police officer with London's Metropolitan Police Force.
Now, moments after this image was shot, Harwood struck Tomlinson with a baton, and he pushed him to ground, and Tomlinson died moments later.
Initially, through official statements and off-the-record briefings, they said that Ian Tomlinson had died of natural causes.
I show you this slide, because this was the newspaper that Ian Tomlinson had been selling for 20 years of his life.
But you can see here, the bottles that were supposedly being thrown at police were turned into bricks by the time they reached this edition of the newspaper.
I discovered that Twitter was a microblogging site.
They went to Ian Tomlinson's aid after he collapsed.
They phoned the ambulance.
So they were concerned that the stories weren't quite as accurate as police were claiming them to be.
And again, through social media, we started encountering individuals with material like this: photographs, evidence.
Now, this does not show the attack on Ian Tomlinson, but he appears to be in some distress.
Was he drunk? Did he fall over?
For us, this was enough to investigate further, to dig deeper.
One of the most amazing things about the internet is: the information that people put out is freely available to anyone, as we all know.
As long as your news is the right side of a paywall, i.e, it's free, anybody can access it.
And stories like these, which were questioning the official version of events, which were skeptical in tone, allowed people to realize that we had questions ourselves.
Individuals with material that could help us were drawn toward us by some kind of gravitational force.
And after six days, we had managed to track down around 20 witnesses.
This is the scene of Ian Tomlinson's death, the Bank of England in London.
There was no official investigation into his death.
And then something changed.
I got an email from an investment fund manager in New York.
On the day of Ian Tomlinson's death, he'd been in London on business, and he'd taken out his digital camera, and he'd recorded this.
(Video) Narrator: This is the crowd at G20 protest on April the 1st, around 7:20pm.
They were on Cornhill, near the Bank of England.
This footage will form the basis of a police investigation into the death of this man.
Ian Tomlinson was walking through this area, attempting to get home from work.
(People yelling) We've slowed down the footage to show how it poses serious questions about police conduct.
Here the riot officer appears to strike Tomlinson's leg area with a baton.
It was two o'clock in the morning, I was there with an IT guy -- the video wasn't coming.
Now, like Ian Tomlinson, he was a father, he lived in London.
But he was a political refugee from Angola.
He'd become unwell on the flight, the plane had returned to Heathrow, and then he was transferred to hospital and pronounced dead.
In the case of Ian Tomlinson, the witnesses were still in London.
Again, we turned to the internet.
The tone of some these stories, journalism professors might frown upon because they were skeptical; they were asking questions, perhaps speculative, maybe the kind of things journalists shouldn't do.
And one of the fascinating things about Twitter is that the pattern of flow of information is unlike anything we've ever seen before.
But strangely, tweets have an uncanny ability to reach their intended destination.
He was on an Angolan oil field when he sent me this tweet.
I was in my office in London.
And he contacted me.
And this is what Michael said.
The last thing we heard the man saying was he couldn't breathe.
And you've got three security guards, each one of them looked like 100-kilo plus, bearing down on him, holding him down -- from what I could see, below the seats.
And all I could see was his head sticking up above the seats, and he was hollering out, you know, "Help me!"
Wow; I didn't get involved because I was scared I might get kicked off the flight and lose my job.
And Michael was actually one of five witnesses that we eventually managed to track down, most of them, as I said, through the internet, through social media.
We could actually place them on the plane, so you could see exactly where they were sat.
And I should say at this stage that one really important dimension to all of this for journalists who utilize social media and who utilize citizen journalism is making sure we get our facts correct.
So in the case of the Ian Tomlinson witnesses, I got them to return to the scene of the death and physically walk me through and tell me exactly what they had seen.
The danger in all of this for journalists -- for all of us -- is that we're victims of hoaxes, or that there's deliberate misinformation fed into the public domain.
So we have to be careful.
But nobody can deny the power of citizen journalism.
Now, think of the two biggest news stories of the year.
Water lifting up inside people's living rooms, supermarkets shaking -- these were images shot by citizen journalists and instantly shared on the internet.
And it doesn't matter if it was Egypt or Libya or Syria or Yemen.
Individuals have managed to overcome the repressive restrictions in those regimes by recording their environment and telling their own stories on the internet.
This image -- and I could have shown you any, actually; YouTube is full of them -- This image is of an apparently unarmed protester in Bahrain.
And he's being shot by security forces.
But citizen journalism and this technology has inserted a new layer of accountability into our world, and I think that's a good thing.
So to conclude: the theme of the conference, "Why not?" -- I think for journalists, it's quite simple, really.
That's new for journalists.
Well, I think that's very simple, too.
That process of witnessing, recording and sharing is journalism.
When I was little -- and by the way, I was little once -- my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker.
And the watchmaker turned around and said, "God can see it."
But I felt something.
And it was a physiological response.
And as I took on my career as a designer, I began to ask myself the simple question: Do we actually think beauty, or do we feel it?
Now you probably know the answer to this already.
And then somebody, I think it was BMW, introduced a light that went out slowly.
I remember it clearly.
And I suddenly realized that there was something that did exactly that -- light to dark in six seconds -- exactly that.
I felt a sense of relaxation tempered with anticipation.
It's actually just happened here -- light to dark in six seconds.
Now I'm not a neuroscientist.
I don't know even if there is something called a conditioned reflex.
But it might be.
This is one of the most beautiful things I know.
It's a plastic bag.
And all of a sudden, this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me.
Look at that picture.
But what are you doing?
Because I have to know how people react to things.
That's not the expression of joy.
There's something else in that.
There's something weird happening.
Poignancy is a word I love as a designer.
It means something triggering a big emotional response, often quite a sad emotional response, but it's part of what we do.
And this is the dilemma, this is the paradox, of beauty.
Now what I'm also interested in is: Is it possible to separate intrinsic and extrinsic beauty?
In fact, this lady has a particularly asymmetrical face, of which both sides are beautiful.
And this is the F1 MV Agusta.
It is really -- I mean, I can't express to you how exquisite this object is.
It's not about the shapes, it's how the shapes reflect light.
Massimo Tamburini.
They call him "The Plumber" in Italy, as well as "Maestro," because he actually is engineer and craftsman and sculptor at the same time.
But unfortunately, the likes of me and people that are like me have to deal with compromise all the time with beauty.
And so look at her.
It's lovely because it is an embodiment of something refreshing and delicious.
You all, I guess, like me, enjoy watching a ballet dancer dance.
You also may be taking into account the fact that it's incredibly painful.
Now I'm using microseconds wrongly here, so please ignore me.
Did you think it was modern? Yes you did.
Look at that. Do you want to see it again?
You didn't maybe know it.
It feels fantastic when you do it, you look forward to doing it, and when you tell somebody else about it -- like you probably have -- you look really smart.
Form is function. Form is function.
And so I've stopped using words like "form," and I've stopped using words like "function" as a designer.
What I try to pursue now is the emotional functionality of things.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
This is Vannevar Bush.
And in 1945, he published an article in a magazine called Atlantic Monthly.
The brain works by association.
And so he suggested a machine, and he called it the memex.
So this was before the computer was invented.
And by the mid-60s, he was able to put this into action when he worked at the Stanford Research Lab in California.
And my company, OWL built a system called Guide for the Apple Macintosh.
And we delivered the world's first hypertext system.
Apple introduced a thing called HyperCard, and they made a bit of a fuss about it.
So I took this system to a trade show in Versailles near Paris in late November 1990.
And he tried to persuade me to write the browser for it, because his system didn't have any graphics or fonts or layout or anything; it was just plain text.
And I saw it, and I thought, yep, that's it.
And the very next year, in 1994, we had the conference here in Edinburgh, and I had no opposition in having Tim Berners-Lee as the keynote speaker.
On the other hand, there's Marc Andreessen who wrote the world's first browser for the World Wide Web.
But is he happy?
(Laughter) (Applause)
(Applause) Thank you for giving me the opportunity to perform tonight at TED New York.
I've been a dedicated TED fan and viewer, and also, I actually used to live in Manhattan when I was younger, so New York is like a second home to me, and it's great to be back.
The song I just performed was called "my mama," and the next song I'm going to perform is another original song of mine called "BLACK BANANA."
Just like fruit ripens when the time is right.
So it's my interpretation of building the future.
(Guitar music starts) Clap your hands.
One!
Two!
(Applause) (Guitar music) (Music ends) (Applause)
Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room, but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar.
(Laughter) Also, the person to your left is a liar.
We're all liars.
So sorry."
Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States.
And we all kind of hate to admit it.
On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times.
But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other.
We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers.
Extroverts lie more than introverts.
Women lie more to protect other people.
If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions.
We're deeply ambivalent about the truth.
(Laughter) Two-year-olds bluff.
By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions.
Why is it so easy to learn?
Because we think liars fidget all the time.
Now, that smile is known in the trade as "duping delight."
See now if you can spot him saying, "yes" while shaking his head "no," slightly shrugging his shoulders.
Murderers are known to leak sadness.
We're human beings.
Now, we've talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who's lying and how to spot a lie.
But I'm going to show you two videos, two mothers -- one is lying, one is telling the truth.
This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it.
And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother.
(Video) Diane Downs: At night when I close my eyes, I can see Christie reaching her hand out to me while I'm driving, and the blood just kept coming out of her mouth.
And that -- maybe it'll fade too with time -- but I don't think so.
But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her.
And that's the truth. Thank you.
(Applause)
So I'm here to explain why I'm wearing these ninja pajamas.
And to do that, I'd like to talk first about environmental toxins in our bodies.
So some of you may know about the chemical Bisphenol A, BPA.
It's a material hardener and synthetic estrogen that's found in the lining of canned foods and some plastics.
So BPA mimics the body's own hormones and causes neurological and reproductive problems.
And it's everywhere.
A recent study found BPA in 93 percent of people six and older.
But it's just one chemical.
says we have 219 toxic pollutants in our bodies, and this includes preservatives, pesticides and heavy metals like lead and mercury.
Second, we are both responsible for and the victims of our own pollution.
And third, our bodies are filters and storehouses for environmental toxins.
So what happens to all these toxins when we die?
But our current funeral practices make the situation much worse.
And in a traditional American funeral, a dead body is covered with fillers and cosmetics to make it look alive.
It's then pumped with toxic formaldehyde to slow decomposition -- a practice which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel.
Green or natural burials, which don't use embalming, are a step in the right direction, but they don't address the existing toxins in our bodies.
I think there's a better solution.
I'm an artist, so I'd like to offer a modest proposal at the intersection of art, science and culture.
The Infinity Burial Project, an alternative burial system that uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies.
The Infinity Burial Project began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the Infinity Mushroom -- a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies, clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots, leaving clean compost.
But I learned it's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom.
I also learned that some of our tastiest mushrooms can clean environmental toxins in soil.
So I thought maybe I could train an army of toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms to eat my body.
It's a kind of imprinting and selective breeding process for the afterlife.
So when I die, the Infinity Mushrooms will recognize my body and be able to eat it.
(Laughter) Just a little.
I realize this is not the kind of relationship that we usually aspire to have with our food.
But as I watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body, I imagine the Infinity Mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment.
See for me, cultivating the Infinity Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet, it's a step towards accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay.
It's also a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet.
First, a burial suit infused with mushroom spores, the Mushroom Death Suit.
(Laughter) I'm wearing the second prototype of this burial suit.
It's covered with a crocheted netting that is embedded with mushroom spores.
The dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia, which are the equivalent of plant roots.
These capsules are embedded in a nutrient-rich jelly, a kind of second skin, which dissolves quickly and becomes baby food for the growing mushrooms.
And believe it or not, a few people have offered to donate their bodies to the project to be eaten by mushrooms.
(Laughter) What I've learned from talking to these folks is that we share a common desire to understand and accept death and to minimize the impact of our death on the environment.
Accepting death means accepting that we are physical beings who are intimately connected to the environment, as the research on environmental toxins confirms.
I believe this is the beginning of true environmental responsibility.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Everything was at my feet.
So in 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time.
It changed my life.
I came back home, told my mother, "I'd like to live and work in a village."
No job, no money, no security, no prospect."
"Dig wells for five years?
You went to the most expensive school and college in India, and you want to dig wells for five years?"
And I thought I'd start a Barefoot College -- college only for the poor.
I said, "No."
(Laughter) "You failed in your exam?"
"What are you doing here?
Why are you here?
I said, "No, I want to actually start a college only for the poor.
So we started the Barefoot College, and we redefined professionalism.
A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief.
And no one can get more than $100 a month.
You come for the work and the challenge, you'll come to the Barefoot College.
You don't need a paper to hang on the wall to show that you are an engineer.
So we built the first Barefoot College in 1986.
150 people lived there, worked there.
No water, rocky soil."
And we have 60 meals twice a day of solar cooking.
Barefoot technology: this was 1986 -- no engineer, no architect thought of it -- but we are collecting rainwater from the roofs.
All the roofs are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank, and no water is wasted.
If we have four years of drought, we still have water on the campus, because we collect rainwater.
So we thought of starting a school at night for the children.
Democracy, citizenship, how you should measure your land, what you should do if you're arrested, what you should do if your animal is sick.
This is what we teach in the night schools.
Every five years we have an election.
Between six to 14 year-old children participate in a democratic process, and they elect a prime minister.
The prime minister is 12 years old.
And they actually monitor and supervise 150 schools for 7,000 children.
She got the World's Children's Prize five years ago, and she went to Sweden.
(Laughter) (Applause) Where the percentage of illiteracy is very high, we use puppetry.
(Laughter) (Applause) So this decentralized, demystified approach of solar-electrifying villages, we've covered all over India from Ladakh up to Bhutan -- all solar-electrified villages by people who have been trained.
What's the best way of communicating in the world today?
(Laughter) (Applause) So we went to Afghanistan for the first time, and we picked three women and said, "We want to take them to India."
Sign language.
This woman is an extraordinary grandmother.
He didn't know.
Those three women have trained 27 more women and solar-electrified 100 villages in Afghanistan.
All these women sitting at one table from eight, nine countries, all chatting to each other, not understanding a word, because they're all speaking a different language.
I went to Sierra Leone, and there was this minister driving down in the dead of night -- comes across this village.
(Laughter) Success story.
Look for solutions within.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win."
Thank you.
(Applause)
Why can't we solve these problems?
The B15 iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf.
And yet I think it's this perspective of us as humans to look at our world through the lens of normal is one of the forces that stops us developing real solutions.
Only 90 days after this, arguably the greatest discovery of the last century occurred.
It was the sequencing for the first time of the human genome.
This is the code that's in every single one of our 50 trillion cells that makes us who we are and what we are.
Two nanometers is 20 atoms in thickness.
And what if we could get exquisite control over the essence of energy, the electron?
So I started to go around the world finding the best and brightest scientists I could at universities whose collective discoveries have the chance to take us there, and we formed a company to build on their extraordinary ideas.
Think of the space that we spend most of our time.
We like the light that comes into the room, but in the middle of summer, all that heat is coming into the room that we're trying to keep cool.
In winter, exactly the opposite is happening.
How is that possible?
One of the things about working at the nanoscale is things look and act very differently.
You think of carbon as black.
And once you've changed its state, it stays there until you change its state again.
As we were working on this incredible discovery at University of Florida, we were told to go down the corridor to visit another scientist, and he was working on a pretty incredible thing.
Firstly I'm going to show you the transparency.
Transparency is key.
And you can see, off a tiny film, incredible clarity.
Suddenly you've converted energy into an electron on a plastic surface that you can stick on your window.
But because it's flexible, it can be on any surface whatsoever.
It was in actually a diner outside of Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.
And what they built was eBox.
EBox is testing new nanomaterials to park an electron on the outside, hold it until you need it, and then be able to release it and pass it off.
The grid of tomorrow is no grid, and energy, clean efficient energy, will one day be free.
But in a world where energy is freed and transmittable easily and cheaply, we can take any water wherever we are and turn it into whatever we need.
I'm glad to be working with incredibly brilliant and kind scientists, no kinder than many of the people in the world, but they have a magic look at the world.
18 years ago, I saw a photograph in the paper.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I consider myself one part artist and one part designer.
And I work at an artificial intelligence research lab.
We're trying to create technology that you'll want to interact with in the far future.
Not just six months from now, but try years and decades from now.
I view art as the gateway to help us bridge this gap between human and machine: to figure out what it means to get each other so that we can train AI to get us.
See, to me, art is a way to put tangible experiences to intangible ideas, feelings and emotions.
We have what feels like an infinite range of emotions, and to top it off, we're all different.
And this is what makes life really interesting.
See, for every qualitative thing about us -- you know, those parts of us that are emotional, dynamic and subjective -- we have to convert it to a quantitative metric: something that can be represented with facts, figures and computer code.
So, think about hearing your favorite song for the first time.
How did you feel?
Hard to describe, right?
So, in the lab, I've been creating art as a way to help me design better experiences for bleeding-edge technology.
And it's been serving as a catalyst to beef up the more human ways that computers can relate to us.
And how does intuition affect the way that we interact?
So, take for example human emotion.
But what about the more complex emotions?
So, to explore this, I created a piece of art, an experience, that asked people to share a memory, and I teamed up with some data scientists to figure out how to take an emotion that's so highly subjective and convert it into something mathematically precise.
You know, like looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.
Like, conversation.
So think about sitting with your friend at a coffee shop and just having small talk.
But when it comes to teaching AI systems how to interact with people, we have to teach them step by step what to do.
And there's a whole branch of sociology, called conversation analysis, that tries to make blueprints for different types of conversation.
I've been collaborating with a conversation analyst at the lab to try to help our AI systems hold more human-sounding conversations.
So I created a piece of art that tries to highlight the robotic, clunky interaction to help us understand, as designers, why it doesn't sound human yet and, well, what we can do about it.
So while it might be grammatically correct and uses all the right hashtags and emojis, it can end up sounding mechanical and, well, a little creepy.
And we call this the uncanny valley.
So there are other things that get lost in translation, too, like human intuition.
So think about the last time that you saw an old classmate or coworker.
And I created a piece that explores computer-based intuition in a physical space.
The piece is called Wayfinding, and it's set up as a symbolic compass that has four kinetic sculptures.
Each one represents a direction, north, east, south and west.
And there are sensors set up on the top of each sculpture that capture how far away you are from them.
The thing is, the piece doesn't work like the automatic door sensor that just opens when you walk in front of it.
So when you walk in front of it, it starts to use all of the data that it's captured throughout its exhibition history -- or its intuition -- to mechanically respond to you based on what it's learned from others.
We can almost see our intuition being played out on the computer, picturing all of that data being processed in our mind's eye.
My hope is that this type of art will help us think differently about intuition and how to apply that to AI in the future.
So these are just a few examples of how I'm using art to feed into my work as a designer and researcher of artificial intelligence.
And I see it as a crucial way to move innovation forward.
Because right now, there are a lot of extremes when it comes to AI.
But regardless of where you stand, it's hard to deny that we're living in a world that's becoming more and more digital by the second.
Our lives revolve around our devices, smart appliances and more.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So what I'm going to talk about is why we don't have a good brain theory, why it is important that we should develop one and what we can do about it.
We study theoretical neuroscience and how the neocortex works.
Very early in my career I decided I was not going to be in the computer industry.
Today is, I think, the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA.
I said, I want to build intelligent machines too, but I want to study how brains work first.
But I'm doing it now, and I'm going to tell you about it.
So why should we have a good brain theory?
Why do we study ants? It's interesting.
This is one, too, because when we understand how brains work, we'll be able to build intelligent machines.
Some say we still don't have enough data, we need more information, there's all these things we don't know.
So we can say, my neocortex, the part of the brain I'm interested in, has 30 billion cells.
Some people say, brains can't understand brains.
Look at other scientific revolutions -- the solar system, that's Copernicus, Darwin's evolution, and tectonic plates, that's Wegener.
They all have a lot in common with brain science.
First, they had a lot of unexplained data. A lot of it.
My daughters understood these three theories, in their basic framework, in kindergarten.
In the case of the solar system, the idea that the Earth is spinning, the surface is going a thousand miles an hour, and it's going through the solar system at a million miles an hour -- this is lunacy; we all know the Earth isn't moving.
Do you feel like you're moving a thousand miles an hour?
So it was intuitive and obvious. Now, what about evolution?
The fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor.
This is what evolution tells us. And it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.
And the same thing about tectonic plates.
Intelligence is defined by prediction.
Alan Turing defined the Turing test, which essentially says, we'll know if something's intelligent if it behaves identical to a human -- a behavioral metric of what intelligence is that has stuck in our minds for a long time.
Now in evolution, what happened?
First thing that happened in evolution with mammals is we started to develop a thing called the neocortex.
So as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain, it also goes up into the neocortex.
Humans uniquely have the same mechanism on the front, but we use it for motor control.
I don't have time to explain, but to understand how a brain works, you have to understand how the first part of the mammalian neocortex works, how it is we store patterns and make predictions.
With an album, at the end of a song, the next song pops into your head.
When you go home tonight, you'll put your hand out, reach for the doorknob, notice it's in the wrong spot and go, "Whoa, something happened."
I've found the best people to work with are physicists, engineers and mathematicians, who tend to think algorithmically.
Then they have to learn the anatomy and the physiology.
What will brain theory look like?
And as I said, the theory must be biologically accurate, it must be testable and you must be able to build it.
Now we know today -- this was revealed by Thomas Reed, Ronald Reagan's former U.S. Air Force Secretary -- this explosion was actually the result of a CIA sabotage operation, in which they had managed to infiltrate the IT management systems of that pipeline.
And to understand why, we must look at how, through the ages, military technologies have maintained or destroyed world peace.
For example, if we'd had TEDxParis 350 years ago, we would have talked about the military innovation of the day -- the massive Vauban-style fortifications -- and we could have predicted a period of stability in the world or in Europe.
So military technologies can influence the course of the world, can make or break world peace -- and there lies the issue with cyber weapons.
Just 3 years ago, both the U.S. and France were saying they were investing militarily in cyberspace, strictly to defend their IT systems.
In May 2007, Estonia was the victim of cyberattacks, that damaged its communication and banking systems.
Because NATO couldn't be 100% sure that the Kremlin was indeed behind these attacks.
Just last week, in a New York Times article dated January 26, 2010, it was revealed for the first time that officials at the National Security Agency were considering the possibility of preemptive attacks in cases where the U.S. was about to be cyberattacked.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Recently, we've seen the effects of cyber attacks on the business world.
Data breaches at companies like JP Morgan, Yahoo, Home Depot and Target have caused losses of hundreds of millions and in some cases, billions of dollars.
In 2012 to 2014, there was a significant data breach at the US Office of Personnel Management.
And you may have heard of the attempt by state-sponsored hackers to use stolen data to influence election outcomes in a number of countries.
Two recent examples are the compromise of a large amount of data from the Bundestag, the national Parliament of Germany, and the theft of emails from the US Democratic National Committee.
The cyber threat is now affecting our democratic processes.
And it's likely to get worse.
As computer technology is becoming more powerful, the systems we use to protect our data are becoming more vulnerable.
Adding to the concern is a new type of computing technology, called quantum computing, which leverages microscopic properties of nature to deliver unimaginable increases in computational power.
Should we start packing our digital survival gear and prepare for an upcoming data apocalypse?
Quantum computing is still in the labs, and it will take a few years until it's put to practical applications.
For me, this is a particularly exciting time in the history of secure communications.
About 15 years ago, when I learned of our new-found ability to create quantum effects that don't exist in nature, I was excited.
That's right.
It has a special combination lock which, when closed, converts all the text in the documents to random numbers.
The code -- we call this an encryption key.
We call this key exchange.
This is how you ensure you get the encryption key securely to the right place.
We call this an encryption algorithm.
Most security systems rely on a secure method for key exchange to communicate the encryption key to the right place.
However, rapid increases in computational power are putting at risk a number of the key exchange methods we have today.
In 1994, just 17 years later, the code was broken.
As computers have become more and more powerful, we've had to use larger and larger codes.
We have to find a way to defend our castle.
Remember those three things important for encryption -- high-quality keys, secure key exchange and a strong algorithm?
Well, advances in science and engineering are putting two of those three elements at risk.
Random numbers are the foundational building blocks of encryption keys.
Currently, we construct encryption keys from sequences of random numbers generated from software, so-called pseudo-random numbers.
The less random the numbers are, or in scientific terms, the less entropy they contain, the easier they are to predict.
Recently, several casinos have been victims of a creative attack.
The output of slot machines was recorded over a period of time and then analyzed.
This allowed the cyber criminals to reverse engineer the pseudo-random number generator behind the spinning wheels.
Similar risks apply to encryption keys.
So having a true random number generator is essential for secure encryption.
For years, researchers have been looking at building true random number generators.
But the quantum world is truly random.
So it makes sense to take advantage of this intrinsic randomness.
Devices that can measure quantum effects can produce an endless stream of random numbers at high speed.
A select group of universities and companies around the world are focused on building true random number generators.
Today, it's miniaturized into a PCI card that plugs into a standard computer.
This is the world's fastest true random number generator.
It measures quantum effects to produce a billion random numbers per second.
And it's in use today to improve security at cloud providers, banks and government agencies around the world.
(Applause) But even with a true random number generator, we've still got the second big cyber threat: the problem of secure key exchange.
Current key exchange techniques will not stand up to a quantum computer.
The quantum solution to this problem is called quantum key distribution or QKD, which leverages a fundamental, counterintuitive characteristic of quantum mechanics.
The very act of looking at a quantum particle changes it.
Let me give you an example of how this works.
Except this time, instead of a call to give James the code, we're going to use quantum effects on a laser to carry the code and send it over standard optic fiber to James.
And because the security is based on the fundamental laws of physics, a quantum computer, or indeed any future supercomputer will not be able to break it.
My team and I are collaborating with leading universities and the defense sector to mature this exciting technology into the next generation of security products.
The internet of things is heralding a hyperconnected era with 25 to 30 billion connected devices forecast by 2020.
We're betting that quantum technologies will be essential in providing this trust, enabling us to fully benefit from the amazing innovations that are going to so enrich our lives.
Thank you.
(Applause)
We talk with our hands.
Arm amputation is usually caused by trauma, with things like industrial accidents, motor vehicle collisions or, very poignantly, war.
There are also some children who are born without arms, called congenital limb deficiency.
When you lose your arm, that nervous system still works.
So you might say, let's go to the brain and put something in the brain to record signals, or in the end of the peripheral nerve and record them there.
So my colleague, Dr. Greg Dumanian, did the surgery.
His brain is thinking about his arm.
That's why it's intuitive.
And after a few months, you touch Jesse on his chest, and he felt his missing hand.
(Applause) So Amanda, would you please tell us how you lost your arm?
There's a lot of information in those nerve signals, and we wanted to get more.
And then we used some algorithms that are a lot like speech recognition algorithms, called pattern recognition.
(Laughter) And here you can see, on Jesse's chest, when he just tried to do three different things, you can see three different patterns.
And I believe Dean Kamen presented it at TED a few years ago.
The future is bright.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Music) What you just heard are the interactions of barometric pressure, wind and temperature readings that were recorded of Hurricane Noel in 2007.
The musicians played off a three-dimensional graph of weather data like this.
Weather is an amalgam of systems that is inherently invisible to most of us.
So I use sculpture and music to make it, not just visible, but also tactile and audible.
I then compare my information to the things I find on the Internet -- satellite images, weather data from weather stations as well as offshore buoys.
My translation medium is a very simple basket.
I use natural reed, because natural reed has a lot of tension in it that I cannot fully control.
When you step closer, you actually see that it is indeed all made up of numbers.
You place it in a science museum, it becomes a three-dimensional visualization of data.
You place it in a music hall, it all of a sudden becomes a musical score.
Thank you.
(Applause)
You all know the truth of what I'm going to say.
What's changed is we now can look at the evidence, we can compare societies, more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does.
And you see the countries on the right, like Norway and the USA, are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, Portugal on the left.
This, again, is life expectancy.
These are small areas of England and Wales -- the poorest on the right, the richest on the left.
A lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us.
But if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to GNP per capita, gross national income, there's nothing there, no correlation anymore.
What all the data I've shown you so far says is the same thing.
That's very important in poorer countries, but not in the rich developed world.
It comes from the World Values Survey.
You see, at the more unequal end, it's about 15 percent of the population who feel they can trust others.
Same thing is going on.
This is the percent of the population with any mental illness in the preceding year.
And again, closely related to inequality.
These red dots are American states, and the blue triangles are Canadian provinces.
But look at the scale of the differences.
It goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150.
And at the more unequal end, fathers' income is much more important -- in the U.K., USA.
And as we like to say -- and I know there are a lot of Americans in the audience here -- if Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark.
Think of the expense, the human cost of that.
Japan is rather different though.
There are some states that do well through redistribution, some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax.
Another really surprising part of this picture is that it's not just the poor who are affected by inequality.
This is just one example.
It's infant mortality.
I think I'm looking and talking about the psychosocial effects of inequality.
Interestingly, some parallel work going on in social psychology: some people reviewed 208 different studies in which volunteers had been invited into a psychological laboratory and had their stress hormones, their responses to doing stressful tasks, measured.
And in the review, what they were interested in seeing is what kind of stresses most reliably raise levels of cortisol, the central stress hormone.
Those kind of stresses have a very particular effect on the physiology of stress.
Now we have been criticized.
What about other countries?
There are 200 studies of health in relation to income and equality in the academic peer-reviewed journals.
And of course, others using more sophisticated methods in the literature have controlled for poverty and education and so on.
What about causality?
Correlation in itself doesn't prove causality.
The big change in our understanding of drivers of chronic health in the rich developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is affecting the immune system, the cardiovascular system.
Suddenly we have a handle on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies, and that's exciting.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I talked about spaghetti sauce.
(Laughter) The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make.
And of course, the Swiss can be divided into two general categories: those who make small, exquisite, expensive objects and those who handle the money of those who buy small, exquisite, expensive objects.
He's an engineer.
Now if you think about it, in the age before GPS and radar, that was obviously a really difficult problem.
It's a complicated physics problem.
It's called the Norden Mark 15 bombsight.
And for Norden as well, this device had incredible moral importance, because Norden was a committed Christian.
And what was God's will?
So in the years leading up to the Second World War, the U.S. military buys 90,000 of these Norden bombsights at a cost of $14,000 each -- again, in 1940 dollars, that's a lot of money.
And they make every one of those bombardiers take an oath, to swear that if they're ever captured, they will not divulge a single detail of this particular device to the enemy, because it's imperative the enemy not get their hands on this absolutely essential piece of technology.
And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards.
The Norden bombsight is the Holy Grail.
Well, it turns out it's not the Holy Grail.
Thirdly, when Norden was making his calculations, he assumed that a plane would be flying at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes.
Well how many cloudless skies do you think there were above Central Europe between 1940 and 1945?
And then to give you a sense of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight was, there was a famous case in 1944 where the Allies bombed a chemical plant in Leuna, Germany.
And over the course of 22 bombing missions, the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs on this 757 acre chemical plant, using the Norden bombsight.
(Laughter) So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight?
Well because we live in an age where there are lots and lots of Norden bombsights.
In the Iraq War, at the beginning of the first Iraq War, the U.S. military, the air force, sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles to the Iraqi desert equipped with these five million dollar cameras that allowed them to see the entire desert floor.
And so they flew missions day and night, and they dropped thousands of bombs, and they fired thousands of missiles in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge.
And after the war was over, there was an audit done -- as the army always does, the air force always does -- and they asked the question: how many Scuds did we actually destroy?
What is the signature weapon of the CIA's war in Northwest Pakistan?
It's the drone. What is the drone?
Well it is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight.
It is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision.
And over the course of the last six years in Northwest Pakistan, the CIA has flown hundreds of drone missiles, and it's used those drones to kill 2,000 suspected Pakistani and Taliban militants.
That is one of the most extraordinary records in the history of modern warfare.
In that exact same period that we've been using these drones with devastating accuracy, the number of attacks, of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks, against American forces in Afghanistan has increased tenfold.
As we have gotten more and more efficient in killing them, they have become angrier and angrier and more and more motivated to kill us.
I've described to you the opposite of a success story.
And that is, on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay flew over Japan and, using a Norden bombsight, dropped a very large thermonuclear device on the city of Hiroshima.
But of course, it didn't matter.
And that's the greatest irony of all when it comes to the Norden bombsight.
(Applause)
I moved to Boston 10 years ago from Chicago, with an interest in cancer and in chemistry.
And you might also know that, for science and medicine, Boston is a bit of a candy store.
The bar is called the Miracle of Science.
You might know that, so far, in just the dawn of this revolution, we know that there are perhaps 40,000 unique mutations affecting more than 10,000 genes, and that there are 500 of these genes that are bona-fide drivers, causes of cancer.
It's been known for decades what causes this malignancy.
It's three proteins: ras, myc, p53.
Horsemen of the Apocalypse that is cancer.
Now, BRD4 is an interesting protein.
We developed libraries of compounds and eventually arrived at this and similar substances called JQ1.
Now, this is a very rare cancer, this BRD4-addicted cancer.
The cancer cells -- small, round and rapidly dividing, grew these arms and extensions.
The next step would be to put this molecule into mice.
The only problem was there's no mouse model of this rare cancer.
Mice with multiple myeloma, an incurable malignancy of the bone marrow, respond dramatically to the treatment with this drug.
It's the information that we most need from pharmaceutical companies, the information on how these early prototype drugs might work.
Yet this information is largely a secret.
This research is funded by the public.
(Laughter) I've never seen, really, anywhere, this unique support for cancer research.
(Applause)
(Applause) (Applause) I am a papercutter.
I take a piece of paper, I visualize my story, sometimes I sketch, sometimes I don't.
As a teenager, I was sketching, drawing, and I wanted to be an artist.
So among them, I have been a shepherdess, a truck driver, a factory worker, a cleaning lady.
I moved for two years in Taiwan.
And then I settled in New York where I became a tour guide.
And I still worked as a tour leader, traveled back and forth in China, Tibet and Central Asia.
So of course, it took time, and I was nearly 40, and I decided it's time to start as an artist.
So the word "silhouette" comes from a minister of finance, Etienne de Silhouette.
So as you can guess, my mother tongue is French.
So the Spelling Spider is a cousin of the spelling bee.
(Laughter) But it's much more connected to the Web.
(Laughter) And this spider spins a bilingual alphabet.
So I want to see how things work and what's happening.
So each window is an image and is a world that I often revisit.
So what if we were living in balloon houses?
It goes from slave trade to over-consumption of sugar with some sweet moments in between.
I call them Freudian cities.
"MAD Growth on Columbus Circle."
"Chaos City."
"Daily Battles."
"Floating Islands."
(Laughter) So in life and in papercutting, everything is connected.
One story leads to another.
Here is a three-week papercutting marathon at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
It's one I'm wearing and one that's on exhibition at the Center for Books Arts in New York City.
Why do I call it a book?
So it's regional memories, and they are just randomly moved by the wind.
I love public art.
With public art, I could also make cut glass.
And Bronx literature, it's all about Bronx writers and their stories.
Another glass project is in a public library in San Jose, California.
So I made a vegetable point of view of the growth of San Jose.
And then the fruit of the world for Silicon Valley today.
So it's a tree, and in its trunk you have the roots of languages.
So in Aurora, Colorado it's a bench.
(Laughter) Another functional work, it's in the south side of Chicago for a subway station.
And it's called "Seeds of the Future are Planted Today."
It's a story about transformation and connections.
And here I've been working for the last three years with a South Bronx developer to bring art to life to low-income buildings and affordable housing.
So each building has its own personality.
And for other projects, like in Paris, it's about the name of the street.
And in 2009, I was asked to make a poster to be placed in the subway cars in New York City for a year.
(Applause)
In 2009, I bought a house in Detroit for 500 dollars.
It had no windows, no plumbing, no electricity and it was filled with trash.
This, of course, is the Detroit that your hear about.
Another Detroit that's more hopeful, more innovative, and may just provide some of the answers to cities struggling to reinvent themselves everywhere.
These answers, however, do not necessarily adhere to conventional wisdom about good development.
About a decade ago, I moved to Detroit with no friends, no job and no money, at a time when it seemed like everyone else was moving out.
Most people who left Detroit just went to the suburbs, while the 139 square miles of the city deteriorated, leaving some estimates as high as 40 square miles of abandoned land -- about the size of San Francisco.
Aside from platitudes such as the vague and agentless "deindustrialization," Detroit's exodus can be summed up with two structures: freeways and walls.
I grew up in a small town in Michigan, the son of a relatively blue-collar family.
I didn't want to be one of the almost 50 percent of college graduates leaving the state at the time, and I thought I might use my fancy college education at home for something positive.
I'd been reading this great American philosopher named Grace Lee Boggs who happened to live in Detroit, and she said something I can't forget.
I eventually found an abandoned house in a neighborhood called Poletown.
Just a 15-minute bike ride from the baseball stadium downtown, the neighborhood was positively rural.
What houses were left looked like cardboard boxes left in the rain; two-story monstrosities with wide-open shells and melted porches.
Poletown was home to an incredibly resourceful, incredibly intelligent and incredibly resilient community.
It's where residents are experimenting with renewable energy and urban farming and offering their skills and discoveries to others, illustrating we don't necessarily have to beg the government to provide solutions.
It's realizing we have the power to create the world anew together and to do it ourselves when our governments refuse.
This is the Detroit that you don't hear much about.
There's a third way to rebuild, and it declines to make the same mistakes of the past.
And now, as you may have heard, Detroit is having a renaissance and pulling itself up from the ashes of despair, and the children and grandchildren of those who fled are returning, which is true.
These are the kind of people that have been in Detroit for generations and are mostly black.
In 2016 alone, just last year, (Voice breaking) one in six houses in Detroit had their water shut off.
Excuse me.
The United Nations has called this a violation of human rights.
And since 2005, one in three houses -- think about this, please -- one in every three houses has been foreclosed in the city, representing a population about the size of Buffalo, New York.
Ten years ago, it was not possible to go anywhere in Detroit and be in a crowd completely made of white people.
This is the price that we're paying for conventional economic resurgence.
We're creating two Detroits, two classes of citizens, cracking the community apart.
This is a grave mistake for all of us.
When economic development comes at the cost of community, it's not just those who have lost their homes or access to water who are harmed, but it breaks little pieces of our own humanity as well.
Or clergy and teachers engaging in civil disobedience to block water shutoff trucks.
And for you, for all of us, it means finding a role to play in our own communities.
I know a third way is possible because I have lived it.
If we can do it in Detroit, you can do it wherever you're from, too.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And this is the Detroit airport in June 19th of 2002.
Basically this is the FBI offices in Tampa where I spent six months of my life -- back and forth, not six months continuously.
(Applause) So I spent a lot of time in this building.
"Are we in Florida?" "Yes." "Is today Tuesday?" "Yes."
So ever since then, before I would go anywhere, I would call the FBI.
And then the phone calls turned into emails, and the emails got longer and longer and longer ...
So you can see, Delta 1252 going from Kansas City to Atlanta.
And I bought some crabs too right around there, and some chitlins at the Safeway in Emoryville.
This is a parking lot in Elko, Nevada off of Route 80 at 8:01 p.m. on August 19th.
I spend a lot of time in gas stations too -- empty train stations.
This, by the way, is the location of my favorite sandwich shop in California -- Vietnamese sandwich.
So on December 4th, I went here.
But if 300 million people in the U.S.
Because it's about surveillance.
I'm watching who's watching me.
We're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments.
It was all due to this woman, Sister Mary Marastela, also known as my mom.
I thought, maybe there's some earthly basis for moral decisions.
I want to know if there was a moral molecule.
After 10 years of experiments, I found it.
This little syringe contains the moral molecule.
(Laughter) It's called oxytocin.
So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals.
It can't be that important."
There must be a reason why."
In other words, I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral.
Then I had to measure morality.
Why? I had shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous.
The trick is you can't see them, you can't talk to them.
But wait. What's wrong with this experiment?
So we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin, but they didn't have any effect.
But the second is that I still only had this indirect relationship between oxytocin and trustworthiness.
So to make the experiment, I knew I'd have to go into the brain and manipulate oxytocin directly.
So oxytocin is the trust molecule, but is it the moral molecule?
Using the oxytocin inhaler, we ran more studies.
We've also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin.
These include massage, dancing and praying.
To investigate this question, we ran an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four year-old son, and his son has terminal brain cancer.
After they watched the video, we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin.
The change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy.
So it's empathy that makes us connect to other people.
It's empathy that makes us help other people.
It's empathy that makes us moral.
Now this idea is not new.
A then unknown philosopher named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1759 called "The Theory of Moral Sentiments."
He said we're social creatures, so we share the emotions of others.
Now this is the same Adam Smith who, 17 years later, would write a little book called "The Wealth of Nations" -- the founding document of economics.
But he was, in fact, a moral philosopher, and he was right on why we're moral.
So to investigate immorality, let me bring you back now to 1980.
I'm working at a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California.
So one Sunday afternoon, a man walks into my cashier's booth with this beautiful jewelry box.
I have this job interview in Galena in 15 minutes, and I need this job, I've got to go."
We found, testing thousands of individuals, that five percent of the population don't release oxytocin on stimulus.
They have many of the attributes of psychopaths.
So we've studied sexually abused women, and about half those don't release oxytocin on stimulus.
Also, high stress inhibits oxytocin.
There's another way oxytocin is inhibited, which is interesting -- through the action of testosterone.
But interestingly, high testosterone males are also more likely to use their own money to punish others for being selfish.
(Laughter) Now think about this. It means, within our own biology, we have the yin and yang of morality.
We have oxytocin that connects us to others, makes us feel what they feel.
And men have 10 times the testosterone as women, so men do this more than women -- we have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally.
So last summer, I attended a wedding in Southern England.
200 people in this beautiful Victorian mansion.
Weddings cause a release of oxytocin, but they do so in a very particular way.
Then the groom's father, then the groom, then the family, then the friends -- arrayed around the bride like planets around the Sun.
I took my blood before and after, and I had a huge spike of oxytocin.
Many people are Tweeting right now.
So we investigated the role of social media and found the using social media produced a solid double-digit increase in oxytocin.
So I ran this experiment recently for the Korean Broadcasting System.
And they had the reporters and their producers participate.
And one of these guys, he must have been 22, he had 150 percent spike in oxytocin.
There are 800 different languages in the highlands.
These are the most primitive people in the world.
And they indeed also release oxytocin.
So oxytocin connects us to other people.
And it's so easy to cause people's brains to release oxytocin.
I know how to do it, and my favorite way to do it is, in fact, the easiest.
Let me show it to you.
I'm happy to share a little more love in the world, it's great, but here's your prescription from Dr. Love: eight hugs a day.
We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier.
Eight hugs a day -- you'll be happier and the world will be a better place.
(Laughter) Thank you.
(Applause)
I'd like to start tonight by something completely different, asking you to join me by stepping off the land and jumping into the open ocean for a moment.
About 100 grams of jellyfish equals four calories.
And a sea that's just filled and teeming with jellyfish isn't very good for all the other creatures that live in the oceans, that is, unless you eat jellyfish.
This animal is in "The Guinness World Book of Records" for being the world's heaviest bony fish.
So it's kind of nice, the sun and the moon getting together this way, even if one is eating the other.
Their other name, Mola mola, is -- it sounds Hawaiian, but it's actually Latin for millstone, and that's attributable to their roundish, very bizarre, cut-off shape.
And in the Mediterranean, in the swordfish net fisheries, they make up up to 90 percent.
Not this time of year -- it's more around October.
So the hardest part of tagging, now, is after you put that tag on, you have to wait, months.
So that's a very important piece of data.
So rather than just being some sunbathing slacker, they're really very industrious fish that dance this wild dance between the surface and the bottom and through temperature.
And there are historic attempts that have had some level of technical success.
And the result is the Terrafugia Transition.
It's a two-seat, single-engine airplane that works just like any other small airplane.
Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it's very important, because being able to deliver the Transition as a light sport aircraft makes it simpler for us to certify it, but it also makes it much easier for you to learn how to fly it.
It turns out that driving, with its associated design implementation and regulatory hurdles, is actually a harder problem to solve than flying.
For those of us that spend most of our lives on the ground, this may be counter-intuitive, but driving has potholes, cobblestones, pedestrians, other drivers and a rather long and detailed list of federal motor vehicle safety standards to contend with.
Fortunately, necessity remains the mother of invention, and a lot of the design work that we're the most proud of with the aircraft came out of solving the unique problems of operating it on the ground -- everything from a continuously-variable transmission and liquid-based cooling system that allows us to use an aircraft engine in stop-and-go traffic, to a custom-designed gearbox that powers either the propeller when you're flying or the wheels on the ground, to the automated wing-folding mechanism that we'll see in a moment, to crash safety features.
We have a carbon fiber safety cage that protects the occupants for less than 10 percent of the weight of a traditional steel chassis in a car.
So we did need a little bit of support from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
(Laughter) Now let's see it in action.
And it is under seven feet tall, so it will fit in a standard construction garage.
Still, if everything goes to our satisfaction with the testing and construction of the two production prototypes that we're working on right now, those first deliveries to the, about a hundred, people who have reserved an airplane at this point should begin at the end of next year.
The Transition will cost in line with other small airplanes.
Here's why.
For those of you who aren't yet pilots, there's four main reasons why those of us who are don't fly as much as we'd like to: the weather, primarily, cost, long door-to-door travel time and mobility at your destination.
The Transition simultaneously expands our horizons while making the world a smaller, more accessible place.
(Applause)
I'm a neuroscientist.
And in neuroscience, we have to deal with many difficult questions about the brain.
And that is, why do we and other animals have brains?
So think about communication -- speech, gestures, writing, sign language -- they're all mediated through contractions of your muscles.
So once you don't need to move, you don't need the luxury of that brain.
And this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure, but that's a different subject.
I believe movement is the most important function of the brain -- don't let anyone tell you that it's not true.
Now if movement is so important, how well are we doing understanding how the brain controls movement?
If you put a five year-old child's dexterity against the best robots of today, the answer is simple: the child wins easily.
Now why is that top problem so easy and the bottom problem so hard?
And the student has trained this robot to pour this water into a glass.
We use it in the engineering and neuroscience sense meaning a random noise corrupting a signal.
The teapot could be full, it could be empty.
Now what I want to convince you of is the brain also goes through a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this sort of noise and variability.
And to do that, I'm going to tell you about a framework which is very popular in statistics and machine learning of the last 50 years called Bayesian decision theory.
And it's more recently a unifying way to think about how the brain deals with uncertainty.
And the key idea to Bayesian inference is you have two sources of information from which to make your inference.
But there's another source of information, and that's effectively prior knowledge.
You accumulate knowledge throughout your life in memories.
And the point about Bayesian decision theory is it gives you the mathematics of the optimal way to combine your prior knowledge with your sensory evidence to generate new beliefs.
So let me give you an intuitive example.
Imagine you're learning to play tennis and you want to decide where the ball is going to bounce as it comes over the net towards you.
Now a key part to the Bayesian is this part of the formula.
But you can imagine looking inside the brain.
And in the intervening years I had two daughters.
And we hypothesize based on the tickling study that when one child hits another, they generate the movement command.
We bring in two adults. We tell them they're going to play a game.
And the game is very simple.
So it really suggests, when you're doing this -- based on this study and others we've done -- that the brain is canceling the sensory consequences and underestimating the force it's producing.
Tasks are symbolic -- I want to drink, I want to dance -- but the movement system has to contract 600 muscles in a particular sequence.
And perhaps in life, movements get better through learning.
And the fundamental idea is you want to plan your movements so as to minimize the negative consequence of the noise.
And one intuition to get is actually the amount of noise or variability I show here gets bigger as the force gets bigger.
So you want to avoid big forces as one principle.
There are many diseases which effect movement.
And hopefully if we understand how we control movement, we can apply that to robotic technology.
And finally, I want to remind you, when you see animals do what look like very simple tasks, the actual complexity of what is going on inside their brain is really quite dramatic.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question for you, Dan.
You have to study vision with the realization of how the movement system is going to use vision.
(Applause)
So magic is a very introverted field.
But if you look at creative practice as a form of research, or art as a form of R&D for humanity, then how could a cyber illusionist like myself share his research?
Now my own speciality is combining digital technology and magic.
It's an augmented reality projection tracking and mapping system, or a digital storytelling tool.
Wake up.
Really what I'm talking about here is trying to create a kind of artificial life.
We consider first that life has a body.
And so these are the things we will try to do in the lab, make some experiments that have one or more of these characteristics of life.
"If we accept the theory of evolution, then the first dawn of synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world, or between the non-living and living world, forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life" -- so, the ones I just discussed -- "to which other attributes will be slowly added in the course of development by the evolutionary actions of the environment."
What that means is, I can mix some chemicals together in a test tube in my lab, and these chemicals will start to self-associate to form larger and larger structures.
So say on the order of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of molecules will come together to form a large structure that didn't exist before.
These membranes are also quite similar, morphologically and functionally, to the membranes in your body, and we can use these, as they say, to form the body of our protocell.
We started with a natural occurring clay called montmorillonite.
This structure, then, can organize the formation of a membrane boundary around itself, so it can make a body of liquid molecules around itself, and that's shown in green here on this micrograph.
So just through self-assembly, mixing things together in the lab, we can come up with, say, a metabolic surface with some informational molecules attached inside of this membrane body, right?
So we came up with a different protocell model, and this is actually simpler than the previous one.
In this protocell model, it's just an oil droplet, but a chemical metabolism inside that allows this protocell to use energy to do something, to actually become dynamic, as we'll see here.
The protocell moves. It encounters the food.
So now that you're all experts on protocells, we're going to play a game with these protocells.
So the way this works is, you have a simple system of five chemicals here, a simple system here. When they hybridize, you then form something that's different than before, it's more complex than before, and you get the emergence of another kind of lifelike behavior which in this case is replication.
So, doing these artificial life experiments helps us define a potential path between non-living and living systems.
And not only that, but it helps us broaden our view of what life is and what possible life there could be out there -- life that could be very different from life that we find here on Earth.
This is similar to having the Sun shining on the Earth, driving photosynthesis, driving the ecosystem.
Without the Sun, there's likely to be no life on this planet.
And thirdly, we need to be able to make and break chemical bonds. And again this is important because life transforms resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain itself.
Most of these don't contain DNA, but yet they have lifelike properties.
So by making these chemical, artificial life experiments, we hope not only to understand something fundamental about the origin of life and the existence of life on this planet, but also what possible life there could be out there in the universe. Thank you.
(Applause)
It's so long that it requires two people to use it.
And at the slightest sound, they hide back again.
So we had these panels on three walls of a room.
So this is how it works.
This is a video prototype.
So each pygmy has its own behavior, psyche, mood swings, personalities and so on.
So this is a very early prototype.
And we were quite intrigued with playing with the notion of invisibility.
And as people walked into the room, they would see themselves in the monitor, except with one difference: one person was constantly invisible wherever they moved in the room.
So this is the last work, and a work in progress, and it's called "Space Filler."
Thank you.
(Applause)
It's about a little boy whose father was a history buff and who used to take him by the hand to visit the ruins of an ancient metropolis on the outskirts of their camp.
Let's fast-forward to the San Francisco Bay Area many decades later, where I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3D laser scanning system.
The system measures the beam's time of flight, recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return.
With two mirrors, the scanner calculates the beam's horizontal and vertical angles, giving accurate x, y, and z coordinates.
We called the project CyArk, which stands for Cyber Archive.
To date, with the help of a global network of partners, we've completed close to fifty projects.
Let me show you some of them: Chichen Itza, Rapa Nui -- and what you're seeing here are the cloud of points -- Babylon, Rosslyn Chapel, Pompeii, and our latest project, Mt. Rushmore, which happened to be one of our most challenging projects.
We also produce media for dissemination to the public -- free through the CyArk website.
What you're looking at in here is a 3D viewer that we developed that would allow the display and manipulation of [the] cloud of points in real time, cutting sections through them and extracting dimensions.
This happens to be the cloud of points for Tikal.
It's used for studies, for visualization, as well as for education.
This includes arson, urban sprawl, acid rain, not to mention terrorism and wars.
It was getting more and more apparent that we're fighting a losing battle.
Imagine us as a human race not knowing where we came from.
Luckily, in the last two or three decades, digital technologies have been developing that have helped us to develop tools that we've brought to bear in the digital preservation, in our digital preservation war.
This includes, for example, the 3D laser scanning systems, ever more powerful personal computers, 3D graphics, high-definition digital photography, not to mention the Internet.
And we created a project we call the CyArk 500 Challenge -- and that is to digitally preserve 500 World Heritage Sites in five years.
Two years ago, we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site, a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda, the Royal Kasubi Tombs.
Last March, we received very sad news.
We owe it to our children, our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along.
(Applause) Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'd like to also thank personally the efforts of David Mitchell, who is the Director of Conservation at Historic Scotland.
(Applause) And Doug Pritchard, who's the Head of Visualization at the Glasgow School of Art.
(Applause) Thank you.
Humans have long held a fascination for the human brain.
Now just like the physical maps of our world that have been highly influenced by technology -- think Google Maps, think GPS -- the same thing is happening for brain mapping through transformation.
So let's take a look at the brain.
20 percent of the oxygen coming from your lungs, 20 percent of the blood pumped from your heart, is servicing this one organ.
On the side here, this is temporal cortex.
So the outer part of that brain is the neocortex.
So there's about 86 billion neurons in our brain.
And of course, as I mentioned before, since we can now start to map brain function, we can start to tie these into the individual cells.
So as I mentioned, there are 86 billion neurons.
These are support cells -- astrocytes glia.
Each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain.
And each neuron itself is largely unique.
These are proteins.
So if we zoom in to an even deeper level, all of those proteins are encoded by our genomes.
We each have 23 pairs of chromosomes.
And on these chromosomes are roughly 25,000 genes.
This is magnetic resonance imaging -- MRI.
The brain is removed from the skull, and then it's sliced into one-centimeter slices.
This is 20 microns thin, so this is about a baby hair's width.
And when we take a sample and we hybridize it to it, we get a unique fingerprint, if you will, quantitatively of what genes are turned on in that sample.
So roughly, we have 50 million data points for a given human brain.
And remember that we've assayed all the 25,000 genes in the genome and have all of that data available.
We're just starting to look at this data ourselves.
There's some basic things that you would want to understand.
Proteins are targets for drugs.
So if you're in drug discovery, for example, you can go through an entire listing of what the genome has on offer to find perhaps better drug targets and optimize.
Most of you are probably familiar with genome-wide association studies in the form of people covering in the news saying, "Scientists have recently discovered the gene or genes which affect X."
And I think every human, we all have different genetic backgrounds, we all have lived separate lives.
But the fact is our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar.
So I think it's an important message to take home today that even though we celebrate all of our differences, we are quite similar even at the brain level.
These are two genes that we found as good examples.
DISC1 is a gene that's deleted in schizophrenia.
And so what you're looking at here in donor one and donor four, which are the exceptions to the other two, that genes are being turned on in a very specific subset of cells.
Whether or not that's due to an individual's genetic background or their experiences, we don't know.
(Applause)
I started Improv Everywhere about 10 years ago when I moved to New York City with an interest in acting and comedy.
(Laughter) And as you'll see now, I'm not wearing pants.
Now, in the meantime, I have six friends who are waiting at the next six consecutive stops in their underwear as well.
(Laughter) (Laughter continues) So at this point, she decides to put the rape book away.
At the eighth stop, a girl came in with a giant duffel bag and announced she had pants for sale for a dollar -- like you might sell batteries or candy on the train.
(Applause) Thank you.
It's a prank, but it's a prank that gives somebody a great story to tell.
(Laughter) And then we had dancing. We had everyone dance.
And because it was in Union Square Park, right by a subway station, there were hundreds of people by the end who stopped and looked up and watched what we were doing.
And you can see the cops in this footage right here.
That's a cop wearing black right there, being filmed with a hidden camera.
Ultimately, the police had to inform Best Buy management that it was not, in fact, illegal to wear a blue polo shirt and khaki pants.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) So we had been there for 20 minutes; we were happy to exit the store.
It's morning rush hour.
It's very cold outside.
[Rob wants] [to give you] (Laughter) [a high five!] (Laughter) [Get ready!] (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) What I want to do this morning is share with you a couple of stories and talk about a different Africa.
While it is true that those things are going on, there's an Africa that you don't hear about very much.
This is the Africa of opportunity.
And this is the Africa where people are looking for partnerships to do this. That's what I want to talk about today.
This arrest occurred because there was cooperation between the London Metropolitan Police and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria -- led by one of our most able and courageous people: Mr. Nuhu Ribadu.
Due to some slip-ups, he managed to escape dressed as a woman and ran from London back to Nigeria where, according to our constitution, those in office as governors, president -- as in many countries -- have immunity and cannot be prosecuted. But what happened: people were so outraged by this behavior that it was possible for his state legislature to impeach him and get him out of office.
This is a story about the fact that people in Africa are no longer willing to tolerate corruption from their leaders.
This is a story about the fact that people want their resources managed properly for their good, and not taken out to places where they'll benefit just a few of the elite.
And therefore, when you hear about the corrupt Africa -- corruption all the time -- I want you to know that the people and the governments are trying hard to fight this in some of the countries, and that some successes are emerging.
Does it mean the problem is over? The answer is no.
So when you hear about corruption, don't just feel that nothing is being done about this -- that you can't operate in any African country because of the overwhelming corruption. That is not the case.
There's a will to fight, and in many countries, that fight is ongoing and is being won. In others, like mine, where there has been a long history of dictatorship in Nigeria, the fight is ongoing and we have a long way to go.
The results are showing: independent monitoring by the World Bank and other organizations show that in many instances the trend is downwards in terms of corruption, and governance is improving.
All the time when they talk about it you immediately think about Africa.
In this country, if you receive stolen goods, are you not prosecuted?
So when we talk about this kind of corruption, let us also think about what is happening on the other side of the globe -- where the money's going and what can be done to stop it.
I'm working on an initiative now, along with the World Bank, on asset recovery, trying to do what we can to get the monies that have been taken abroad -- developing countries' moneys -- to get that sent back.
Because if we can get the 20 billion dollars sitting out there back, it may be far more for some of these countries than all the aid that is being put together.
And what is happening in many African countries now is a realization that no one can do it but us. We have to do it.
We can invite partners who can support us, but we have to start.
We have to reform our economies, change our leadership, become more democratic, be more open to change and to information.
And this is what we started to do in one of the largest countries on the continent, Nigeria.
(Laughter) One in four sub-Saharan Africans is Nigerian, and it has 140 million dynamic people -- chaotic people -- but very interesting people. You'll never be bored.
(Laughter) What we started to do was to realize that we had to take charge and reform ourselves.
So we decided to privatize many of our enterprises.
(Laughter) Having a telephone in my country was a huge luxury.
Nigeria's telecoms market is the second-fastest growing in the world, after China. We are getting investments of about a billion dollars a year in telecoms. And nobody knows, except a few smart people.
(Laughter) The smartest one, first to come in, was the MTN company of South Africa.
And in the three years that I was Finance Minister, they made an average of 360 million dollars profit per year.
360 million in a market -- in a country that is a poor country, with an average per capita income just under 500 dollars per capita.
Nigerians themselves began to develop some wireless telecommunications companies, and three or four others have come in.
But there's a huge market out there, and people don't know about it, or they don't want to know.
So privatization is one of the things we've done.
The other thing we've also done is to manage our finances better.
Because nobody's going to help you and support you if you're not managing your own finances well.
And Nigeria, with the oil sector, had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well.
Our exchange rate that used to fluctuate all the time is now fairly stable and being managed so that business people have a predictability of prices in the economy.
We brought inflation down from 28 percent to about 11 percent.
So all the changes and reforms we were able to make have shown up in results that are measurable in the economy.
Agriculture grew at better than eight percent.
We have opportunities in agriculture, like I said.
We have opportunities in solid minerals. We have a lot of minerals that no one has even invested in or explored. And we realized that without the proper legislation to make that possible, that wouldn't happen. So we've now got a mining code that is comparable with some of the best in the world.
We have opportunities in housing and real estate.
This was an investment opportunity for someone that excited the imagination of people.
We consolidated them from 89 to 25 banks by requiring that they increase their capital -- share capital.
And it went from about 25 million dollars to 150 million dollars.
The banks -- these banks are now consolidated, and that strengthening of the banking system has attracted a lot of investment from outside.
Barclays Bank of the U.K. is bringing in 500 million.
We are doing the same with the insurance sector.
In tourism, in many African countries, a great opportunity.
And that's what many people know East Africa for: the wildlife, the elephants, and so on.
But managing the tourism market in a way that can really benefit the people is very important.
A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections.
And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs.
If we can invest in places where you yourselves make money whilst creating jobs and helping people stand on their own feet, isn't that a wonderful opportunity? Isn't that the way to go?
Understand that the woman who made it is going to be in Tanzania, where they're having the session in June.
And the women are diligent. They are focused; they work hard.
So if you want to be in Africa, think about investing.
So I invite you to explore the opportunities.
When you go to Tanzania, listen carefully, because I'm sure you will hear of the various openings that there will be for you to get involved in something that will do good for the continent, for the people and for yourselves.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine and chief of scientific visualization at Yale University in the department of medicine.
And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep-space flight, so they could be kept in robotic pods.
I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen.
And your entire body, everything -- your hair, skin, bone, nails -- everything is made of collagen.
And it's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this.
And the only place that collagen changes its structure is in the cornea of your eye.
And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these new technologies.
So I wrote the algorithms and code, and he built the hardware -- Paul Lauterbur -- then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI.
I got the data.
And like this magnificent origami, cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks, as it's just folding on itself.
Within five weeks, you start to see the early atrium and the early ventricles.
It's a mystery, it's magic, it's divinity.
And only one mile is visible.
The complexity of building that within a single system is, again, beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today.
We're launching two new studies of scanning babies' brains from the moment they're born.
(Applause)
[Wind tunnel tests] Narrator: The wing has no steering controls, no flaps, no rudder.
And that's quite unique.
There is Yves Rossy.
Ladies and gentlemen, a historic flight has begun.
But I feel like a bird sometimes.
It's really an unreal feeling, because normally you have a big thing, a plane, around you.
BG: How did you start to become Jetman?
And especially when you take a tracking position, you have the feeling that you are flying.
That means about 190 miles per hour.
For example, last winter I began with kite surfing.
Harness, parachute.
(Laughter) And yeah, that's all.
For example, we have two engines on an Airbus; with only one engine, you can fly it.
That's my ejection seat.
So just as a curiosity, where did you land when you flew over the Grand Canyon?
Have you ever seen tandem birds?
What's next for you? What's next for Jetman?
(Applause)
I've always had a fascination for computers and technology, and I made a few apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
My favorite and most successful app is "Bustin Jieber," which is -- (Laughter) which is a Justin Bieber whack-a-mole.
So I went to work programming it, and I released it just before the holidays in 2010.
A lot of kids these days like to play games, but now they want to make them, and it's difficult, because not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program.
And then Apple released the iPhone, and with it, the iPhone software development kit, and the software development kit is a suite of tools for creating and programming an iPhone app.
This opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me, and after playing with the software development kit a little bit, I made a couple of apps, I made some test apps.
Any student at my school can come and learn how to design an app.
(Laughter) So this is a resource to teachers, and educators should recognize this resource and make good use of it.
First of all, I'd like to create more apps, more games.
I'd like to get into Android programming and development, and I'd like to continue my app club, and find other ways for students to share knowledge with others.
So what I'm doing right now is, I'm making sounds with my mouth as I'm exhaling.
Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they're hitting your eardrums, and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums and transforms them into thoughts.
Now of course, there isn't just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world.
Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabularies, and they also have different structures -- very importantly, different structures.
That begs the question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think?
Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, "To have a second language is to have a second soul" -- strong statement that language crafts reality.
But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say, "What's in a name?
Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world, we've started doing research, and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question.
So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples.
Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit."
(Laughter) Keep your eyes closed. Point.
(Laughter) There are also really big differences in how people think about time.
So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages.
They don't use words like "left" and "right."
So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way.
It's a dramatically different way of thinking about time.
Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there.
Well, some languages don't do this, because some languages don't have exact number words.
But folks who don't have that linguistic trick can't do that.
Languages also differ in how they divide up the color spectrum -- the visual world.
Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words, "light" and "dark."
So, for example, in English, there's a word for blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but in Russian, there isn't a single word.
Instead, Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue, "goluboy," and dark blue, "siniy."
Languages have all kinds of structural quirks.
Lots of languages have grammatical gender; every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine.
And these genders differ across languages.
So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse.
Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehow more male-like?
So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here -- "bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish -- German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypically feminine words.
Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're "strong" or "long," these masculine words.
(Laughter) Languages also differ in how they describe events, right?
In English, it's fine to say, "He broke the vase."
In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, "The vase broke," or, "The vase broke itself."
So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do.
So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say, "He did it; he broke the vase."
Whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more likely to remember that it was an accident.
So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event.
This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony.
Now, I've given you a few examples of how language can profoundly shape the way we think, and it does so in a variety of ways.
This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into a whole cognitive realm.
Language can have really broad effects.
Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is.
Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000 -- there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world.
We're losing about one language a week, and by some estimates, half of the world's languages will be gone in the next hundred years.
And the even worse news is that right now, almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities.
So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better.
I've told you about how speakers of different languages think differently, but of course, that's not about how people elsewhere think.
It's how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think.
"How could I think differently?"
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
But scientists have for a long time thought this just was never going to be possible.
But if you look in nature, you see that different kinds of animals can have really different lifespans.
Now these animals are different from one another, because they have different genes.
So that suggests that somewhere in these genes, somewhere in the DNA, are genes for aging, genes that allow them to have different lifespans.
So if there are genes like that, then you can imagine that, if you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan.
And if you could do that, then you could find the genes for aging.
So we've set out to look for genes that control aging.
Instead, we studied a little, tiny, round worm called C. elegans, which is just about the size of a comma in a sentence.
And we were very lucky to find that mutations that damage one single gene called daf-2 doubled the lifespan of the little worm.
So this animal is going to live twice as long.
Now get out your handkerchiefs here.
So there's something about aging that's kind of universal.
And now here is the daf-2 mutant.
And when I tell people about this, they tend to think of maybe an 80 or 90 year-old person who looks really good for being 90 or 80.
She says, "I'm 60."
(Laughter) Okay.
So what is the daf-2 gene?
And the daf-2 gene encodes a hormone receptor.
And the other part is on the inside where it sends signals into the cell.
Okay, so what is the daf-2 receptor telling the inside of the cell?
I just told you that, if you make a mutation in the daf-2 gene cell, that you get a receptor that doesn't work as well; the animal lives longer.
So that means that the normal function of this hormone receptor is to speed up aging.
That's what that arrow means.
It says that aging is subject to control by the genes, and specifically by hormones.
These hormones are similar to hormones that we have in our bodies.
The daf-2 hormone receptor is very similar to the receptor for the hormone insulin and IGF-1.
Insulin is a hormone that promotes the uptake of nutrients into your tissues after you eat a meal.
And the hormone IGF-1 promotes growth.
So these functions were known for these hormones for a long time, but our studies suggested that maybe they had a third function that nobody knew about -- maybe they also affect aging.
If you change this hormone pathway in flies, they live longer.
So for example, there was one study that was done in a population of Ashkenazi Jews in New York City.
And just like any population, most of the people live to be about 70 or 80, but some live to be 90 or 100.
And what they found was that people who lived to 90 or 100 were more likely to have daf-2 mutations -- that is, changes in the gene that encodes the receptor for IGF-1.
So those are hints suggesting that humans are susceptible to the effects of the hormones for aging.
So the next question, of course, is: Is there any effect on age-related disease?
As you age, you're much more likely to get cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, all sorts of diseases.
They hardly get cancer, and when they do it's not as severe.
So how can a hormone ultimately affect the rate of aging?
Well it turns out that in the daf-2 mutants, a whole lot of genes are switched on in the DNA that encode proteins that protect the cells and the tissues, and repair damage.
And the way that they're switched on is by a gene regulator protein called FOXO.
Under those conditions, the FOXO protein in blue has gone into the nucleus -- that little compartment there in the middle of the cell -- and it's sitting down on a gene binding to it.
You see one gene. There are lots of genes actually that bind on FOXO.
And the genes it turns on includes antioxidant genes, genes I call carrot-giver genes, whose protein products actually help other proteins to function well -- to fold correctly and function correctly.
DNA repair genes are more active in these animals.
And the immune system is more active.
And many of these different genes, we've shown, actually contribute to the long lifespan of the daf-2 mutant.
They have the ability to protect themselves from many kinds of damage, which we think makes them live longer.
Well when the daf-2 receptor is active, then it triggers a series of events that prevent FOXO from getting into the nucleus where the DNA is.
That's how it works. That's why we don't see the long lifespan, until we have the daf-2 mutant.
Well we think that insulin and IGF-1 hormones are hormones that are particularly active under favorable conditions -- in the good times -- when food is plentiful and there's not a lot of stress in the environment.
But what we think is that, under conditions of stress, the levels of these hormones drop -- for example, having limited food supply.
And that, we think, is registered by the animal as a danger signal, a signal that things are not okay and that it should roll out its protective capacity.
So it activates FOXO, FOXO goes to the DNA, and that triggers the expression of these genes that improves the ability of the cell to protect itself and repair itself.
And that's why we think the animals live longer.
And then suddenly, he learns that there's going to be a hurricane.
We all have FOXO genes, but we don't all have exactly the same form of the FOXO gene.
And there are certain forms of the FOXO gene that have found to be more frequently present in people who live to be 90 or 100.
We don't know the details of how this works, but we do know then that FOXO genes can impact the lifespan of people.
And that means that, maybe if we tweak it a little bit, we can increase the health and longevity of people.
So this is really exciting to me.
So we've been trying in our lab now to develop drugs that will activate this FOXO cell using human cells now in order to try and come up with drugs that will delay aging and age-related diseases.
There are lots of different proteins that are known to affect aging.
And mutations that damage the TOR gene -- just like the daf-2 mutations -- extend lifespan in worms and flies and mice.
But in this case, there's already a drug called rapamycin that binds to the TOR protein and inhibits its activity.
And you can take rapamycin and give it to a mouse -- even when it's pretty old, like age 60 for a human, that old for a mouse -- if you give the mouse rapamycin, it will live longer.
It is a drug for people, but the reason is it suppresses the immune system.
But still, here in the year 2011, there's a drug that you can give to mice at a pretty old age that will extend their lifespan, which comes out of this science that's been done in all these different animals.
So I'm really optimistic, and I think it won't be too long, I hope, before this age-old dream begins to come true.
Thank you.
(Applause) Matt Ridley: Thank you, Cynthia.
So if you stop taking the drug, the protein would go back to normal.
There isn't the technology to do that.
But I don't think that's a good idea.
If you knock them out completely, then you're very sick.
And also, there are other ways of activating FOXO that don't even involve insulin or IGF-1 that might even be safer.
There are some creatures on this planet already that don't really do aging.
And they grow to be about this size.
And they've been tagged, and they've been found to be 70 years old.
And the 70 year-old ones, actually they're better at scouting out the good nesting places, and they also have more progeny every year.
It's not clear.
If you look at birds, which live a long time, cells from the birds tend to be more resistant to a lot of different environmental stresses like high temperature or hydrogen peroxide, things like that.
(Applause)
I do a radio show.
So therefore, we get a lot of complaints every single week -- complaints including one we get very often, which is to say the very title, "Infinite Monkey Cage," celebrates the idea of vivisection.
But I also don't understand how it does ruin the magic.
All of the magic, I think, that may well be taken away by science is then replaced by something as wonderful.
Astrology, for instance: like many rationalists, I'm a Pisces.
And that to me as well, that if you think I'm worried about losing worlds, well Many Worlds theory -- one of the most beautiful, fascinating, sometimes terrifying ideas from the quantum interpretation -- is a wonderful thing.
Remember that in the majority of universes, you don't even exist in the first place.
Science actually says we will live forever.
But every single thing that makes us, every atom in us, has already created a myriad of different things and will go on to create a myriad of new things.
Who knows, maybe one of your atoms was once Napoleon's knee.
For instance, my wife could turn to me and she may say, "Why do you love me?"
And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, "Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors."
(Laughter) Though I'll probably also say something about her hair and personality as well.
No, I just spit out a tooth.
I have a son. His name is Archie.
That's the wonderful thing about evolution -- the predilection to believe that our child is best.
(Laughter) That's the strong anthropic principle of vacuuming.
For me, it's a very, very important thing.
Every time I breathe in, I'm breathing in a million-billion-billion atoms of oxygen.
I look out the window, and I realize that every single time we stop and I look out that window, framed in that window, wherever we are, I am observing more life than there is in the rest of the known universe beyond the planet Earth.
If you go to the safari parks on Saturn or Jupiter, you will be disappointed.
Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate, once said, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless."
Now for some people, that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism.
We have the individual power to go, "This is what I want to do."
Thank you very much. Goodbye.
(Applause)
[A provocation from Danny Hillis:] [It's time to start talking about engineering our climate] What if there was a way to build a thermostat that allowed you to turn down the temperature of the earth anytime you wanted?
So, the basic idea of solar geoengineering is that we can cool things down just by reflecting a little bit more sunlight back into space.
And ideas about how to do this have been around literally for decades.
Clouds are a great way to do that, these low-lying clouds.
I like this cloud because it has exactly the same water content as the transparent air around it.
And it just shows that even a little bit of a change in the flow of the air can cause a cloud to form.
We make artificial clouds all the time.
These are contrails, which are artificial water clouds that are made by the passing of a jet engine.
And so, we're already changing the clouds on earth.
(Laughter) But we are already doing this quite a lot.
So we already are doing solar engineering.
And there are some very good reasons for that.
And, in fact, I have some very good friends in the audience who I respect a lot, who really don't think I should be talking about this.
I think it's actually a serious problem.
And so I think it makes sense for us to look for ways to mitigate that impact.
But we need science to tell us what our options are; that informs both our creativity and our caution.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) This talk sparked a lot of controversy at TED2017, and we encourage you to look at discussions online to see other points of view.
Probably by now most of you have seen Al Gore's amazing talk.
We've got a climate crisis.
She said, "I agree with everything that's been said.
Because the more we learned, the more concerned we grew.
You know, my partners at Kleiner and I were compulsive networkers, and so when we see a big problem or an opportunity like avian flu or personalized medicine, we just get together the smartest people we know.
For this climate crisis, we assembled a network, really, of superstars, from policy activists to scientists and entrepreneurs and business leaders. Fifty or so of them.
And so, I want to tell you about what we've learned in doing that and four lessons I've learned in the last year.
The first lesson is that companies are really powerful, and that matters a lot. This is a story about how Wal-Mart went green, and what that means.
Two years ago, the CEO, Lee Scott, believed that green is the next big thing, and so Wal-Mart made going green a top priority.
And, third, they put the refrigerated goods behind closed doors with LED lighting.
Why does Wal-Mart matter? Well, it's massive.
They're the largest private employer in America.
They're the largest private user of electricity.
And they have one of the world's most amazing supply chains, 60,000 suppliers. If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be the sixth-largest trading partner with China.
When Wal-Mart declares it's going to go green and be profitable, it has a powerful impact on other great institutions.
The second thing that we learned is that individuals matter, and they matter enormously.
Wal-Mart has over 125 million U.S. customers.
That's a third of the U.S. population.
65 million compact fluorescent light bulbs were sold last year.
Consumers don't really like these light bulbs.
100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs means that we'll save 600 million dollars in energy bills, and 20 million tons of CO2 every year, year in and year out.
It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing.
(Laughter) It's hard to change consumer behavior because consumers don't know how much this stuff costs. Do you know?
I'm really afraid, because I think the kinds of changes we can reasonably expect from individuals are going to be clearly not enough.
The third lesson we learned is that policy matters. It really matters.
At the end of our first meeting, we got together to talk about what the action items would be, how we'd follow up.
And Bob Epstein raised a hand. He stood up.
You know, Bob's that Berkeley techie type who started Sybase.
It's necessary and, just as important, it's good for the California economy.
So, eight of us went to Sacramento in August and we met with the seven undecided legislators and we lobbied for AB32.
You know what? Six of those seven voted yes in favor of the bill, so it passed, and it passed by a vote of 47 to 32.
(Applause) Please. Thank you.
I think it's the most important legislation of 2006. Why?
Because California was the first state in this country to mandate 25 percent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020.
And the result of that is, we're going to generate 83,000 new jobs, four billion dollars a year in annual income, and reduce the CO2 emissions by 174 million tons a year.
Here's a story about national policy that we could all learn from.
Well, we went to Brazil to meet Dr. Jose Goldemberg.
And so, here's what's happened in Brazil.
They now have 29,000 ethanol pumps -- this versus 700 in the U.S., and a paltry two in California -- and in three years their new car fleet has gone from four percent to 85 percent flex-fuel.
So, what's happened in Brazil is, they've replaced 40 percent of the gasoline consumed by their automotive fleet with ethanol.
It's created a million jobs inside that country, and it's saved 32 million tons of CO2. It's really substantial.
But Brazil's only 1.3 percent of the world's CO2 emission.
So, Brazil's ethanol miracle, I'm really afraid, is not enough.
The fourth and final lesson we've learned is about the potential of radical innovation.
So, I want to tell you about a tragic problem and a breakthrough technology.
Every year a million and a half people die of a completely preventable disease. That's malaria. 6,000 people a day.
Well, two dollars, two dollars is too much for Africa.
So, a team of Berkeley researchers with 15 million dollars from the Gates Foundation is engineering, designing a radical new way to make the key ingredient, called artemisinin, and they're going to make that drug 10 times cheaper.
Their breakthrough technology is synthetic biology.
We've now formed a company called Amyris, and this technology that they're using can be used to make better biofuels.
Alan Kay is famous for saying the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
And that's why we're investing 200 million dollars in a wide range of really disruptive new technologies for innovation in green technologies.
In 2005, there were 600 million dollars invested in new technologies of the sort you see here. It doubled in 2006 to 1.2 billion dollars.
Second fact: the President's new budget for renewable energy is barely a billion dollars in total.
Third fact: I bet you didn't know that there's enough energy in hot rocks under the country to supply America's energy needs for the next thousand years. And the federal budget calls for a measly 20 million dollars of R&D in geothermal energy.
Who would have thought that a mass retailer could make money by going green? Who would have thought that a database entrepreneur could transform California with legislation?
Who would have thought that the ethanol biofuel miracle would come from a developing country in South America?
And who would have thought that scientists trying to cure malaria could come up with breakthroughs in biofuels?
Not enough to keep the ice in Greenland from crashing into the ocean.
The scientists tell us -- and they're only guessing -- that we've got to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one half, and do it as fast as possible.
To size the problem, China's CO2 emissions today are 3.3 gigatons; the U.S. is 5.8. Business as usual means we'll have 23 gigatons from China by 2050.
When I was in Davos, China's Mayor of Dalian was pressed about their CO2 strategy, and he said the following, "You know, Americans use seven times the CO2 per capita as Chinese."
Energy's a six-trillion-dollar business worldwide.
It is the mother of all markets. You remember that Internet?
It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.
Moreover, if we succeed, it's going to be the most important transformation for life on the planet since, as Bill Joy says, we went from methane to oxygen in the atmosphere.
What can you do? You can personally get carbon neutral.
Go to ClimateCrisis.org or CarbonCalculator.com and buy carbon credits. You could join other leaders in mandating, lobbying for mandated cap and trade in U.S. greenhouse gas reductions.
And the most important thing you can do, I think, is to use your personal power and your Rolodex to lead your business, your institution, in going green.
Can you imagine what it would be like if Amazon or eBay or Google or Microsoft or Apple really went green and you caused that to happen?
And I really, really hope that we multiply all of our energy, all of our talent and all of our influence to solve this problem.
(Applause)
You can see here, there's the Yucatan Peninsula, if you recognize Cozumel off the east coast there.
Now, not all asteroids are that big.
It came in at speeds that were tremendous, slammed into the ground, blew up, and exploded with the energy of roughly a 20-megaton nuclear bomb -- a very hefty bomb.
This is a potential threat.
This is an image of an asteroid that passed us in 2009.
These are just stars.
We're building telescopes that are looking for the threat.
It's roughly 250 [meters] across, so it's pretty big -- bigger than a football stadium.
And it's going to pass by the Earth in April of 2029.
In the year 2005, NASA launched a probe called Deep Impact, which slammed a piece of itself into the nucleus of a comet.
We did move the comet a little tiny bit -- not very much, but that wasn't the point.
I think even NASA can do that, and proved that they can.
(Laughter) The problem is, if you hit this asteroid, you've changed the orbit, you measure the orbit, then you find out, oh yeah, we just pushed it into a keyhole, and now it's going to hit us in three years.
(Laughter) There's a group of scientists and engineers and astronauts, and they call themselves The B612 Foundation.
For those of you who've read "The Little Prince," you understand that reference, I hope -- the little prince lived on an asteroid called B612.
The gravity of the asteroid pulls on the probe, and the probe has a couple of tons of mass.
If anybody here is a fan of the original "Star Trek," they ran across an alien ship that had an ion drive, and Spock said, "They're very technically sophisticated.
That's the difference -- that's the difference between us and the dinosaurs.
The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote, and so we can change our future.
(Laughter) We have the ability to change our future.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
This means that the robot is inherently unstable.
For now, it's an experiment, but let me show you some possible future applications.
In a hospital, this device could be used to carry around medical equipment.
But there's also a certain beauty within this technology.
(Music) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Once upon a time in 19th century Germany, there was the book.
Now during this time, the book was the king of storytelling.
But it was a little bit boring.
(Music) His name was Lothar, Lothar Meggendorfer.
For example, one company would tell a story of love through its very own search engine.
One Taiwanese production studio would interpret American politics in 3D.
They realized that, in 6,000 years of storytelling, they've gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls.
(Applause)
When I graduated UCLA, I moved to Northern California, and I lived in a little town called Elk, on the Mendocino coast.
So I started shooting time-lapse photography.
I've been shooting time-lapse flowers continuously, nonstop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 30 years.
(Music) Beauty and seduction are nature's tools for survival, because we protect what we fall in love with.
It opens our hearts and makes us realize we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it.
The "oh" means it caught your attention; it makes you present, makes you mindful.
The "my" means it connects with something deep inside your soul.
Did you know that 80 percent of the information we receive comes through our eyes, and if you compare light energy to musical scales, it would only be one octave that the naked eye could see, which is right in the middle?
And aren't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and the beauty of nature?
Nature's beauty is a gift that cultivates appreciation and gratitude.
So, I have a gift I want to share with you today, a project I'm working on called "Happiness Revealed."
Look at the sky.
We so rarely note how different it is from moment to moment, with clouds coming and going.
It's a gift that millions and millions in the world will never experience.
So these are just a few of an enormous number of gifts to which we can open your heart.
(Applause)
But what I'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open-source collaboration.
A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan, in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment.
Now light and temperature vary with each window's microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically.
And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now, and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food.
So actually now on this website, we have 18,000 people.
What we're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R&D, or research and development.
But what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or "research and develop it yourself."
So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone.
If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we're all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term "consumer" and get behind the people who are doing stuff.
(Applause)
If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go?
That's the question that changed my life forever.
Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free.
I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell.
At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place where it snowed and I became a massage therapist.
With this job all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere.
For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life.
I went home from work early one day with what I thought was the flu, and less than 24 hours later I was in the hospital on life support with less than a two percent chance of living.
It wasn't until days later as I lay in a coma that the doctors diagnosed me with bacterial meningitis, a vaccine-preventable blood infection.
Over the course of two and a half months I lost my spleen, my kidneys, the hearing in my left ear and both of my legs below the knee.
I thought the worst was over until weeks later when I saw my new legs for the first time.
The calves were bulky blocks of metal with pipes bolted together for the ankles and a yellow rubber foot with a raised rubber line from the toe to the ankle to look like a vein.
But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy.
I daydreamed like I did as a little girl and I imagined myself walking gracefully, helping other people through my journey and snowboarding again.
I could feel the wind against my face and the beat of my racing heart as if it were happening in that very moment.
And that is when a new chapter in my life began.
I was so shocked, I was just as shocked as everybody else, and I was so discouraged, but I knew that if I could find the right pair of feet that I would be able to do this again.
As you can see, rusted bolts, rubber, wood and neon pink duct tape.
It was these legs and the best 21st birthday gift I could ever receive — a new kidney from my dad — that allowed me to follow my dreams again.
I started snowboarding, then I went back to work, then I went back to school.
Then in 2005 I cofounded a nonprofit organization for youth and young adults with physical disabilities so they could get involved with action sports.
From there, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa, where I helped to put shoes on thousands of children's feet so they could attend school.
It's believing in those dreams and facing our fears head-on that allows us to live our lives beyond our limits.
Thank you.
He's about my age, and he's in San Quentin State Prison.
When Tony was 16 years old, one day, one moment, "It was mom's gun.
And that's felony murder -- 25 to life, parole at 50 if you're lucky, and Tony's not feeling very lucky.
So I say to Tony, "Sorry, but it's worse than you think.
And something changes for Tony.
So Tony starts doing his homework.
And I say to Tony, "Let's do this."
Thank you.
(Applause)
So that's Johnny Depp, of course.
And that's Johnny Depp's shoulder.
And that's Johnny Depp's famous shoulder tattoo.
Some of you might know that, in 1990, Depp got engaged to Winona Ryder, and he had tattooed on his right shoulder "Winona forever."
And then three years later -- which in fairness, kind of is forever by Hollywood standards -- they broke up, and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done.
(Laughter) So like Johnny Depp, and like 25 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 50, I have a tattoo.
Because we all know people who have gotten tattoos when they were 17 or 19 or 23 and regretted it by the time they were 30.
I got my tattoo when I was 29, and I regretted it instantly.
But I had always felt like, look, you know, I made the best choice I could make given who I was then, given the information I had on hand.
It's also, by the way, a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage.
It's called a lobotomy.
What is regret?
Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past.
So in other words, regret requires two things.
And second of all, it requires imagination.
"I should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel.
We feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly, but almost came out well.
This session today is about behavioral economics.
We have a vast body of literature on consumer and financial decisions and the regrets associated with them -- buyer's remorse, basically.
So top six regrets -- the things we regret most in life: Number one by far, education.
33 percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education.
But for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around, what does that experience feel like?
So the first consistent component of regret is basically denial.
This is an unbelievably primitive emotional response.
So the other thing I thought about there in my bedroom that night was, "How could I have done that?
Now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop.
That night in my apartment, after I got done kicking myself and so forth, I lay in bed for a long time, and I thought about skin grafts.
But first I want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we're feeling regretful about.
Or you can have your last day at work.
Because of course, sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences, either for our own or for other people's health and happiness and livelihoods, and in the very worst case scenario, even their lives.
If you Google regret and tattoo, you will get 11.5 million hits.
(Laughter) The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos, 17 percent of us regret getting them.
That is Johnny Depp and me and our seven million friends.
The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves.
The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time, which, as we know, heals all wounds -- except for tattoos, which are permanent.
So it's been several years since I got my own tattoo.
And as I said earlier, I'm a perfectionist.
This is my tattoo.
Some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are.
I got this tattoo because I spent most of my 20s living outside the country and traveling.
And when I came and settled in New York afterward, I was worried that I would forget some of the most important lessons that I learned during that time.
It actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us, which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us.
Thank you.
In 1994, I walked into a prison in Cambodia, and I met a 12-year-old boy who had been tortured and was denied access to counsel.
And as I looked into his eyes, I realized that for the hundreds of letters I had written for political prisoners, that I would never have written a letter for him, because he was not a 12-year-old boy who had done something important for anybody.
He was a 12-year-old boy who had stolen a bicycle.
We often think of torture as being political torture or reserved for just the worst, but, in fact, 95 percent of torture today is not for political prisoners.
And there was silence in the class, and finally one woman stood up, [inaudible name], and she said "Khrew," which means "teacher."
In Burundi I walked into a prison and it wasn't a 12-year-old boy, it was an 8-year-old boy for stealing a mobile phone.
And when I walked up to the prison director, I said, "You've got to let her out.
But we realized that it's not only the training of the lawyers, but the connection of the lawyers that makes a difference.
And there are many reasons why I believe it's possible.
And on December 4, he organized three thousand members of the Youth Communist League, from 14 of the top law schools, who organized themselves, developed posters with the new laws, and went to the police stations and began what he says is a non-violent legal revolution to protect citizen rights.
It began with a small group of people who decided they would commit.
You know, he never quite made it to all of them every day, but he wanted to visit all 156 prisoners. And I would lift him, and he would put his fingers through.
And most of the prisoners said that he was their greatest joy and their sunshine, and they looked forward to him. And I was like, here's Vishna. He's a 4-year-old boy.
So I thank you for having the prophetic imagination to imagine the shaping of a new world with us together, and invite you into this journey with us.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
My subject today is learning.
When does learning begin?
Now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher.
And so your answer to my question would be: Learning begins at birth.
And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb.
I write books and magazine articles.
And those two roles came together for me in a book that I wrote called "Origins."
"Origins" is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins.
Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb.
I was myself pregnant while I was doing the research for the book.
Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled.
Newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking.
My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born.
So fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into.
A study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language.
Now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful?
It may have evolved to aid the baby's survival.
But it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero.
By seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning.
The flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus.
In one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water.
Six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it.
What this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat.
They're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth.
Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life -- the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels -- are shared in some fashion with her fetus.
The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood.
In the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of World War II, German troops blockaded Western Holland, turning away all shipments of food.
The opening of the Nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades -- so cold the water in the canals froze solid.
Soon food became scarce, with many Dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day -- a quarter of what they consumed before the war.
And then on May 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when Holland was liberated by the Allies.
Decades after the "Hunger Winter," researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions.
Why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later?
When food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver.
The fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it.
The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation.
And their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result.
At 8:46 a.m. on September 11th, 2001, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the World Trade Center in New York -- commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on Wall Street.
About a year after 9/11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the World Trade Center attack.
In a particularly dangerous environment, the characteristic manifestations of PTSD -- a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger -- could save someone's life.
Let me be clear.
Fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy.
That important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This is Seadragon, and it's an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of visual data.
Most of them are ordinary digital camera photos, but this one, for example, is a scan from the Library of Congress, and it's in the 300 megapixel range.
It doesn't make any difference because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment.
It's also very flexible architecture.
We've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution -- much higher than in an ordinary ad -- and we've embedded extra content.
If you want to see the features of this car, you can see it here.
Or other models, or even technical specifications.
This is a project called Photosynth, which marries two different technologies.
You just type Notre Dame into Flickr, and you get some pictures of guys in T-shirts, and of the campus and so on.
And so these are all Flickr images, and they've all been related spatially in this way.
(Applause) (Applause ends) You know, I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft.
(Laughter) I guess you can see this is lots of different types of cameras: it's everything from cell-phone cameras to professional SLRs, quite a large number of them, stitched together in this environment.
Thank you so much.
I come to you with a modest proposal for easing the financial burden.
This idea came to me while talking to a physicist friend of mine at MIT.
The control of a laser is so precise that you can perform surgery inside of an eye, you can use it to store massive amounts of data, and you can use it for this beautiful experiment that my friend was struggling to explain.
The atoms lose their individual identity, and the rules from the quantum world take over, and that's what gives superfluids such spooky properties.
For example, if you shine light through a superfluid, it is able to slow photons down to 60 kilometers per hour.
I have a Ph.D in molecular biology.
I started a contest four years ago called Dance Your Ph.D.
Now surprisingly, it seems to work.
Dance really can make science easier to understand.
I think that bad PowerPoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy.
There are other costs, because PowerPoint is a tool, and like any tool, it can and will be abused.
So now my country is 15 trillion dollars in debt.
For example, our National Endowment for the Arts, with its $150 million budget, slashing that program would immediately reduce the national debt by about one one-thousandth of a percent.
Imagine our politicians using dance to explain why we must invade a foreign country or bail out an investment bank.
Of course someday, in the deep future, a technology of persuasion even more powerful than PowerPoint may be invented, rendering dancers unnecessary as tools of rhetoric.
(Music) (Applause)
(Laughter) I was having coffee with a friend of mine the other day, and I said, "You know, I read a new study that says coffee reduces the risk of depression in women."
(Laughter) That said -- (Laughter) "A new study says drinking coffee may decrease depression risk in women."
(Laughter) And that tweet had a link to the "New York Times" blog, where a guest blogger translated the study findings from a "Live Science" article, which got its original information from the Harvard School of Public Health news site, which cited the actual study abstract, which summarized the actual study published in an academic journal.
(Laughter) So, when I said I read a study, I was reading fractions of the study that were put together by four different writers that were not the author, before it got to me.
And you might be asking yourself, why aren't academics engaging with popular media?
To understand why scholars aren't engaging with popular media, you first have to understand how universities work.
Now, in the last six years, I've taught at seven different colleges and universities in four different states.
(Laughter) And at the same time, I'm pursuing my PhD.
First, scholars produce research in their fields.
To fund their research, they apply for public and private grants and after the research is finished, they write a paper about their findings.
And then, once it's published, for-profit companies resell that information back to universities and public libraries through journal and database subscriptions.
My friends and I call it feeding the monster.
The first problem is that most academic research is publicly funded but privately distributed.
Every year, the federal government spends 60 billion dollars on research.
According to the National Science Foundation, 29 percent of that goes to public research universities.
So, if you're quick at math, that's 17.4 billion dollars.
And just five corporations are responsible for distributing most publicly funded research.
In 2014, just one of those companies made 1.5 billion dollars in profit.
It's a big business.
If the public is funding academics' research, but then we have to pay again to access the results, it's like we're paying for it twice.
And the other major problem is that most academics don't have a whole lot of incentive to publish outside of these prestigious subscription-based journals.
So, books and journal articles are kind of like a form of currency for scholars.
Google Scholar has made open-access research searchable and easier to find.
Congress, last year, introduced a bill that suggests that academic research projects with over 100 million or more in funding should develop an open-access policy.
And this year, NASA opened up its entire research library to the public.
And there are some other benefits to this approach.
And when there's a healthy relationship between the public and scholars, it encourages public participation in research.
Because a functioning democracy requires that the public be well-educated and well-informed.
Instead of research happening behind paywalls and bureaucracy, wouldn't it be better if it was unfolding right in front of us?
I believe in inclusive, democratic research that works in the community and talks with the public.
I'm standing on the shoulders of many scholars, teachers, librarians and community members who also advocate for including more people in the conversation.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Really what we want to hear is music.
(Music) So many of you know that that's Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.
Now this is a video that I'm going to show you of a girl who's born deaf.
(Video) Mother: That's an owl.
Owl, yeah.
Owl. Owl.
Now hearing loss and the treatment for hearing loss has really evolved in the past 200 years.
And now today we have the modern multi-channel cochlear implant, which is an outpatient procedure.
Do you remember writing that chapter?
It is. It's a huge success story in modern medicine.
However, despite this incredible facility that some cochlear implant users display with language, you turn on the radio and all of a sudden they can't hear music almost at all.
Music is entirely different.
Because I always view music as the pinnacle of hearing.
Now this is a MIDI arrangement of Rachmaninoff's Prelude.
Most cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between an instrument.
(Violin) That's a violin.
Cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between these instruments.
So for whatever reason, this implant is not successfully stimulating auditory cortices during melody perception.
Now the question comes to mind: Is there any hope?
This is Beethoven.
This is a cat that's been trained to respond to a trumpet for food.
He's deaf, and he learned to play the piano after he received the cochlear implant.
And here's a video of Joseph.
And at about four months old, I was diagnosed with profoundly severe hearing loss.
Not long after, I was fitted with hearing aids.
So as a result, I had to rely on lip reading a lot, and I couldn't really hear what people were saying.
And not long after I got my cochlear implant, I started learning how to play piano.
And the fact that he can play the piano like that is a testament to his brain.
Truth of the matter is you can play the piano without a cochlear implant, because all you have to do is press the keys at the right time.
I know he doesn't hear well, because I've heard him do Karaoke.
When it comes to restoration of hearing, we have certainly come a long way, a remarkably long way.
Restoration of basic sensory function is critical.
And I don't mean to understate how important it is to restore basic function.
And I don't think that we should give up on beauty.
(Applause)
The moon sees somebody that I don't see.
God bless the moon, and God bless me.
And God bless the somebody that I don't see.
If I get to heaven, before you do, I'll make a hole and pull you through.
And I'll write your name on every star, and that way the world won't seem so far.
There is a fat yellow cat asleep on his couch, raindrops against the window and not even the hint of coffee in the kitchen air.
Nobody notices.
How many galaxies are we losing per second?
How long before next rocket can be launched?
Somewhere an electron flies off its energy cloud.
The astronaut is asleep.
(Applause) Thank you.
When I was little, I could not understand the concept that you could only live one life.
I was listing things I thought I was gonna get to be: a princess and a ballerina and an astronaut.
In April for National Poetry Month, there's this challenge that many poets in the poetry community participate in, and its called the 30/30 Challenge.
The idea is you write a new poem every single day for the entire month of April.
But at the end of the month, I looked back at these 30 poems I had written and discovered that they were all trying to tell the same story, it had just taken me 30 tries to figure out the way that it wanted to be told.
And I realized that this is probably true of other stories on an even larger scale.
There's a French poet and essayist by the name of Paul Valéry who said a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned.
And I use poetry in my life, as a way to help me navigate and work through things.
It didn't always work this way.
Opened a shop, turned it into a family affair.
My father was born into this world of black and white.
"Follow the light," he said.
"Follow the light."
This was my mother's home, before she was mother.
And the only two rooms in the house, with walls that reached all the way up to the ceiling, and doors that opened and closed, were the bathroom and the darkroom.
They got married. Had a baby.
Moved to a house near a park.
The baby tipped the grayscale, filled her parents' photo albums with red balloons and yellow icing.
The baby grew into a girl without freckles, with a crooked smile, who didn’t understand why her friends did not have darkrooms in their houses, who never saw her parents kiss, who never saw them hold hands.
But one day, another baby showed up.
When he laughed, he laughed so loudly he scared the pigeons on the fire escape And the four of them lived in that house near the park.
One day, some towers fell.
The sweet potato boy mashed his fists into his mouth until he had nothing more to say.
And the note said: "A guy sure loves the girl who works in the darkroom."
It was a year before my father picked up a camera again.
A year later he traveled across the country to follow a forest fire stayed for a week hunting it with his camera, it was ravaging the West Coast eating 18-wheeler trucks in its stride.
On the other side of the country, I went to class and wrote a poem in the margins of my notebook.
(Applause)
And then, on top of it you add: "And thousands of young people from Athens, Madrid and New York will demonstrate for social justice, claiming they are inspired by Arabs."
Let me give you an example.
I come from a country called Serbia.
It took us 10 years to unite 18 opposition party leaders, with their big egos, behind one single candidate against the Balkan dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
One single act of violence can literally destroy your movement.
There are certain rules in nonviolent struggle you may follow.
It's only 200 of us in this room.
It is true that the Internet and the new media are very useful in making things faster and cheaper.
My friend Maria Stephan's book talks a lot about violent and nonviolent struggle, and there are some shocking data.
Thank you.
CAPTCHAs are used all over the Internet.
And if you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity is wasting about 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying CAPTCHAs.
While you're typing a CAPTCHA, during those 10 seconds, your brain is doing something amazing.
And the answer to that is "yes," and this is what we're doing now.
Now, the problem is that OCR is not perfect.
And the number of sites that are using reCAPTCHA is so high that the number of words we're digitizing per day is really large.
So this actually has given rise to a really big Internet meme that tens of thousands of people have participated in, which is called CAPTCHA art.
Some of them are very cute.
So the question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000, what can we do with 100 million?
[How many times like the wind, a pole, and the dragon?] (Laughter) Then comes my favorite part of the question.
For example, translating a tiny fraction of the whole web, Wikipedia, into one other language, Spanish.
So what we want to do is, we want to get 100 million people translating the web into every major language for free.
So I don't even know if there exists 100 million people out there using the web who are bilingual enough to help us translate.
So it turns out that today, there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language.
There's a lot of very simple sentences on the web.
And as you translate them and as you see how other people translate them, you start learning the language.
Because with Duolingo, people are learning with real content.
But perhaps more surprisingly, the translations that we get from people using the site, even though they're just beginners, the translations that we get are as accurate as those of professional language translators, which is very surprising.
Of course, we play a trick here to make the translations as good as professional language translators.
So it's extremely unfair towards the poor.
(Applause)
This red dot marks the Great Basin of North America, and I'm involved with an alpine biodiversity project there with some collaborators.
Turning rocks over revealed this crab spider grappling with a beetle.
Spiders are not just everywhere, but they're extremely diverse.
So what this figure shows is that spiders date back to almost 380 million years.
All spiders make silk at some point in their life.
Most spiders use copious amounts of silk, and silk is essential to their survival and reproduction.
So this means that both spiders and spider silk have been around for 380 million years.
For example, this garden spider can make seven different kinds of silks.
How does an individual spider make so many kinds of silk?
They differ by size, shape, and sometimes even color.
Nearly all of these proteins can be explained by a single gene family, so this means that the diversity of silk types we see today is encoded by one gene family, so presumably the original spider ancestor made one kind of silk, and over the last 380 million years, that one silk gene has duplicated and then diverged, specialized, over and over and over again, to get the large variety of flavors of spider silks that we have today.
You can also see that there's a lot of short sequence motifs that repeat over and over and over again, so for example there's a lot of what we call polyalanines, or iterated A's, AAAAA. There's GGQ. There's GGY.
Now, it's really convenient that spiders use their silk completely outside their body.
Here are stress-strain curves generated by tensile testing five fibers made by the same spider.
We call that the tool kit of a spider.
It's been hypothesized that orb-weaving spiders, like this argiope here, should have the toughest dragline silks because they must intercept flying prey.
It's the combination of strength, extensibility and toughness that makes spider silk so special, and that has attracted the attention of biomimeticists, so people that turn to nature to try to find new solutions.
And the strength, extensibility and toughness of spider silks combined with the fact that silks do not elicit an immune response, have attracted a lot of interest in the use of spider silks in biomedical applications, for example, as a component of artificial tendons, for serving as guides to regrow nerves, and for scaffolds for tissue growth.
Spider silks also have a lot of potential for their anti-ballistic capabilities.
In addition to these biomimetic applications of spider silks, personally, I find studying spider silks just fascinating in and of itself.
The next time you see a spider web, please, pause and look a little closer.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
(Laughter) So this dream is really enabled by the convergence of two known technologies.
So let's first talk about focused ultrasound.
It is made out of silicon.
We need to reach a target inside the brain.
(Laughter) Okay, so let's talk a little bit about ultrasound, the force of ultrasound.
You know all about imaging, right, ultrasound imaging.
And you know also about lithotripsy -- breaking kidney stones.
And I am going to show you multiple applications in the medical field that can be enabled just by focusing, physically focusing.
So this idea of harnessing focused ultrasound to treat lesions in the brain is not new at all.
And it makes you ponder why those pioneers failed.
One of the neurological conditions that can be treated with focused ultrasound are movement disorders, like Parkinson's or essential tremor.
What is typical to those conditions, to essential tremor for example, is inability to drink or eat cereal or soup without spilling everything all over you, or write legibly so people can understand it, and be really independent in your life without the help of others.
And many of those patients refused to undergo surgery to have people cut into their brain.
It's a target in the thalamus.
There's water in between the skull and the transducer.
So the first sonication is at lower energy.
And one of the unique capabilities that we leverage with the MR is the ability to measure temperature noninvasively.
But here we can get both the anatomical imaging and the temperature maps in real time.
The temperature was raised to 43 degrees C temporarily.
And you see the temperature rises to like 55 to 60 degrees C.
(Applause) Thank you.
John is one of [about] a dozen very heroic, courageous people who volunteered for the study.
It's like three millimeters in the middle of the brain.
Pain is something that can make your life miserable.
All those I've indicated have already been shown to be successfully treated by focused ultrasound relieving the pain, again, very fast.
They drove like three hours from their farm to the hospital.
So I have good news and bad news.
So the first two applications are breast cancer and prostate cancer.
There is a unique opportunity now with focused ultrasound guided by MR, because we can actually think about prostate lumpectomy -- treating just the focal lesion and not removing the whole gland, and by that, avoiding all the issues with potency and incontinence.
Well, there are other cancer tumors in the abdomen -- quite lethal, very lethal actually -- pancreas, liver, kidney.
And this will take time.
This will take two years.
And this is, in 2004, the FDA has approved MR-guided focused ultrasounds for the treatment of symptomatic uterine fibroids.
So she elected to undergo a focused ultrasound procedure in 2008.
So new life was born.
(Applause) So in conclusion, I'd like to leave you with actually four messages.
And the other thing I would like you to think about is the new type of relationship between physician and patients when you have a patient on the table [who] is awake and can even monitor the treatment.
(Applause)
(Music) (Applause) Okay, so first of all, let's welcome Mr. Jamire Williams on the drums, (Applause) Burniss Travis on the bass, (Applause) and Mr. Christian Sands on the piano.
There are so many decisions being made when you walk on the bandstand.
Every "mistake" is an opportunity in jazz.
I ended up creating a melody out of it.
So how does this all relate to behavioral finance?
But what that does is it actually limits the artistic possibilities.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So today, I want to talk about the microprinter, about my work, how everything started, what was my motivation to build the smallest 3-D printer in the world.
So, my normal working field is called two-photon polymerization.
We call it "Agathe," because it's very heavy, and we thought Agathe was a nice name.
You maybe notice this scale bar, and it's 100 microns for the tower bridge and 20 microns for the fat man.
For comparison, the diameter of a human hair is around 50 microns.
So these objects are like a dust particle or even smaller, so you can hardly see them.
What we're trying to do, or what the next step would be, is to make biocompatible polymers and maybe to write some things inside your body or inside the body of a worm, or to attach cells to our structures, and so on.
Today I want to tell the story behind the microprinter.
What was my motivation?
Well, everything started on Monday morning, 6:30.
OK, that's a lie. Maybe it was 10 o'clock.
(Laughter) I went to my laser lab, which is located near Karlsplatz, in Freihaus, at the Vienna University of Technology.
I went in, and I saw that this laser system was broken, and I tried to fix it.
Then I noticed, OK, there is a major issue with the pump source.
And from that point on, I noticed I had time to think.
(Laughter) No, no, not a good idea at all.
And then, on Saturday, after a week of thinking, I came up with the idea to build the smallest 3-D microprinter in the world.
(Applause) So I called my professor and told him about it.
This video was produced by a friend of mine, Junior Veloso.
And under the set stage, there is a liquid, which gets solidified by the light.
Of course, this is a much bigger machine than the microprinter, but it uses more or less the same principles, so that's what I want to show you.
OK, but what does the microprinter look like?
Well, maybe some of you have already seen this picture.
So it's very small, it's really a desktop version.
For example, you all know these hearing aids?
(Applause) Then they print it out with a big machine, and then, when it's ready to send back to Vienna or wherever you are -- via post -- then they put in the electronics.
When you have a microprinter in your store, you can go to the store, they scan your ear, they just press "Print," the 3-D model gets sliced, and you can go for a coffee, you can go to the university, whatever you want, and instead of five days, you can have your ear shell or your hearing aid in just one day.
And that is an example of how these tiny little machines or other cheap 3-D printers could change our everyday lives.
(Applause)
When I was 14 my parents bought me a chemistry set and I decided to make water.
(Laughter) So, I made a hydrogen generator and I made an oxygen generator, and I had the two pipes leading into a beaker and I threw a match in.
The gentleman to my left is the very famous, perhaps overly famous, Frank Gehry.
(Laughter) (Applause) And Frank, you've come to a place in your life, which is astonishing.
And I know the road was extremely difficult.
But that's an interesting thing for a creative person.
And when I started out, I thought that architecture was a service business and that you had to please the clients and stuff.
We bought this tiny little bungalow in Santa Monica and for like 50 grand I built a house around it.
He's building this huge concrete place.
(Laughter) So, I thought, "Yeah, that's probably a good idea."
But I just found out the world ain't going to last that long, this guy was telling us the other day.
For me, every day is a new thing.
I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going -- if I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it.
If you think about the world, and even just in this audience, most of us are involved with buildings.
He's become the head of Art Center, and there's a building by Craig Ellwood there.
They want to add to it and it's hard to add to a building like that -- it's a beautiful, minimalist, black steel building -- and Richard wants to add a library and more student stuff and it's a lot of acreage.
I visited with him a few years ago and he showed me his early work, and his early work had a resemblance to my early work.
I've done it with Claes Oldenburg and with Richard Serra, who doesn't think architecture is art.
Did you see that thing?
Audience: Liquid architecture.
And I think for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city and what might happen in the city.
Anyway, he's that kind of patron.
It's not his money, of course.
What's the schedule, Richard?
You can come to the opening. I'll invite you.
I'd seen drawings you had presented here at TED.
That was the real surprise of Bilbao.
If it leaks -- Bilbao did not leak.
I was so proud.
They were there three days and it rained every day and they kept walking around -- I noticed they were looking under things and looking for things, and they wanted to know where the buckets were hidden, you know?
And I told her the Frank Lloyd Wright story.
Is that a curse, that people want a Bilbao building?
I asked them what kind of building it was.
So four of us went.
And they took us -- they put us up in a great hotel and we were looking over the bay, and then they took us in a boat out in the water and showed us all these sights in the harbor.
It was a table as long as this carpet and the harbor commissioner was here, and I was here, and my guys.
(Applause)
Thank you.
And of course, in the Buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it, and enlightened beings can see the life on all the other planets.
So they don't -- when they look out and they see those lights that you showed in the sky -- they don't just see sort of pieces of matter burning or rocks or flames or gases exploding.
They actually see landscapes and human beings and gods and dragons and serpent beings and goddesses and things like that.
It just becomes intolerable.
With all of us knowing everything, we're kind of forced by technology to become Buddhas or something, to become enlightened.
And of course, we all will be deeply disappointed when we do.
And occasionally we get together with another person stuck in their skin and the two of us enjoy each other, and each one tries to get out of their own, and ultimately it fails of course, and then we're back into this thing.
Because our egocentric perception -- from the Buddha's point of view, misperception -- is that all we are is what is inside our skin.
Who is it who's going to get enough attention from the world?
I need a hundred billion." So I'm like that.
Imagine if I had to feel even a hundred other people's suffering.
But apparently, this is a strange paradox of life.
I, me, me, mine. It's like a perfect song, that song. A perfect teaching.
And we feel ourselves differently. It's totally strange.
It's totally strange.
It's really too boring whether you feel like this or like that, or what, you know -- and the more you focus on how you feel, by the way, the worse it gets.
But of course, what you said, I think the key to saving the world, the key to compassion is that it is more fun.
Because when you open up like that, then you can't just -- what good does it do to add being miserable with others' misery?
Look at that beautiful thing Chiho showed us. She scared us with the lava man.
So, compassion means to feel the feelings of others, and the human being actually is compassion.
Now, Jim's brain is memorizing the almanac.
I'm going to get up in the morning and think, what can I do for even one other person, even a dog, my dog, my cat, my pet, my butterfly?"
Thank you.
Let's talk about thrift.
Thrift is a concept where you reduce, reuse and recycle, but yet with an economic aspect I think has a real potential for change.
My grandmother, she knew about thrift.
At the moment, we have about 1.3 billion tons of material every year going into landfills.
By 2100, it's going to be about four billion tons.
It's the idea of completely changing the way we think about waste, so waste is no longer a dirty word -- we almost remove the word "waste" completely.
We used to be good at thrifting.
My grandmother, again, used to use old seed packets to paper the bathroom walls.
And a lot of the technologies that have been developed for the smart age can also be adapted to reduce, reuse and also thrift more proficiently.
And as a materials scientist, what I've been tracking over the last couple of decades is how companies are getting smart at thrifting, how they're able to understand this concept and profit from it.
I'm going to give you two examples.
The first is the automotive industry.
Not always known as the most innovative or creative of industries, but it turns out, they're really, really good at recycling their products.
That includes, of course, the old steel and aluminum but then also the plastics from the fender and the interiors, glass from the windows and the windshield and also the tires.
There's a mature and successful industry that deals with these old cars and basically recycles them and puts them back into use as new cars or other new products.
Even as we move towards battery-powered cars, there are companies that claim they can recycle up to 90 percent of the 11 million tons of batteries that are going to be with us in 2020.
That, I think, is not perfect, but it's certainly good, and it's getting better.
A simple example is the waste that they basically belch out as part of industrial processes.
Turns out, there's a company called Land Detector that's actually working in China and also soon in South Africa, that's able to take that waste gas -- about 700,000 tons per smelter -- and then turn it into about 400,000 tons of ethanol, which is equivalent to basically powering 250,000, or quarter of a million, cars for a year.
That's a very effective use of waste.
How about products more close to home?
The advantage with this is not just a simplification of the process, it's also, "I've got one material. I have zero waste," and then also, "I'm able to potentially recycle that at the end of its life."
In this case, it's actually creating the theoretical limit of strength for a material: you cannot get any stronger for the amount of material than this shape.
The idea here is, I'm minimizing the amount of material.
Here's a good example from architecture.
Typically, these sorts of metal nodes are used to hold up large tent structures.
And it was able to reduce waste to zero, cost less money and also, because it's made out of steel, can be eventually recycled at the end of its life.
Nature also is very effective at thrift.
Think about it: nature has zero waste.
Everything is useful for another process.
The advantage of this, though, is it's not just bioderived, comes from a renewable resource, but also that it is transparent, so it can be used in consumer electronics, as well as food packaging.
Now, it's very hard to actually create spider silk naturally.
It's the water bottle.
Why is that interesting?
Because when we think about reusing and recycling, metals, glass, things like that, can be recycled as many times as you like.
This, though, just using a few enzymes, is able to recycle it infinitely.
(Applause)
Jamie Oliver: My wish ...
I came here to start a food revolution that I profoundly believe in.
(Applause) [Great Big Story in partnership with TED] Narrator: They had a big idea to change the world.
(Voices overlapping) So, my wish ... My wish ... I wish ...
[Timothy Baker Head teacher] Timothy Baker: In the past, the children weren't eating the right things.
I've been inspired by Jamie to educate this school about the fact that we're feeding the children the wrong food.
Male teacher: Today we're doing a little bit of science in the kitchen.
Male teacher: Is this a physical change or a chemical change?
(Children shout) Students: Welcome to the Secret Garden!
Kehinde: This is our greenhouse.
This is our compost bin.
Sean: The chickens come out, and they try and chase you.
Student: Thank you, Jamie.
Student: Thank you, Jamie.
[Join the food revolution JamiesFoodRevolution.org]
I was walking through the forests of my grandmother's tales.
This is why I went to Afghanistan.
One day, I crossed the bridge over the Oxus River.
And the Afghan soldier was so surprised to see me that he forgot to stamp my passport.
But he gave me a cup of tea.
My only weapon was my notebook and my Leica.
I heard prayers of the Sufi -- humble Muslims, hated by the Taliban.
Hidden river, interconnected with the mysticism from Gibraltar to India.
These are opium-addicted people on the roofs of Kabul 10 years after the beginning of our war.
These are the nomad girls who became prostitutes for Afghan businessmen.
What do we know about the women 10 years after the war?
Clothed in this nylon bag, made in China, with the name of burqa.
I saw one day, the largest school in Afghanistan, a girls' school.
13,000 girls studying here in the rooms underground, full of scorpions.
And their love [for studying] was so big that I cried.
(Applause)
But art can change the way we see the world.
for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project.
[Great big story in partnership with TED] Narrator: They had a big idea to change the world.
(Voices overlapping) So, my wish ... My wish ... I wish ...
There are two ways of thinking about my work.
(Music) Luana: We're a team of four traveling in the Photobooths truck: Josh, Basel, Jamie and I.
Luana: We're just a tool for people that want to send a positive message.
Jamie: Step inside and take a seat over here.
Once the truck is ready and running, anyone can come.
(Music) (Camera clicking) Touch the screen, take your picture, type in information.
Woman: Oh yeah, there's my funny face for you.
We printed more than 300,000 faces already.
We don't decide the message.
Vianey Perez: When people drive by and they see a lot of faces, they're going to get curious and they're going to wonder who they are.
And so, if you don't believe that you can make change, change will never happen.
Even if it's a very small change in one person, that's a positive change.
It's about everyone who believes that art can change the world.
JR: I think that definitely art can change the perception we have about the world.
In fact, medicine today is a team sport.
And in many ways, it always has been.
I'm a surgeon, and we surgeons have always had this special relationship with light.
When I make an incision inside a patient's body, it's dark.
And this is why, traditionally, surgeries have always started so early in the morning -- to take advantage of daylight hours.
And then this is a picture of one of the most famous hospitals in America.
Here it is on the top of the building with plenty of windows to let light in.
Nerves are yellow, arteries are red, veins are blue.
We heard over the last couple days what an urgent problem cancer still is in our society, what a pressing need it is for us to not have one person die every minute.
The nurses, anesthesiologist, the surgeon, all the assistants are waiting around.
So now you're faced with telling your patient, first of all, that they may need another surgery, or that they need additional therapy such as radiation or chemotherapy.
I mean, in many ways, the way that we're doing it, we're still operating in the dark.
The molecule they had developed had three parts.
The main part of it is the blue part, polycation, and it's basically very sticky to every tissue in your body.
The molecule passes through and gets excreted.
However, in the presence of the tumor, now there are molecular scissors that can break this molecule apart right there at the cleavable site.
So here's an example of a nerve that has tumor surrounding it.
Can you tell where the tumor is?
But here it is. It's fluorescent.
And the cool thing about fluorescence is that it's not only bright, it actually can shine through tissue.
The light that the fluorescence emits can go through tissue.
So even if the tumor is not right on the surface, you'll still be able to see it.
But even before I peel that muscle away, you saw that there was a tumor underneath.
So if you're driving on the freeway and you want to know where's the next gas station, you have a map to tell you that that gas station is down the road.
You have to cut it out, bring it back home, cut it up, look inside and say, "Oh yes, it does have gas."
Anesthesiologists, surgeons are waiting around.
That takes time.
You see a lot of little, roundish bumps there.
Well with our technology, the surgeon is able to tell immediately which nodes have cancer.
And what I'm talking about are nerves.
In the setting of prostate cancer, up to 60 percent of men after prostate cancer surgery may have urinary incontinence and erectile disfunction.
And Roger helped me.
And we eventually discovered molecules that were specifically labeling nerves.
And when we made a solution of this, tagged with the fluorescence and injected in the body of a mouse, their nerves literally glowed.
We have been able to see nerves for facial expression, for facial movement, for breathing -- every single nerve -- nerves for urinary function around the prostate.
Do you guys know where the margins of this tumor is?
What about the nerve that's going into this tumor?
That white portion there is easy to see.
But what about the part that goes into the tumor?
Basically, we've come up with a way to stain tissue and color-code the surgical field.
We published our results in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in Nature Biotechnology.
What needs to happen now is further development of our technology along with development of the instrumentation that allows us to see this sort of fluorescence in the operating room.
And this takes the long-term steady courage of the day-in day-out struggle to educate, to persuade and to win acceptance.
And that is the light that I want to shine on health and medicine today.
A project called TEEB was started in 2007, and it was launched by a group of environment ministers of the G8+5.
And their basic inspiration was a stern review of Lord Stern.
We began the project with an interim report, which quickly pulled together a lot of information that had been collected on the subject by many, many researchers.
Something like 20 billion tons per day of water vapor is sucked up by the northeastern trade winds, and eventually precipitates in the form of rain across the La Plata Basin.
It's not just about the Amazonas, or indeed about rainforests.
No matter what level you look at, whether it's at the ecosystem level or at the species level or at the genetic level, we see the same problem again and again.
At the species level, it's been estimated that insect-based pollination, bees pollinating fruit and so on, is something like 190 billion dollars-worth.
Because these are important benefits for the poor.
And here's an example from Thailand where we found that, because the value of a mangrove is not that much -- it's about $600 over the life of nine years that this has been measured -- compared to its value as a shrimp farm, which is more like $9,600, there has been a gradual trend to deplete the mangroves and convert them to shrimp farms.
And the World Bank has acknowledged this and they've started a project called WAVES -- Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services.
Just a year later the Yangtze flooded, causing something like 5,500 deaths.
What's green carbon?
It's about energy emissions.
And finally, there's deforestation, and there's emission of methane from agriculture.
Green carbon, which is the deforestation and agricultural emissions, and blue carbon together comprise 25 percent of our emissions.
We have the means already in our hands, through a structure, through a mechanism, called REDD Plus -- a scheme for the reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
And already Norway has contributed a billion dollars each towards Indonesia and Brazil to implement this Red Plus scheme.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Ben Roche: So I'm Ben, by the way.
Homaro Cantu: And I'm Homaro.
So this dish in particular is basically champagne with seafood.
The champagne grapes that you see are actually carbonated grapes. A little bit of seafood and some crème fraiche and the picture actually tastes exactly like the dish. (Laughter) BR: But it's not all just edible pictures.
We decided to do something a little bit different and transform flavors that were very familiar -- so in this case, we have carrot cake.
So this is a plate of nachos.
The difference between our nachos and the other guy's nachos, is that this is actually a dessert.
You see a cow with its tongue hanging out.
So after we do that, we put it into a vacuum bag, add a little bit of seaweed, some spices, and we roll it, and this starts taking on the appearance of tuna.
So here's the next challenge.
I told the staff, let's just take a bunch of wild plants, think of them as food ingredients. As long as they're non-poisonous to the human body, go out around Chicago sidewalks, take it, blend it, cook it and then have everybody flavor-trip on it at Moto.
(Applause)
I had no idea that at that moment, my life was going to change forever.
My left leg got caught up in the wheel well -- spun it around.
Somehow I ended up at the hospital.
I was wrapped in ice, and then eventually put into a drug-induced coma.
Eighteen months later, I woke up.
I was blind, I couldn't speak and I couldn't walk.
I was 64 pounds.
I had so many surgeries to put my neck back together, to repair my heart a few times.
It's hard sometimes to talk about these things, so bear with me.
I had more than 50 surgeries.
So the senior citizens realized that they needed to have an emergency meeting.
(Laughter) We're not going to talk about the hairstyles they tried to force on me once my hair grew back.
And a former teacher who happened to have Alzheimer's took on the task of teaching me to write.
So there were two obstacles I had to get through.
One was post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was actually robotic surgery that removed a hematoma from behind my eye.
The biggest change for me was that the world moved forward, that there were innovations and all kinds of new things -- cellphones, laptops, all these things that I had never seen before.
(Applause)
When I was in the fifth grade, I bought an issue of "DC Comics Presents #57" off of a spinner rack at my local bookstore, and that comic book changed my life.
The combination of words and pictures did something inside my head that had never been done before, and I immediately fell in love with the medium of comics.
Even so, I kept reading comics, and I even started making them.
I also became a high school teacher.
This is where I taught: Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, California.
I taught a little bit of math and a little bit of art, but mostly computer science, and I was there for 17 years.
I remember telling my students on the first day of every class that I was also a cartoonist.
It seemed like my instincts in fifth grade were correct.
At the time, I was also the school's educational technologist, which meant every couple of weeks I had to miss one or two periods of this Algebra 2 class because I was in another classroom helping another teacher with a computer-related activity.
For these Algebra 2 students, that was terrible.
In an effort to provide some sort of consistency for my students, I began videotaping myself giving lectures.
(Laughter) I thought it was pretty awesome.
(Laughter) These video lectures were a disaster.
(Laughter) This surprised me, because my students are part of a generation that was raised on screens, so I thought for sure they would like learning from a screen better than learning from a page.
Our students grow up in a visual culture, so they're used to taking in information that way.
When I was teaching this Algebra 2 class, I was also working on my master's in education at Cal State East Bay.
Comic books first became a mass medium in the 1940s, with millions of copies selling every month, and educators back then took notice.
In 1944, the "Journal of Educational Sociology" even devoted an entire issue to this topic.
Mr. Burns assigns a comics essay to his students every year.
Now, Ms. Counts and all of her librarian colleagues have really been at the forefront of comics advocacy, really since the early '80s, when a school library journal article stated that the mere presence of graphic novels in the library increased usage by about 80 percent and increased the circulation of noncomics material by about 30 percent.
The educational potential is there just waiting to be tapped by creative people like you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) (Applause) It is so subversive, in fact, that it has the potential to radically alter the balance of power, not only in our own country, but in the entire world.
There's nothing particularly radical or revolutionary about a patch of grass.
Now, I would like to suggest to you all that gardening is a subversive activity.
(Laughter) Think about this: food is a form of energy.
I also look at gardening as a sort of healthy gateway drug, you might say, to other forms of food freedom.
But she's really inspired me to think much more boldly about the role that I want to have in the garden movement.
The reality is that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic, and it's not simply limited to our country.
It's spreading around the world right now.
And in a sort of parallel universe, we're also seeing that hunger is on the rise.
That's three times the population of the United States.
But at the same time, world food prices are rising and world population is rising and is set to reach 10 billion people by the end of the century.
Now, another thing about the population is we know that it's increasing, but a lot of us don't realize that it's also changing.
Now, I imagine that there are some Stephen King fans in the audience here, and I'm one of them.
Now, you might not think in terms of oil and food as being linked, but there's a very strong link, in fact.
It takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy in our highly industrialized food system in order to produce one calorie of food energy.
Now here, I'm not simply talking about the ticking time bomb that is the global population.
That's the average amount of time the American family spends preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals per day.
31 minutes.
Right?
But the reality is something different.
We're not going to solve our food problems and our health problems simply by switching from regular Coke to some future green iteration thereof.
Now, what's become even more troublesome of late is that even the foods that ought to be healthy aren't always so, and we're starting to lose confidence in our food system, I think.
This is an image from the latest E. coli outbreak.
So we have this sort of shopper's dilemma right now.
I think we need to redefine what good food is.
That's what we transformed our yard into, and I think a really key message is this one: gardens grow good food.
And when I say good food, I mean a number of different things.
Another important message is this one: gardens grow healthy kids and families.
Those happen to be my two youngest sons, and they look healthy and they are healthy, and I think it has to do with the fact that they grew up in gardens and they know where good food comes from.
That's, in fact, the question that my organization, Kitchen Gardens International, is both asking and answering.
(Laughter) Now if this campaign was successful, I think it wasn't simply because we had a visionary First Lady taking up residence at the White House -- that certainly was a major part of it -- and it wasn't simply because we had some celebrity chefs and authors saying this would be a good idea to do.
I think it was ultimately made possible by the fact that there were a lot of people who wanted it to happen.
We had a petition on Facebook, 110,000 signatures.
This is an image from a little holiday we invented called "World Kitchen Garden Day."
It's at the end of August each year, and it's just about bringing people together in gardens to learn from one another, to experience a garden as a community experience.
We also need to grow the next generation of gardeners, and we're doing that in the United States and abroad.
We need a road map, and I picked this slide for a reason.
We've got a bike garden on the left and a map of the Netherlands on the right.
And I think this is a really good start.
That's actually sort of a snapshot of what the garden looked like when it was planted earlier this spring -- lots of diversity, lots of healthy crops.
However, this is not a good representation of our federal agriculture policy.
(Applause) In terms of other things that we need to be doing, we need to move down to the local level and we need to make sure that gardens are legal.
We need to figure out also new ways of getting people into gardens, people who don't have yards.
Earlier this year, a number of Maine towns passed local food sovereignty laws that allow town residents to not only grow food where they want to grow it but to also sell it the way they want to sell it and to the people they want to sell it to.
(Applause) And I'm going to challenge the women to come up with really clever, creative ways of getting guys into the gardens, too.
(Laughter) Perhaps wearing a bathing suit?
(Laughter) But beyond that, I think we need to reexamine the infrastructure that we have in place for gardens.
I think we need to create new infrastructure.
In addition to that, I think we need another type of infrastructure.
I think if we've learned anything through the TED experience, it's that there is power when we bring people together, and I think we need to bring people together at the local level as well.
So here's the new history of gastronomy.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the eastern American chestnut population, counting nearly four billion trees, was completely decimated by a fungal infection.
Fungi are the most destructive pathogens of plants, including crops of major economic importance.
Can you imagine that today, crop losses associated with fungal infection are estimated at billions of dollars per year, worldwide?
And this leads to severe repercussions, including episodes of famine in developing countries, large reduction of income for farmers and distributors, high prices for consumers and risk of exposure to mycotoxin, poison produced by fungi.
The problems that we face is that the current method used to prevent and treat those dreadful diseases, such as genetic control, exploiting natural sources of resistance, crop rotation or seed treatment, among others, are still limited or ephemeral.
Therefore, we urgently need to develop more efficient strategies and for this, research is required to identify biological mechanisms that can be targeted by novel antifungal treatments.
One feature of fungi is that they cannot move and only grow by extension to form a sophisticated network, the mycelium.
(Applause) Thank you.
And those treatments would disrupt the interaction between the fungus and the plant either by blocking the plant signal or the fungal reception system which receives those signals.
Fungal infections have devastated agriculture crops.
And this is due to population growth, economic development, climate change and demand for bio fuels.
Our understanding of the molecular mechanism of interaction between a fungus and its host plant, such as the tomato plant, potentially represents a major step towards developing more efficient strategy to combat plant fungal diseases and therefore solving of problems that affect people's lives, food security and economic growth.
Thank you.
(Applause)
But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness and even the possibility of transcendence.
All the way back into early philosophy and certainly throughout the history of neuroscience, this has been one mystery that has always resisted elucidation, has got major controversies.
I don't believe that, and I think the situation is changing.
And even more -- and this is something that one can be really amazed about -- is what I'm going to show you next, which is going underneath the surface of the brain and actually looking in the living brain at real connections, real pathways.
So all of those colored lines correspond to bunches of axons, the fibers that join cell bodies to synapses.
At any rate, what is consciousness?
What is a conscious mind?
Well first of all, it is a mind, which is a flow of mental images.
That flow of mental images is mind.
So in order to have a conscious mind, you have a self within the conscious mind.
So a conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.
The self introduces the subjective perspective in the mind, and we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind.
Now the first part, the first problem, is relatively easy -- it's not easy at all -- but it is something that has been approached gradually in neuroscience.
So imagine a grid, like the one I'm showing you right now, and now imagine, within that grid, that two-dimensional sheet, imagine neurons.
On the right side, my retina is perfectly symmetrical.
So from the retina you go onto visual cortex.
And of course, the brain adds on a lot of information to what is going on in the signals that come from the retina.
And in that image there, you see a variety of islands of what I call image-making regions in the brain.
You have the green for example, that corresponds to tactile information, or the blue that corresponds to auditory information.
And something else that happens is that those image-making regions where you have the plotting of all these neural maps, can then provide signals to this ocean of purple that you see around, which is the association cortex, where you can make records of what went on in those islands of image-making.
So it provides certain areas for perception and image-making.
But what about the self?
You have, in effect, lost consciousness when you have damage to that red section of the brain stem.
So in that green component of the brain stem, if you damage it, and often it happens, what you get is complete paralysis, but your conscious mind is maintained.
So throughout vertebrates, the design of the brain stem is very similar to ours, which is one of the reasons why I think those other species have conscious minds like we do.
That's where the difference is.
And I strongly disagree with the idea that consciousness should be considered as the great product of the cerebral cortex.
Cetaceans and primates have also an autobiographical self to a certain degree.
The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.
And the autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language.
And out of that came the instruments of culture -- religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.
Three reasons. First, curiosity.
Primates are extremely curious -- and humans most of all.
Second, understanding society and culture.
And finally, medicine.
Let's not forget that some of the worst diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression, Alzheimer's disease, drug addiction.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
Then what happens is the retinal circuitry, the middle part, goes to work on it, and what it does is it performs operations on it, it extracts information from it, and it converts that information into a code.
So what happens when a person gets a retinal degenerative disease like macular degeneration? What happens is is that, the front-end cells die, the photoreceptors die, and over time, all the cells and the circuits that are connected to them, they die too.
And then the transducer then makes the output cells send the code on up to the brain, and the result is a retinal prosthetic that can produce normal retinal output.
I'm not sure "cool" is really the right word, but you know what I mean.
Can we reconstruct what the retina was seeing from the responses from the firing patterns?
So on the left is the encoder alone, and on the right is from an actual blind retina, so the encoder and the transducer.
So the same strategy that we used to find the code for the retina we can also use to find the code for other areas, for example, the auditory system and the motor system, so for treating deafness and for motor disorders.
So just the same way that we were able to jump over the damaged circuitry in the retina to get to the retina's output cells, we can jump over the damaged circuitry in the cochlea to get the auditory nerve, or jump over damaged areas in the cortex, in the motor cortex, to bridge the gap produced by a stroke.
(Applause)
It's very flat, kind of rigid.
I mean it's point and click, it's like the menus, icons, it's all the kind of same thing.
And one of the things I can do is make it bigger if I want to emphasize it and make it more important.
(Laughter) So it's cute, but it's also like a subtle channel of conveying information, right?
This is heavy so it feels more important. So it's kind of cool.
There was this hero, Odysseus, who's heading back home after the Trojan War.
And he's standing on the deck of his ship, he's talking to his first mate, and he's saying, "Tomorrow, we will sail past those rocks, and on those rocks sit some beautiful women called Sirens.
All right, so tie me to the mast."
But then there's this other self, the future self.
It's physically possible to lose weight.
The other reason that it's difficult to resist temptation is because it's an unequal battle between the present self and the future self.
Because it's not that easy to get rid of five dollars.
I mean, you can't burn it; that's illegal.
Because not writing is bad, but giving to charity is good.
So ultimately, I just decided I would leave it in an envelope on the subway.
And this is a timely issue.
We look at the savings rate and it has been declining since the 1950s.
At the same time, the Retirement Risk Index, the chance of not being able to meet your needs in retirement, has been increasing.
That is to say, we somehow might not believe that we're going to get old, or we might not be able to imagine that we're going to get old some day.
So my coauthors and I have used computers, the greatest tool of our time, to assist people's imagination and help them imagine what it might be like to go into the future.
Once you find an investment that you're happy with, what people do is they click "done" and the markers begin to disappear, slowly, one by one.
They're making more money while retired than they were making while they were working.
This is a simulation that uses graphics, but other people find motivating what money can buy, not just numbers.
And what's good is, unlike in the experiments that Hal and myself ran with Russ Smith, you don't have to program these by yourself in order to see the virtual reality.
There are applications you can get on smartphones for just a few dollars that do the same thing.
Thank you.
I work for the Red Cross and I'm a physical therapist.
It took quite many years for the program to become what it is now.
I arrived in Afghanistan in 1990 to work in a hospital for war victims.
So the orthopedic center was closed because physical rehabilitation was not considered a priority.
It was a strange sensation.
Anyway, in 1992, the Mujahideen took all Afghanistan.
And the orthopedic center was closed.
But one day, something happened.
It was a man in a wheelchair desperately trying to move away.
So I stopped the car and I went to help.
The man was without legs and only with one arm.
So I took him into a safe place.
But Mahmoud and his son were already there.
And the gatekeeper told me, "They come everyday to see if the center will open."
It's really dangerous.
Believe me, I was worried because I was breaking the rules.
And slowly, slowly week after week his legs were improving.
April in Kabul is beautiful, full of roses, full of flowers.
Inside, all of us panting, I sat a moment and I heard Rafi telling his father, "Father, you can run faster than me."
And I will never forget Mahmoud and his son walking together pushing the empty wheelchair.
He was sweating.
I don't want them to be teased at school by the other students."
I said, "Okay."
And then he sat down.
I sat down too with goosebumps everywhere.
I could not believe.
That's a production line and a very fast one.
One week later, Mahmoud was the fastest in the production line.
I can't believe it."
It became a policy of "positive discrimination," we call it now.
And then the surprise turns into hope.
And when you start changing, you cannot stop.
And when you start, you cannot stop.
So you do vocational training, home education for those who cannot go to school.
They are my teachers.
Recently we have just started a program, a sport program -- basketball for wheelchair users.
And then I asked the usual question: "Is it a priority?
Is it really necessary?"
That was my story. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation, hopefully for a good cause, which is self-improvement.
And I decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z -- or, more precisely, from "a-ak" to "Zywiec."
It was painful at times, especially for those around me.
So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible.
And from the Ten Commandments to growing my beard -- because Leviticus says you cannot shave.
And there's the sheep.
I was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers.
I wrote the book on a treadmill, and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book.
I had to put on sunscreen.
So I think half of my book advance went into sunscreen.
So that took a lot of time.
(Laughter) Well yeah, I tried that.
It was like something out of Caligula.
It was really a life-changing project.
Because we live in such a noisy world.
(Laughter) And this is a real underestimated, under-appreciated health hazard -- not just because it harms our hearing, which it obviously does, but it actually initiates the fight-or-flight response.
And this, over the years, can cause real damage, cardiovascular damage.
And our Founding Fathers knew about this.
So without noise reduction technology, our country would not exist.
So as a patriot, I felt it was important to -- I wear all the earplugs and the earphones, and it's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way.
To give just one example, we love crunchiness, mouthfeel.
And you can almost trick yourself into thinking you're eating Doritos.
(Laughter) And it has made me a healthier person.
And I hope that I don't get sick during the book tour.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
But many people today -- philosophers, artists, doctors, scientists -- are taking a new look at what I call "the third act" -- the last three decades of life.
But now that I am actually smack-dab in the middle of my own third act, I realize I've never been happier.
Picasso once said, "It takes a long time to become young."
(Laughter) I don't want to romanticize aging.
As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics.
About three years ago, I read an article in the New York Times.
It was about a man named Neil Selinger -- 57 years old, a retired lawyer, who had joined the writers' group at Sarah Lawrence, where he found his writer's voice.
In this article, Mr. Selinger wrote the following to describe what was happening to him.
And I quote: "As my muscles weakened, my writing became stronger.
As I lost so much, I finally started to find myself."
Neil Selinger, to me, is the embodiment of mounting the staircase in his third act.
And they say it can give new significance and clarity and meaning to a person's life.
And he wrote this: "Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing: your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
This is what determines the quality of the life we've lived -- not whether we've been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or suffering.
What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities, what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind we allow them to trigger."
If, however, we can go back and alter our relationship, re-vision our relationship to past people and events, neural pathways can change.
And if we can maintain the more positive feelings about the past, that becomes the new norm.
It's like resetting a thermostat.
But very often, many, if not most of us, when we hit puberty, we start worrying about fitting in and being popular.
Older women are the largest demographic in the world.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
There's a poem written by a very famous English poet at the end of the 19th century.
And the poem goes: "On the idle hill of summer, lazy with the flow of streams, hark I hear a distant drummer, drumming like a sound in dreams, far and near and low and louder on the roads of earth go by, dear to friend and food to powder, soldiers marching, soon to die."
But for us, I want to talk about three factors today.
The globalization of power -- we talk about the globalization of markets, but actually it's the globalization of real power.
The revelation of 9/11 is that even if you are the most powerful nation on earth, nevertheless, those who inhabit that space can attack you even in your most iconic of cities one bright September morning.
And I believe that the decades ahead of us now will be to a greater or lesser extent turbulent the more or less we are able to achieve that aim: to bring governance to the global space.
Now notice, I'm not talking about government.
The world needs an international forum.
And that's what the G20 is, a treaty-based institution.
Well it seems to me that we're now seeing a fundamental shift of power, broadly speaking, away from nations gathered around the Atlantic [seaboard] to the nations gathered around the Pacific rim.
My guess is, for what it's worth, is that the United States will remain the most powerful nation on earth for the next 10 years, 15, but the context in which she holds her power has now radically altered; it has radically changed.
You see increasingly that the world now looks actually, for us Europeans, much more like Europe in the 19th century.
Canning, the great British foreign secretary once said, "Britain has a common interest, but no common allies."
My guess is that we're reaching the beginning of the end of 400 years -- I say 400 years because it's the end of the Ottoman Empire -- of the hegemony of Western power, Western institutions and Western values.
The West got together -- the Bretton Woods Institution, World Bank, International Monetary Fund -- the problem solved.
And here's the third factor, which is totally different.
Today in our modern world, because of the Internet, because of the kinds of things people have been talking about here, everything is connected to everything.
There are fires in the steppes of Russia, food riots in Africa.
That was when the enemy was outside the walls.
Now the enemy is inside the walls.
Peace has come to Northern Ireland because both sides realized that the zero-sum game couldn't work.
They shared a destiny with their enemies.
One of the great barriers to peace in the Middle East is that both sides, both Israel and, I think, the Palestinians, do not understand that they share a collective destiny.
The great poem of John Donne's.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Because if you think about it, 1,000 TED Talks, that's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading.
How on earth are you going to spread a thousand ideas?
Even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head by watching all those thousand TED videos, it would actually currently take you over 250 hours to do so.
Each of those TED Talks has an average length of about 2,300 words.
(Laughter) The obvious question here is, does a TED Talk really need 2,300 words?
What's the minimum amount of words you would need to do a TED Talk?
So if a novel can be put into six words and a whole memoir can be put into six words, you don't need more than six words for a TED Talk.
Actually, it sounded nice in the beginning, but when you look at 600 summaries, it's quite a lot, it's a huge list.
Again, there were some misunderstandings.
(Applause)
But the thing about this filter is that it always leaves the same things in.
There is the old saying that just about every story can be summed up as "a stranger came to town."
There is a book by Christopher Booker, where he claims there are really just seven types of stories.
(Laughter) It's probably the best answer, I don't mean that in a bad way.
11% said, "My life is a battle." Again, that is a kind of story.
So how many of you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree?
So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories?
But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative.
When you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good versus evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics.
As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine that every time you're telling a good versus evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more.
Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good versus evil story, and by pressing that button, you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more.
As a good rule of thumb, if you're asking: "When I hear a story, when should I be especially suspicious?"
I view it usually as a kind of mental laziness.
Another kind of problem with stories is you can only fit so many stories into your mind at once, or in the course of a day, or even over the course of a lifetime.
For instance, just to get out of bed in the morning, you tell yourself the story that your job is really important, what you're doing is really important (Laughter) and maybe it is, but I tell myself that story even when it's not.
So stories will serve dual and conflicting purposes, and very often they will lead us astray.
I used to think I was within the camp of economists, I was one of the good guys, and I was allied with other good guys, and we were fighting the ideas of the bad guys.
And probably, I was wrong.
Maybe sometimes, I'm one of the good guys, but on some issues, I finally realized: "Hey, I wasn't one of the good guys."
One interesting thing about cognitive biases is they are the subject of so many books these days.
The more of these books you read, you're learning about some of your biases, but you're making some of your other biases essentially worse.
Often, people buy them as a kind of talisman, like: "I bought this book. I won't be 'Predictably Irrational'."
It's just like the evidence that shows that the most dangerous people are those who have been taught some financial literacy.
They're the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes.
(Laugther) If you think about how capitalism works, there is a bias here.
Let's consider two kinds of stories about cars.
(Laughter) There are a lot of people who have a financial incentive to promote that story.
(Laughter) Maybe Toyota has an incentive there, but even Toyota is making more money off the luxury cars, and less money off the cheaper cars.
I'm really not sure, and I'm not here to tell you to burn your DVD player and throw out your Tolstoy.
There is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez memoir "Living to Tell the Tale" that we use memory in stories to make sense of what we've done, to give meaning to our lives, to establish connections with other people.
(Laughter) (Applause)
This is an equipment graveyard.
Most of the medical devices used in Africa are imported, and quite often, they're not suitable for local conditions.
An example of a medical device that may have ended up in an equipment graveyard at some point is an ultrasound monitor to track the heart rate of unborn babies.
It's very much dependent on the skill and the experience of the midwife.
Two young inventors from Uganda visited an antenatal clinic at a local hospital a few years ago, when they were students in information technology.
So they invented their own fetal heart rate monitor.
An app on the smartphone records the heart rate, analyzes it and provides the midwife with a range of information on the status of the baby.
These inventors -- (Applause) are called Aaron Tushabe and Joshua Okello.
Another inventor, Tendekayi Katsiga, was working for an NGO in Botswana that manufactured hearing aids.
Now, he noticed that these hearing aids needed batteries that needed replacement, very often at a cost that was not affordable for most of the users that he knew.
In response, and being an engineer, Tendekayi invented a solar-powered battery charger with rechargeable batteries, that could be used in these hearing aids.
He cofounded a company called Deaftronics, which now manufactures the Solar Ear, which is a hearing aid powered by his invention.
The glove has sensors to detect temperature and pressure and warn the user.
Sudesh invented this glove after observing former leprosy patients as they carried out their day-to-day activities, and he learned about the risks and the hazards in their environment.
Now, the inventors that I've mentioned integrated engineering with healthcare.
This is what biomedical engineers do.
At the University of Cape Town, we run a course called Health Innovation and Design.
The aim of the course is to introduce these students to the philosophy of the design world.
The students are encouraged to engage with communities as they search for solutions to health-related problems.
One of the communities that we work with is a group of elderly people in Cape Town.
A recent class project had the task of addressing hearing loss in these elderly people.
The students, many of them being engineers, set out believing that they would design a better hearing aid.
They spent time with the elderly, chatted to their healthcare providers and their caregivers.
They soon realized that, actually, adequate hearing aids already existed, but many of the elderly who needed them and had access to them didn't have them.
The students realized that many of these elderly people were in denial of their hearing loss.
So instead of developing and designing a new and better hearing aid, the students did an audit of the environment, with a view to improving the acoustics.
They also devised a campaign to raise awareness of hearing loss and to counter the stigma attached to wearing a hearing aid.
This approach to understanding a problem through listening and engaging is not new, but it often isn't followed by engineers, who are intent on developing technology.
Another student gave us feedback that she had learned to design with empathy, as opposed to designing for functionality, which is what her engineering education had taught her.
So what all of this illustrates is that we're often blinded to real needs in our pursuit of technology.
But we need technology.
We need hearing aids. We need fetal heart rate monitors.
So how do we create more medical device success stories from Africa?
How do we create more inventors, rather than relying on a few exceptional individuals who are able to perceive real needs and respond in ways that work?
Well, we focus on needs and people and context.
But Africa is a diverse continent, with vast disparities in health and wealth and income and education.
And we in Africa are already immersed.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Lauren Hodge: If you were going to a restaurant and wanted a healthier option, which would you choose, grilled or fried chicken?
Now most people would answer grilled, and it's true that grilled chicken does contain less fat and fewer calories.
However, grilled chicken poses a hidden danger.
A carcinogen is any substance or agent that causes abnormal growth of cells, which can also cause them to metastasize or spread.
Studies show that antioxidants are known to decrease these heterocyclic amines.
They weren't sued because there was carcinogens in the chicken, but they were sued because of California's Proposition 65, which stated that if there's anything dangerous in the products then the companies had to give a clear warning.
But then one night, my mom was cooking grilled chicken for dinner, and I noticed that the edges of the chicken, which had been marinated in lemon juice, turned white.
And later in biology class, I learned that it's due to a process called denaturing, which is where the proteins will change shape and lose their ability to chemically function.
When compared with the unmarinated chicken, which is what I used as my control, I found that lemon juice worked by far the best, which decreased the carcinogens by about 98 percent.
The saltwater marinade and the brown sugar marinade also worked very well, decreasing the carcinogens by about 60 percent.
Olive oil slightly decreased the PhIP formation, but it was nearly negligible.
Now I'm not saying that if you eat grilled chicken that's not marinated, you're definitely going to catch cancer and die.
However, anything you can do to decrease the risk of potential carcinogens can definitely increase the quality of lifestyle.
And that was my first science fair project.
(Laughter) And then came the summer after my freshman year, when my grandfather passed away due to cancer.
So, armed with all the wisdom of freshman year biology, I decided I wanted to do cancer research at 15.
So ovarian cancer is one of those cancers that most people don't know about, or at least don't pay that much attention to.
But yet, it's the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States.
In fact, one in 70 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Chemotherapy, one of the most effective ways used to treat cancer today, involves giving patients really high doses of chemicals to try and kill off cancer cells.
Cisplatin is a relatively common ovarian cancer chemotherapy drug -- a relatively simple molecule made in the lab that messes with the DNA of cancer cells and causes them to kill themselves.
But here's the problem: sometimes patients become resistant to the drug, and then years after they've been declared to be cancer free, they come back.
In fact, it's one of the biggest problems with chemotherapy today.
So we wanted to figure out how these ovarian cancer cells are becoming resistant to this drug called Cisplatin.
And we thought it had something to do with this protein called AMP kinase, an energy protein.
And in fact, it might be changing the cells themselves to make the cells resistant.
In fact, it means that if a patient comes in and they're resistant to this drug, then if we give them a chemical to block this protein, then we can treat them again with the same drug.
It was about finding my passion.
Thank you.
(Applause) Naomi Shah: Hi everyone. I'm Naomi Shah, and today I'll be talking to you about my research involving indoor air quality and asthmatic patients.
People spend over 90 percent of their lives indoors.
And the economic burden of asthma exceeds that of HIV and tuberculosis combined.
Now these statistics had a huge impact on me, but what really sparked my interest in my research was watching both my dad and my brother suffer from chronic allergies year-round.
It confused me; why did these allergy symptoms persist well past the pollen season?
As soon as I realized this, I investigated the underlying relationship between four prevalent air pollutants and their affect on the lung health of asthmatic patients.
But soon after, I developed a novel mathematical model that essentially quantifies the effect of these environmental pollutants on the lung health of asthmatic patients.
And it surprises me that no model currently exists that quantifies the effect of environmental factors on human lung health, because that relationship seems so important.
For example, volatile organic compounds are chemical pollutants that are found in our schools, homes and workplaces.
So today I want to show you my interactive software model that I created.
So I want you to imagine that you're in Julie's shoes, or someone who's really close to you who suffers from asthma or another lung disorder.
And the doctor has her sit down, and he takes her peak expiratory flow rate -- which is essentially her exhalation rate, or the amount of air that she can breathe out in one breath.
Clean out the air ducts in your home, in your workplace, in your school.
Because these environmental solutions that Julie can make in her home, her workplace and her school are impacting everyone that lives around her.
So I'm very passionate about this research and I really want to continue it and expand it to more disorders besides asthma, more respiratory disorders, as well as more pollutants.
And that saying is that genetics loads the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger.
But if each one of us takes initiative in our own home, in our own school and in our own workplace, we can make a huge difference in air quality.
Because remember, we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors.
And air quality and air pollutants have a huge impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients, anyone with a respiratory disorder and really all of us in general.
Thank you.
(Applause)
We who are diplomats, we are trained to deal with conflicts between states and issues between states.
We loosely call them "groups."
Let me show you a slide here which illustrates the character of conflicts since 1946 until today.
The red is modern conflict, conflicts within states.
I happen to believe that Libya was necessary and that military intervention in Afghanistan was also necessary.
But still we have a large deficit in dealing with and understanding modern conflict.
10 years after that military intervention, that country is far from secure.
The situation, to be honest, is very serious.
When I first came to Afghanistan in 2005 as a foreign minister, I met the commander of ISAF, the international troops.
And it is not us who will solve it; Afghans have to solve it."
Now everybody agrees.
Because we didn't talk.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC, is talking to everyone, and it is doing so because it is neutral.
My point is that you don't have to be neutral to talk.
Prime Minister Rabin said when he engaged the Oslo process, "You don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies."
It's hard, but it is necessary.
This is Tahrir Square.
There's a revolution going on.
Should we talk to Hamas?
I think that is wrong.
And how can we tell the Muslim Brotherhood, as we should, that they must respect minority rights, if we don't accept majority rights?
Now my diplomats are instructed to talk to all these groups.
We make a distinction between talking from a diplomatic level and talking at the political level.
In his memoirs, "Long Road to Freedom," he wrote that he survived during those years of captivity because he always decided to look upon his oppressor as also being a human being, also being a human being.
So he engaged a political process of dialogue, not as a strategy of the weak, but as a strategy of the strong.
Dialogue is not easy -- not between individuals, not between groups, not between governments -- but it is very necessary.
And what is dialogue really about?
When I enter into dialogue, I really hope that the other side would pick up my points of view, that I would impress upon them my opinions and my values.
And I believe we need to strengthen this approach in modern diplomacy, not only between states, but also within states.
We are seeing some new signs.
All of a sudden, NGOs were not only standing in the streets, crying their slogans, but they were taking [them] into the negotiations, partly because they represented the victims of these weapons.
How are we going to solve climate change through negotiations, unless we are able to make civil society and people, not part of the problem, but part of the solution?
We as diplomats need to know the social capital of communities.
The diplomatic toolbox is actually full of different tools we can use to strengthen our communication.
And as we try to understand this broad movement across the Arab world, we are not powerless.
Our modern Western societies are more complex than before, in this time of migration.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
(Laughter) She told me she was sure.
I was thinking about how I was going to tell my family and friends that I had cancer.
And I was figuring out how I was going to tell my mother, who had herself had breast cancer when she was pregnant with me.
But I also didn't want her to have to relive her cancer experience.
And at a time like that, you would think that I would turn to my family and friends for support.
And yes, of course I did that.
(Laughter) But in little moments like this, I appreciated what their support meant, and I wondered what I would have done without that network.
And there are several reasons for this.
So I started to look into what an employer is required to do when someone presents with a cancer diagnosis.
I discovered that under Australian law, cancer is considered a disability.
And if this happened to me, I wondered how I was going to do my job as a lawyer.
I scheduled chemo for first thing on a Monday morning.
And as I was working from home, I was thinking about how employers should be applying this concept of reasonable adjustments in our current age, where one in two Australian men and women will be diagnosed with cancer by the age of 85.
So, as we continue to work longer and longer into older age, the chances of having a serious illness while we're in the workforce are increasing.
And lessons from people like me, that have really benefited from working through treatment, need to be more widely shared.
So what should be a manager's first response when somebody says that they're sick and they don't know how it's going to impact their work?
And I was able to do that because my employer gave me the choice.
Thank you.
(Applause)
What I'm going to show you are the astonishing molecular machines that create the living fabric of your body.
So what we can do is actually tell you about the molecules, but we don't really have a direct way of showing you the molecules.
The perception in the 17th century was the Moon was a perfect heavenly sphere.
But what Galileo saw was a rocky, barren world, which he expressed through his watercolor painting.
Another scientist with very big ideas, the superstar of biology is Charles Darwin.
In the top left-hand corner, you've got this yellow-green area.
And the red region is a slice into a red blood cell.
And those red molecules are hemoglobin.
And hemoglobin acts as a molecular sponge to soak up the oxygen in your lungs and then carry it to other parts of the body.
What would it look like?
And so what I'm about to show you is an accurate representation of the actual DNA replication machine that's occurring right now inside your body, at least 2002 biology.
So again, we begin with DNA.
But in each one of your cells, each strand of DNA is about 30 to 40 million nanometers long.
So to keep the DNA organized and regulate access to the genetic code, it's wrapped around these purple proteins -- or I've labeled them purple here.
This huge package of DNA is called a chromosome.
This is the way a living cell looks down a light microscope.
These sausage-shaped things are the chromosomes, and we'll focus on them.
Now we're going to rewind and just focus on the chromosomes, and look at its structure and describe it.
The chromosomes line up.
So this is a single chromosome.
It is made up of about 200 different types of proteins, thousands of proteins in total.
It's involved with the growing of the microtubules, and it's able to transiently couple onto them.
But most medical researchers -- discovering the stuff is simply steps along the path to the big goals, which are to eradicate disease, to eliminate the suffering and the misery that disease causes and to lift people out of poverty.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Music) ♫ They stood together ♫ ♫ under a tree in tall grass ♫ ♫ on TV ♫ ♫ telling the world ♫ ♫ their story ♫ ♫ We will be left to wander ♫ ♫ and fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and took our husbands ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ We will live on ♫ ♫ then fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and killed our children ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I believe ♫ ♫ I believe the almighty knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ You've got something this little life ♫ ♫ can never take away ♫ ♫ Running through the darkness of night ♫ ♫ with a child by her side ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Daybreak brings a sign of new life ♫ ♫ with the power to stand ♫ ♫ Crossing the border ♫ ♫ she said, "You will grow free on this land" ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I can feel your power ♫ ♫ in these words she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on living ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on giving ♫ ♫ and forgiving ♫ ♫ Aung San Suu Kyi ♫ ♫ living under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ When her people asked her for a message ♫ ♫ she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ Now we know the words, let's sing.
♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ People of hope ♫ ♫ People of change ♫ ♫ People of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ I believe the almighty ♫ ♫ knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ Thank you.
(Applause)
People can't function very well when it's too hot or too cold.
And a supply of energy is the basis for all of these activities.
Now, I spent 10 years working at NASA.
But this is the kind of community I was thinking of -- a lunar community It had all of the same needs as a community on Earth would have, but it had some very unique constraints.
There’s no coal on the Moon.
There's no atmosphere.
If you want to try to store enough energy in batteries for two weeks, it just simply isn't practical.
Now, back in 2000, I didn't really know too much about nuclear power, so I started trying to learn.
Almost all of the nuclear power we use on Earth today uses water as a basic coolant.
This has some advantages, but it has a lot of disadvantages.
At normal pressures, water will boil at 100 degrees Celsius.
So water-cooled reactors have to run at much higher pressures than atmospheric pressure.
Some water-cooled reactors run at over 70 atmospheres of pressure, and others have to run at as much as 150 atmospheres of pressure.
This means you have to build a water-cooled reactor as a pressure vessel, with steel walls over 20 centimeters thick.
If that sounds heavy, that's because it is.
Things get a lot worse if you have an accident where you lose pressure inside the reactor.
Steam takes up about 1,000 times more volume than liquid water, so the containment building ends up being very large, relative to the size of the reactor.
If you don't get emergency coolant to the fuel in the reactor, it can overheat and melt.
The reactors we have today use uranium oxide as a fuel.
It's a ceramic material similar in performance to the ceramics we use to make coffee cups or cookware or the bricks we use to line fireplaces.
If you lose pressure, you lose your water, and soon your fuel will melt down and release the radioactive fission products within it.
Making solid nuclear fuel is a complicated and expensive process.
And we extract less than one percent of the energy for the nuclear fuel before it can no longer remain in the reactor.
Water-cooled reactors have another additional challenge: they need to be near large bodies of water, where the steam they generate can be cooled and condensed.
Now, there's no lakes or rivers on the Moon, so if all of this makes it sound like water-cooled reactors aren't such a good fit for a lunar community, I would tend to agree with you.
(Laughter) I had the good fortune to learn about a different form of nuclear power that doesn't have all these problems, for a very simple reason: it's not based on water-cooling, and it doesn't use solid fuel.
Surprisingly, it's based on salt.
One day, I was at a friend's office at work, and I noticed this book on the shelf, "Fluid Fuel Reactors."
Inside that book, I learned about research in the United States back in the 1950s, into a kind of reactor that wasn't based on solid fuel or on water-cooling.
It used a mixture of fluoride salts as a nuclear fuel, specifically, the fluorides of lithium, beryllium, uranium and thorium.
Fluoride salts are remarkably chemically stable.
So the containment building around the reactor can be much smaller and close-fitting.
Unlike the solid fuels that can melt down if you stop cooling them, these liquid fluoride fuels are already melted, at a much, much lower temperature.
In normal operation, you have a little plug here at the bottom of the reactor vessel.
This plug is made out of a piece of frozen salt that you've kept frozen by blowing cool gas over the outside of the pipe.
In water-cooled reactors, you generally have to provide power to the plant to keep the water circulating and to prevent a meltdown, as we saw in Japan.
But in this reactor, if you lose the power to the reactor, it shuts itself down all by itself, without human intervention, and puts itself in a safe and controlled configuration.
Thorium is a naturally occurring nuclear fuel that is four times more common in the Earth's crust than uranium.
It's so energy-dense that you could hold a lifetime supply of thorium energy in the palm of your hand.
Thorium is also common on the Moon and easy to find.
Here's an actual map of where the lunar thorium is located.
Thorium has an electromagnetic signature that makes it easy to find, even from a spacecraft.
The same energy generation and recycling techniques that could have a powerful impact on surviving on the Moon could also have a powerful impact on surviving on the Earth.
You see, in a LFTR, we could use thorium about 200 times more efficiently than we're using uranium now.
And because the LFTR is capable of almost completely releasing the energy in thorium, this reduces the waste generated over uranium by factors of hundreds, and by factors of millions over fossil fuels.
We're still going to need liquid fuels for vehicles and machinery, but we could generate these liquid fuels from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and from water, much like nature does.
We could generate hydrogen by splitting water and combining it with carbon harvested from CO2 in the atmosphere, making fuels like methanol, ammonia, and dimethyl ether, which could be a direct replacement for diesel fuels.
Imagine carbon-neutral gasoline and diesel, sustainable and self-produced.
In fact, in the United States, we have over 3,200 metric tons of thorium that was stockpiled 50 years ago and is currently buried in a shallow trench in Nevada.
And thorium is not a rare substance, either.
In 2007, we used five billion tons of coal, 31 billion barrels of oil and five trillion cubic meters of natural gas, along with 65,000 tons of uranium to produce the world's energy.
With thorium, we could do the same thing with 7,000 tons of thorium that could be mined at a single site.
If all this sounds interesting to you, I invite you to visit our website, where a growing and enthusiastic online community of thorium advocates is working to tell the world about how we can realize a clean, safe and sustainable energy future, based on the energies of thorium.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
I remember the first time that I saw people injecting drugs.
I had just arrived in Vancouver to lead a research project in HIV prevention in the infamous Downtown East Side.
I'll never forget the young woman standing on the stairs repeatedly jabbing herself with a needle, and screaming, "I can't find a vein," as blood splattered on the wall.
In response to the desperate state of affairs, the drug use, the poverty, the violence, the soaring rates of HIV, Vancouver declared a public health emergency in 1997.
But today, 20 years later, harm reduction is still viewed as some sort of radical concept.
Drug users are far more likely to be arrested than to be offered methadone therapy.
Why do we ignore countless personal stories and overwhelming scientific evidence that harm reduction works?
Critics say that harm reduction doesn't stop people from using illegal drugs.
In fact, it is just the opposite.
Probably the most misunderstood health intervention ever.
All we are saying is that allowing people to inject in a clean, dry space with fresh needles, surrounded by people who care is a lot better than injecting in a dingy alley, sharing contaminated needles and hiding out from police.
It's better for everybody.
The police would often lock it down, but somehow it always mysteriously reopened, often with the aid of a crowbar.
I learned that despite unimaginable trauma, physical pain and mental illness, that everyone there thought that things would get better.
It opened in September of 2003 as a three-year research project.
After eight years, the battle to close INSITE went all the way up to Canada's Supreme Court.
It pitted the government of Canada against two people with a long history of drug use who knew the benefits of INSITE firsthand: Dean Wilson and Shelley Tomic.
This was a hopeful moment for harm reduction.
There was one interesting thing that happened in December of 2016, when due to the overdose crisis, the government of British Columbia allowed the opening of overdose prevention sites.
Nobody has ever died at INSITE.
Our disdain for drugs and drug users goes very deep.
We are bombarded with images and media stories about the horrible impacts of drugs.
Virtually millions of people are caught up in a hopeless cycle of incarceration, violence and poverty that has been created by our drug laws and not the drugs themselves.
Let's be clear: criminalization is just a way to institutionalize stigma.
We have been led to believe that drug users are irresponsible people who just want to get high, and then through their own personal failings spiral down into a life of crime and poverty, losing their jobs, their families and, ultimately, their lives.
In reality, most drug users have a story, whether it's childhood trauma, sexual abuse, mental illness or a personal tragedy.
While the media may focus on overdose deaths like Prince and Michael Jackson, the majority of the suffering happens to people who are living on the margins, the poor and the dispossessed.
Even within health care, drug use is highly stigmatized.
"What drugs do you use?"
"When were you last in jail?"
The Center for Disease Control estimated that 64,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2016, far exceeding car crashes or homicides.
Drugs like Oxycontin, Percocet and Dilaudid have been liberally distributed for decades for all kinds of pain.
It is estimated that two million Americans are daily opioid users, and over 60 million people received at least one prescription for opioids last year.
Many people who were reliant on a steady supply of prescription drugs turned to heroin.
People are literally being poisoned.
What if thousands of people started dying from poisoned meat or baby formula or coffee?
First, we should fully embrace, fund and scale up harm reduction programs across North America.
I know that in places like Vancouver, harm reduction has been a lifeline to care and treatment.
And I personally know hundreds of people who are alive today because of harm reduction.
If we truly want to make an impact on this drug crisis, we need to have a serious conversation about prohibition and criminal punishment.
We need to recognize that drug use is first and foremost a public health issue and turn to comprehensive social and health solutions.
We already have a model for how this can work.
In 2001, Portugal was having its own drug crisis.
Lots of people using drugs, high crime rates and an overdose epidemic.
Overall drug use is down dramatically.
This year even more people will get caught up in the illegal drug trade.
And far too many parents will be notified that their son or daughter has died of a drug overdose.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Music is the most universal language that we have, way more so than any dialect or tongue.
You can play a melody to a child in China and the same melody to a child in South Africa.
And despite the huge differences between those two children, they will still draw some of the same truths from that melody.
By logical extension of this, if music is this universal force, then surely groups of musicians -- let's call them orchestras -- should reflect every aspect of the community.
At TEDxBrussels today, we've been looking forward to the future -- 50 years from now.
And if you took a look at all the great orchestras of the world at that time, a snapshot, how many women do you think you would find playing in those orchestras?
Well, here we are 50 years on, in 2011, and pretty much every orchestra on the planet has a fantastic and healthy balance between the sexes.
"Of course!" I hear you say, "Totally logical."
Well, I can tell you as a conductor, I work with orchestras around the world all the time, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of disabled musicians I've encountered in any orchestra, anywhere.
Why is this?
And this mission has a personal root to it.
I have four children, the youngest of whom was born with cerebral palsy.
Apologies to any of you who are sports fans, but music is far more universal than sport.
So, we in the UK are at the very early stages in forming what will be Britain's first-ever national disabled orchestra.
Every country should have a multiplicity of paraorchestras of all shapes and sizes, no question.
It's one of the only folk melodies that we still recognize in our culture.
And here's an interesting thing: folk music can tell you an awful lot about the cultural DNA of the country from which it originates.
The food's not so good.
We need your help, we need the global community to help us deliver this dream, so that this orchestra can be full steam ahead by summer 2012.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me enormous pride, pleasure and joy to introduce to you, with a short improvisation upon that most melancholic tune, "Greensleeves," the first four members of the British Paraorchestra.
(Applause) (Cheers) (Music) (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause)
Cholera was reported in Haiti for the first time in over 50 years last October.
There was no way to predict how far it would spread through water supplies and how bad the situation would get.
Right now, if you want to test water in the field, you need a trained technician, expensive equipment like this, and you have to wait about a day for chemical reactions to take place and provide results.
Countless lives have been saved by canaries in coalmines -- a simple and invaluable way for miners to know whether they're safe.
We call it the Water Canary.
It's a fast, cheap device that answers an important question: Is this water contaminated?
We've seen how distributed networks, big data and information can transform society.
Thank you.
(Applause)
One of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who don't -- into the religious and the atheists.
And for the last decade or so, it's been quite clear what being an atheist means.
There have been some very vocal atheists who've pointed out, not just that religion is wrong, but that it's ridiculous.
And what I'd like to inaugurate today is a new way of being an atheist -- if you like, a new version of atheism we could call Atheism 2.0.
Now what is Atheism 2.0?
Well it starts from a very basic premise: of course, there's no God.
Now let's move on; that's not the end of the story, that's the very, very beginning.
But," a very important but, "I love Christmas carols.
I really like looking at old churches.
I really like turning the pages of the Old Testament."
And for me, atheism 2.0 is about both, as I say, a respectful and an impious way of going through religions and saying, "What here could we use?"
The secular world is full of holes.
When we think about how we're going to make the world a better place, we think education; that's where we put a lot of money.
In the early 19th century, church attendance in Western Europe started sliding down very, very sharply, and people panicked.
They asked themselves the following question.
It's to culture that we should look for guidance, for consolation, for morality.
They wanted to replace scripture with culture.
Now religions start from a very different place indeed.
All religions, all major religions, at various points call us children.
And so we need guidance and we need didactic learning.
If you said to a modern liberal individualist, "Hey, how about a sermon?"
What's the difference between a sermon and our modern, secular mode of delivery, the lecture?
Well a sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information.
That's what all religions tell us: "Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day."
"The new is better than the old."
All the major religions give us calendars.
What is a calendar?
A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas.
You know, when you look at the Moon, you think, "I'm really small. What are my problems?"
So for example, take the Jewish idea of forgiveness.
A lot of our surplus wealth goes to museums, etc.
We sometimes hear it said that museums are our new cathedrals, or our new churches.
Now I think that the potential is there, but we've completely let ourselves down.
Art should be one of the tools by which we improve our society.
Let's think of something else.
The people in the modern world, in the secular world, who are interested in matters of the spirit, in matters of the mind, in higher soul-like concerns, tend to be isolated individuals.
They're poets, they're philosophers, they're photographers, they're filmmakers.
And they tend to be on their own.
What do organized religions do?
The Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to the Wall Street Journal.
These are all very good qualities.
And that's what religions do.
If you're involved in anything that's communal, that involves lots of people getting together, there are things for you in religion.
If you're involved, say, in a travel industry in any way, look at pilgrimage.
If you're in the art world, look at the example of what religions are doing with art.
And if you're an educator in any way, again, look at how religions are spreading ideas.
Thank you very much.
Atheism shouldn't cut itself off from the rich sources of religion.
CA: It seems to me that there's plenty of people in the TED community who are atheists.
But probably most people in the community certainly don't think that religion is going away any time soon and want to find the language to have a constructive dialogue and to feel like we can actually talk to each other and at least share some things in common.
(Applause)
In the 1980s, in communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government.
But today, in 2011, if you go and buy a color laser printer from any major laser printer manufacturer and print a page, that page will end up having slight yellow dots printed on every single page, in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer.
This is happening to us today.
And nobody seems to be making a fuss about it.
And this is an example of the ways our own governments are using technology against us, the citizens.
And this is one of the main three sources of online problems today.
We have three main groups.
We have online criminals.
We actually have several cases of millionaires online, multimillionaires, who made money with their attacks.
And I claim it's already today that it's more likely for any of us to become the victim of a crime online than here in the real world.
And it's very obvious that this is only going to get worse.
In the future, the majority of crime will be happening online.
This is a prime example of what happens when governments attack against their own citizens.
So how do people die as the result of a hack like this?
Well, you need a certificate if you have a website that has https, SSL encrypted services, services like Gmail.
And this is exactly what happened with the case of DigiNotar.
What about Arab Spring and things that have been happening, for example, in Egypt?
Among those papers was this binder entitled, "FinFisher."
And within that binder were notes from a company based in Germany, which had sold to the Egyptian government a set of tools for intercepting, at a very large scale, all the communication of the citizens of the country.
They had sold this tool for 280,000 euros to the Egyptian government.
So Western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools to do this against their own citizens.
But Western governments are doing it to themselves as well.
For example, in Germany, just a couple of weeks ago, the so-called "State Trojan" was found, which was a Trojan used by German government officials to investigate their own citizens.
If you are a suspect in a criminal case, well, it's pretty obvious, your phone will be tapped.
This is not a question between privacy against security.
It's a question of freedom against control.
And do we trust, do we blindly trust, any future government, a government we might have 50 years from now?
And these are the questions that we have to worry about for the next 50 years.
But it turns out to be illegal to print a child's drawing of Micky Mouse onto a plate of sugar.
So there's two bills in Congress right now.
One is called SOPA, the other is called PIPA.
PIPA is short for PROTECTIP, which is itself short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property -- because the congressional aides who name these things have a lot of time on their hands.
And what SOPA and PIPA want to do is they want to do this.
Now the domain name system is the thing that turns human-readable names, like Google.com, into the kinds of addresses machines expect -- 74.125.226.212.
Now the problem with this model of censorship, of identifying a site and then trying to remove it from the domain name system, is that it won't work.
And the back story is this: SOPA and PIPA, as legislation, were drafted largely by media companies that were founded in the 20th century.
The 20th century was a great time to be a media company, because the thing you really had on your side was scarcity.
If you were making a TV show, it didn't have to be better than all other TV shows ever made; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time -- which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty.
This is like having a license to print money and a barrel of free ink.
And slowly, slowly, at the end of the 20th century, that scarcity started to get eroded -- and I don't mean by digital technology; I mean by analog technology.
Cassette tapes, video cassette recorders, even the humble Xerox machine created new opportunities for us to behave in ways that astonished the media business.
Because it turned out we're not really couch potatoes.
Jack Valenti, who was the head lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, once likened the ferocious video cassette recorder to Jack the Ripper and poor, helpless Hollywood to a woman at home alone.
And so the media industries begged, insisted, demanded that Congress do something.
By the early 90s, Congress passed the law that changed everything.
And that law was called the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
But that wasn't what the media businesses wanted.
They had wanted Congress to outlaw copying full-stop.
The DMCA marks the moment when the media industries gave up on the legal system of distinguishing between legal and illegal copying and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means.
We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
We share written things, we share images, we share audio, we share video.
So PIPA and SOPA are round two.
So what PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries-old legal concept, innocent until proven guilty, and reversing it -- guilty until proven innocent.
You can't share until you show us that you're not sharing something we don't like.
The real effects of SOPA and PIPA are going to be different than the proposed effects.
There's two things you can do to help stop this -- a simple thing and a complicated thing, an easy thing and a hard thing.
You don't have millions and millions of dollars, but you can call your representatives, and you can remind them that you vote, and you can ask not to be treated like a thief, and you can suggest that you would prefer that the Internet not be broken.
And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries.
"We'd prefer not to do that," says the content industries.
They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now.
Because that's the real message of PIPA and SOPA.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Do you know how many choices you make in a typical day?
Do you know how many choices you make in typical week?
And they found that the average CEO engaged in about 139 tasks in a week.
I want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions.
Now as I talk about this problem, I'm going to have some questions for you and I'm going to want to know your answers.
So when I ask you a question, since I'm blind, only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories.
(Laughter) Otherwise, when I ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, I'd like you to clap your hands.
(Applause) Thank you.
So when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I used to go to this very, very upscale grocery store; at least at that time it was truly upscale.
It was a store called Draeger's.
Now this store, it was almost like going to an amusement park.
I used to love going to this store, but on one occasion I asked myself, well how come you never buy anything?
They had over 75 different kinds of olive oil, including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees.
We decided to do a little experiment, and we picked jam for our experiment.
They had 348 different kinds of jam.
We set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store.
Now if you do the math, people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24.
And what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan, the 401(k) plan, does that affect people's likelihood to save more for tomorrow.
And what we found was that indeed there was a correlation.
And what we found was that, the more funds offered, indeed, there was less participation rate.
Well, over the past decade, we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices.
So what I want to propose to you today are four simple techniques -- techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues -- that you can easily apply in your businesses.
When the Golden Cat Corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products, they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent -- a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs.
You know, the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products.
But the ninth largest retailer, the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is Aldi, and it offers you only 1,400 products -- one kind of canned tomato sauce.
Every single Harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund.
Now before we started our session this afternoon, I had a chat with Gary.
(Laughter) You guys knew there was a trick, didn't you.
That in order for people to understand the differences between the choices, they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice, and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way, in a very concrete way.
Why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an ATM card or a credit card as opposed to cash?
It turns out that in Wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor, the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664.
Here are two different jewelry displays.
One is called "Jazz" and the other one is called "Swing."
If you think the display on the left is Swing and the display on the right is Jazz, clap your hands.
If you think the one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, clap your hands.
(Laughter) The categories need to say something to the chooser, not the choice-maker.
Let's take a very, very complicated decision: buying a car.
Here's a German car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car.
Now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So what makes a piece of music beautiful?
Well, most musicologists would argue that repetition is a key aspect of beauty, the idea that we take a melody, a motif, a musical idea, we repeat it, we set up the expectation for repetition, and then we either realize it or we break the repetition.
And that's a key component of beauty.
So if repetition and patterns are key to beauty, then what would the absence of patterns sound like, if we wrote a piece of music that had no repetition whatsoever in it?
Is it possible to write a piece of music that has no repetition whatsoever?
Well, in the 1960s, a guy by the name of John Costas was working on the Navy's extremely expensive sonar system.
(Piano notes play high to low) So that was the sonar ping they were using, a down chirp.
The relationship between the first two notes is the same as the second two, and so forth.
These look like a random pattern of dots, but they're not.
John Costas is the inventor of these patterns.
He was the sonar engineer working for the Navy.
So he wrote a letter to the mathematician in the middle, a young mathematician in California at the time, Solomon Golomb.
It turns out that Solomon Golomb was one of the most gifted discrete mathematicians of our time.
So, Solomon Golomb spent the summer thinking about the problem.
Now, Galois is a very famous mathematician.
It's the mathematics of prime numbers.
He was challenged to a duel, and he accepted.
He then fought the duel, was shot and died at age 20.
The mathematics that runs your cell phones, the internet, that allows us to communicate, DVDs, all comes from the mind of Évariste Galois, a mathematician who died 20 years young.
Thankfully, his mathematics was eventually published.
So he sent a letter back to John saying, "It turns out you can generate these patterns using prime number theory."
Elementary school mathematics is sufficient to solve this problem.
There happen to be 88 notes on the piano.
So today, we are going to have the world premiere of the world's first pattern-free piano sonata.
So, back to the question of music: What makes music beautiful?
It turns out that musicologists -- a famous composer by the name of Arnold Schoenberg -- thought of this in the 1930s, '40s and '50s.
His goal as a composer was to write music that would free music from tonal structure.
It sounds a lot like a Costas array.
Unfortunately, he died 10 years before Costas solved the problem of how you can mathematically create these structures.
This is mathematically almost impossible.
(Laughter) When you're listening to this piece of music, I implore you: try and find some repetition.
(Applause)
(Laughter) But have you ever gone to a bar and come out with a $200 million business?
That's what happened to us about 10 years ago.
Don't worry about it."
So I say, "Why don't we send in Jeff, the bartender?"
(Laughter) "Jeff is wicked smart. He's brilliant.
I couldn't believe it.
So we changed the way we recruited and trained.
We work with the fastest-growing software package to ever reach 10 billion dollars in annual sales.
Meanwhile, the push for STEM-based education in this country -- science, technology, engineering, mathematics -- is fierce.
Since 2009, STEM majors in the United States have increased by 43 percent, while the humanities have stayed flat.
Number one, today's technologies are incredibly intuitive.
They're like LEGO: easy to put together, easy to learn, even easy to program, given the vast amounts of information that are available for learning.
The humanities give us the context of our world.
And yes, you can hire a bunch of artists and build a tech company and have an incredible outcome.
Google, Apple, Facebook.
Sixty-five percent of their open job opportunities are non-technical: marketers, designers, project managers, program managers, product managers, lawyers, HR specialists, trainers, coaches, sellers, buyers, on and on.
And if there's one thing that our future workforce needs -- and I think we can all agree on this -- it's diversity.
We need a diversity of backgrounds and skills, with introverts and extroverts and leaders and followers.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Now, my task at NASA is to develop the next generation of aviation fuels.
Extreme green. Why aviation?
Do not use arable land.
Number two: Don't compete with food crops.
If 97.5 percent of the world's water is saltwater, 2.5 percent is fresh water. Less than a half percent of that is accessible for human use.
A halophyte is a salt-tolerating plant.
We also are using weeds and we are also using algae.
If you are into the business of the next generation of aviation fuels, algae is a viable option, there's a lot of funding right now, and we have an algae to fuels program.
Now the problems with closed photobioreactors are: They are quite expensive, they are automated, and it's very difficult to get them in large scale.
We have 95 percent mixing and our lipid content is higher than a closed photobioreactor system, which we think is significant.
There is a drawback to algae, however: It's very expensive.
Is there a way to produce algae inexpensively?
And the answer is: yes.
We do the same thing we do with halophytes, and that is: climatic adaptation.
We do not use chemical fertilizer.
So a lot of people ask me, "How did you get started?"
It's a wonderful plant. I love that plant.
Everywhere we go we see it. It's all over the place, from Maine all the way to California. We love that plant.
So, we have a seed to fuel program.
So far we talked about water and fuel, but along the way we found out something interesting about Salicornia: It's a food product.
You can see there's a greenhouse in Germany that sells it as a health food product.
So we are pickling pickle weed in the middle.
And last, garlic with Salicornia, which is what I like.
Just like the Miami Heat has the big three, we have the big three at NASA GRC.
Over the last two years we've had 35 different students from around the world working at GreenLab.
Clearly we use electricity. We have a solution for you — We're using clean energy sources here.
We are also using something that is quite interesting — there is a solar array field at NASA's Glenn Research Center, hasn't been used for 15 years.
Here's a concept with this: We are using the GreenLab for a micro-grid test bed for the smart grid concept in Ohio.
We really, really hope this concept catches on worldwide.
We think we have a solution for food, water, fuel and now energy. Complete.
So I get a lot of questions about, "What are you doing in that lab?"
Well, I'm not quite sure.
Now certainly, I think there are lots of things in our culture around us which sort of reinforce the idea that for each one of us, we have a kind of a core, an essence.
You answer a lot of questions, and this is supposed to reveal something about your core personality.
And if you pick up one of those magazines, it's hard to resist, isn't it?
So I think that we have a common-sense idea that there is a kind of core or essence of ourselves to be discovered.
You are the individuals you are, and you have this kind of core.
I don't know whether this number plate, which says "messiah 1," indicates that the driver believes in the messiah, or that they are the messiah.
Either way, they have beliefs about messiahs.
We have knowledge.
But the suggestion I want to put to you today is that there's something fundamentally wrong with this model.
But what happens is these things exist, and they're kind of all integrated, they're overlapped, they're connected in various different ways.
But there's also a narrative, a story we tell about ourselves, the experiences we have when we remember past things.
So what we desire is partly a result of what we believe, and what we remember is also informing us what we know.
It's the shift between thinking of yourself as a thing which has all the experiences of life, and thinking of yourself as simply that collection of all experiences in life.
If you have a heart transplant, you're still the same person.
In a way, it's common sense.
Everything else in the universe is the same.
Now this view is not particularly new, actually.
You find it in Buddhism, you find it in 17th, 18th-century philosophy going through to the current day, people like Locke and Hume.
But interestingly, it's also a view increasingly being heard reinforced by neuroscience.
But it's true that neuroscience shows that there is no centre in the brain where things do all come together."
So when you look at the brain, and you look at how the brain makes possible a sense of self, you find that there isn't a central control spot in the brain.
There is no kind of center where everything happens.
There are lots of different processes in the brain, all of which operate, in a way, quite independently.
The term I use in the book, I call it the ego trick.
It's like a mechanical trick.
Now you might think this is a worrying idea.
You might think that if it's true, that for each one of us there is no abiding core of self, no permanent essence, does that mean that really, the self is an illusion?
There is no real you.
Well, a lot of people actually do use this talk of illusion and so forth.
In the same way, we're not illusions either.
The waters are always carving new channels.
with changes and tides and the weather, some things dry up, new things are created.
Of course the water that flows through the waterfall is different every single instance.
It doesn't mean it's not real.
But if you think of yourself as being, in a way, not a thing as such, but a kind of a process, something that is changing, then I think that's quite liberating.
Now we've got to be careful here, right?
That's not true.
I could practice hard and maybe be good, but I don't have that really natural ability.
There are limits to what we can achieve.
You'll be aware of the fact how much of you changed over recent years.
and that, I think, is a liberating and exciting prospect.
Thank you very much.
So what I'm doing is a thought experiment.
Now you may know of or have read this book by this guy.
It's probably the first and maybe the only bestseller ever written about economics.
It talks about how nations all over the world will prosper through the individual pursuit of individual profit.
So my thought experiment is to imagine what would have happened if Adam Smith had visited Africa.
And fortunately, there's actually an easy answer, because the Arab lawyer and traveler Ibn Battuta traveled down the east coast of Africa in the 14th century, and what he found when he got to Mogadishu was a market, and he wrote about it.
And basically, merchant ships came to the harbor, and they weren't even allowed to land.
They had to drop anchor in the harbor, and boats came out to them, and locals picked them and said, "You are my guest, I am now your broker."
That's a share-the-wealth free market."
And when I put this question to Christian [Benimana], who had the stage at the beginning of this session, he responded that if Adam Smith had come to Africa, there would have been a sharing economy long before Airbnb and Uber.
And that's true.
There would be a lot of money flowing into the countries.
These are just figures of 10 percent of exports in these countries.
So the interesting thing is that this mutual aid economy still exists, and we can find examples of it in the strangest places.
It's the largest electronics market in West Africa.
It's 10,000 merchants, they do about four billion dollars of turnover every year.
But in reality, this market is governed by a sharing principle.
That's locally generated venture capital. Right?
It's migrated from North Africa to Spain, and from Spain to the west of the United States, where it still is used.
People in acequias have been commonly managing scarce water resources for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
And it seems to me that we have actually two kinds of capitalism.
One one-hundredth of one percent of the Kenyan population controls wealth equal to 75 percent of the GDP of the country.
And everyone else is with this guy, selling board games and bodybuilding equipment in a go-slow on the highway in Lagos.
And when you're selling board games and bodybuilding equipment in a go-slow, that traffic jam is really, really, really bad, right?
I wanted to quote Steve Biko, and I thought it was really important to quote Steve Biko, because next month, September 12 to be exact, is the 40th anniversary of his murder by the South African state.
And he also said that "the great powers of the world have done wonders in giving us an industrial and military look, ..."
and we don't have to copy that military-industrialist complex, because Africa can do things differently and restore the humanity of the world.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And the reason we can do this is through an emerging technology called additive manufacturing, or 3D printing.
This is a 3D printer.
In this case, we can see a laser sintering machine developed by EOS.
And you can see, they're ranging from shoes, rings that were made out of stainless steal, phone covers out of plastic, all the way through to spinal implants, for example, that were created out of medical-grade titanium, and engine parts.
And you can create parts with moving components, hinges, parts within parts.
This was created by an architectural firm called Shiro.
It was developed by a company called Within Technologies and 3T RPD.
And then taking this idea of creating a very detailed structure, we can apply it to honeycomb structures and use them within implants.
With 3D printing, we're seeing today that we can create much better implants.
And in fact, because we can create bespoke products en masse, one-offs, we can create implants that are specific to individuals.
You can use software like Google SketchUp to create products from scratch very easily.
3D printing can be also used to download spare parts from the Web.
These are parts of a RepRap machine, which is a kind of desktop printer.
This is a lamp.
And also, you can engage in shape manipulation of that product, but within boundaries that are safe.
And the idea of now creating implants, scanning data, an MRI scan of somebody can now be converted into 3D data and we can create very specific implants for them.
You know, this is pair of lungs and the bronchial tree.
Using this process, pioneers in the industry are layering up cells today.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And then my mother died at 82.
It's not that I didn't have help, but honestly, I sort of led, I was the team leader.
And there's hypothermia.
And there are sharks.
Are your shoulders ready?
You know, you're swimming with the fogged goggles, you're swimming at 60 strokes a minute, so you're never really focused on anything, you don't see well.
The most venomous animal that lives in the ocean is the box jellyfish.
Help me! Somebody help me!"
I need help, and I can't help Diana."
The doctor, medical team from University of Miami arrived at five in the morning.
As a matter of fact, the best advice I got was from an elementary school class in the Caribbean.
And I was telling these kids, 120 of them -- they were all in the school on the gymnasium floor -- and I was telling them about the jellyfish and how they're gelatinous and you can't see them at night especially.
"Henry, what's your question?"
He said, "You know those guys who really believe in what they believe in and so they wear bombs?"
(Applause) Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) And so, what after that?
But I'm ready.
And by the way, a reporter called me the other day and he said he looked on Wikipedia and he said he saw my birthday was August 22nd 1949, and for some odd reason in Wikipedia, they had my death date too.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
I think we have to do something about a piece of the culture of medicine that has to change.
It's called batting average.
Do you know what they call a 300 hitter in Major League Baseball?
And I memorized everything.
And that's when I made my first mistake; I sent her home.
Actually, I made two more mistakes.
And I went back to my work on the wards.
But I carried on with my work.
"Do you remember that patient you sent home?"
About an hour after she had arrived home, after I'd sent her home, she collapsed and her family called 911 and the paramedics brought her back to the emergency department where she had a blood pressure of 50, which is in severe shock.
Over the next few weeks, I beat myself up and I experienced for the first time the unhealthy shame that exists in our culture of medicine -- where I felt alone, isolated, not feeling the healthy kind of shame that you feel, because you can't talk about it with your colleagues.
And I kept asking myself these questions.
And then at my worst moments: Why did I make such a stupid mistake?
And I went back to work.
Two years later I was an attending in the emergency department at a community hospital just north of Toronto, and I saw a 25 year-old man with a sore throat.
It was busy, I was in a bit of a hurry.
And I gave him a prescription for penicillin and sent him on his way.
He had a potentially life-threatening condition called epiglottitis.
And fortunately he didn't die.
He was placed on intravenous antibiotics and he recovered after a few days.
Twice in one emergency shift, I missed appendicitis.
In my 20 years or so of medical broadcasting and journalism, I've made a personal study of medical malpractice and medical errors to learn everything I can, from one of the first articles I wrote for the Toronto Star to my show "White Coat, Black Art."
In this country, as many as 24,000 Canadians die of preventable medical errors.
In a hospital system where medical knowledge is doubling every two or three years, we can't keep up with it.
I'm not a robot; I don't do things the same way each time.
Given all of that, mistakes are inevitable.
My name is Brian Goldman.
I'm human. I make mistakes.
(Applause)
The maxim, "Know thyself" has been around since the ancient Greeks.
"Know thyself."
"Know thyself."
This fascination led me to submerge myself in art, study neuroscience, and later, to become a psychotherapist.
Today I combine all my passions as the CEO of InteraXon, a thought-controlled computing company.
I mean, it's self-awareness that separates Homo sapiens from earlier instances of our mankind.
You may or may not have noticed that I'm wearing a tiny electrode on my forehead.
Or what if I can take that information and put it into an organic shape up on the screen?
Over 17 days at the Olympics, 7,000 visitors from all over the world actually got to individually control the light from the CN Tower, parliament and Niagara in real time with their minds from across the country, 3,000 km away.
Let me show you an example of what I'm talking about here.
Here's an application that I created for the iPad.
In that headset, you have fabric sensors on your forehead and above the ear.
You have graphs and charts that tell you how your brain was doing -- not just how much rope you used or what your high score is, but what was going on inside of your mind.
I like to call this "intra-active."
Normally, we think about technology as interactive.
For example, thought-controlled computing can teach children with ADD how to improve their focus.
With ADD, children have a low proportion of beta waves for focus states and a high proportion of theta states.
So you can imagine kids playing video games with their brain waves and improving their ADD symptoms as they do it.
With humanized technology we can monitor the quality of your sleep cycles.
I look forward to the day that I can sit beside you, easel-side, watching the world that we can create with our new toolboxes and the discoveries that we can make about ourselves.
Six years ago, I started writing about women entrepreneurs during and after conflict.
Rwanda in the immediate aftermath of the genocide was 77 percent female.
And she said business was even more important for women because earning an income earned respect and money was power for women.
She had started her business squatting in an abandoned garage, sewing sheets and pillow cases she would take to markets all around the city so that she could support the 12 or 13 family members who were counting on her for survival.
By the time we met, she had 20 employees, most of them women, who were sending their boys and their girls to school.
And if you see the word "entrepreneur," most people think men.
Microfinance is an incredibly powerful tool that leads to self-sufficiency and self-respect, but we must move beyond micro-hopes and micro-ambitions for women, because they have so much greater hopes for themselves.
In the U.S., women-owned businesses will create five and a half million new jobs by 2018.
And in the developing world overall, That figure is 40 to 50 percent.
And as the World Bank recently noted, women are stuck in a productivity trap.
We don't need to invent solutions because we have them -- cash flow loans based in income rather than assets, loans that use secure contracts rather than collateral, because women often don't own land.
And Kiva.org, the microlender, is actually now experimenting with crowdsourcing small and medium sized loans.
Recently it has become very much in fashion to call women "the emerging market of the emerging market."
Because -- and I say this as somebody who worked in finance -- 500 billion dollars at least has gone into the emerging markets in the past decade.
It is about how we invest and it's about how we see women.
Secondly, when we talk about men who are succeeding, we rightly consider them icons or pioneers or innovators to be emulated.
We are the majority.
When we change the way we see ourselves, others will follow.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So as a hint, this solution involves hundreds of mobile robots, sometimes thousands of mobile robots, moving around a warehouse. And I'll get to the solution.
But for a moment, just think about the last time that you ordered something online.
And maybe a blue pair of shoes — click!
I was out in the Bay area in '99, 2000, the dot com boom.
Turns out e-commerce was something that was very hard and very costly.
In this particular case, we challenged ourselves with the idea: What if we had to build a distribution center in China, where it's a very, very low-cost market?
Did any of you see the Beijing Olympics, the opening ceremonies?
I about fell out of my couch when I saw this.
Here is a warehouse.
So the process is very productive.
So the side effects of this approach are what really surprised us.
Here's a warehouse and we're thinking about parallel processing supercomputer architectures.
And we're using dynamic and adaptive algorithms to tune the floor of the warehouse.
She puts out her hand. The product jumps into it.
The reason we can say that, though, is that workers in a lot of these buildings now compete for the privilege of working in the Kiva zone that day.
(Laughter) That was at a pharmaceutical distributor, so they told us not to use that video.
(Applause)
As the highest military commander of the Netherlands, with troops stationed around the world, I'm really honored to be here today.
Some chose the microscope as their instrument.
Ladies and gentlemen, I made a different choice.
(Laughter) (Applause) I share your goals.
I chose the gun.
For you, and you heard already, being so close to this gun may make you feel uneasy.
The Netherlands is not at war.
In many countries, it is a different story.
Why then am I standing before you with this weapon?
Why did I choose the gun as my instrument?
And I want to tell you how this gun can help.
My story starts in the city of Nijmegen in the east of the Netherlands, the city where I was born.
The Nazis invaded the Netherlands.
It was our last resort.
As the son of a farmer who knew how to hunt, my father was an excellent marksman.
At this decisive moment in Dutch history my father was positioned on the bank of the river Waal near the city of Nijmegen.
But with an old gun, not even the best marksman in the armed forces could have hit the mark.
Then in high school, I was gripped by the stories of the Allied soldiers -- soldiers who left the safety of their own homes and risked their lives to liberate a country and a people that they didn't know.
From the awareness that sometimes only the gun can stand between good and evil.
And that is why I took up the gun -- not to shoot, not to kill, not to destroy, but to stop those who would do evil, to protect the vulnerable, to defend democratic values, to stand up for the freedom we have to talk here today in Amsterdam about how we can make the world a better place.
The gun may be one of the most important instruments of peace and stability that we have in this world.
Violence has declined dramatically over the last 500 years.
The murder rate in Europe has dropped by a factor of 30 since the Middle Ages.
And occurrences of civil war and repression have declined since the end of the Cold War.
Statistics show that we are living in a relatively peaceful era.
In his latest book, Harvard professor Steven Pinker -- and many other thinkers before him -- concludes that one of the main drivers behind less violent societies is the spread of the constitutional state and the introduction, on a large scale, of the state monopoly on the legitimized use of violence -- legitimized by a democratically elected government, legitimized by checks and balances and an independent judicial system.
It removes the incentive for an arms race between potentially hostile groups in our societies.
War is simply no longer the best option, and that is why violence has decreased.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the rationale behind the existence of my armed forces.
My soldiers use the gun as an instrument of peace.
That is why we are trying to build a judicial system right now in Afghanistan.
That is why we train police officers, we train judges, we train public prosecutors around the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, looking at this gun, we are confronted with the ugly side of the human mind.
Every day I hope that politicians, diplomats, development workers can turn conflict into peace and threat into hope.
But until that day comes, we will have to make ideals and human failure meet somewhere in the middle.
Until that day comes, I stand for my father who tried to shoot the Nazis with an old gun.
Ladies and gentlemen, until the day comes when we can do away with the gun, I hope we all agree that peace and stability do not come free of charge.
It takes good equipment and well-trained, dedicated soldiers.
I hope you will support the efforts of our armed forces to train soldiers like this young captain and provide her with a good gun, instead of the bad gun my father was given.
I hope you will support our soldiers when they are out there, when they come home and when they are injured and need our care.
I hope you will respect my soldiers, this soldier with this gun.
Because she wants a better world.
Because she makes an active contribution to a better world, just like all of us here today.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And once our lives are touched by cancer, we quickly learn that there are basically three weapons, or three tools, that are available to fight the disease: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.
And they use low-intensity electric fields to fight cancer.
Let me first address a few popular misconceptions.
First of all, electric fields are not an electric current that is coursing through the tissue.
Electric fields are not ionizing radiation, like X-rays or proton beams, that bombard tissue to disrupt DNA.
And electric fields are not magnetism.
What electric fields are are a field of forces.
And these forces act on, attract, bodies that have an electrical charge.
The best way to visualize an electric field is to think of gravity.
Gravity is also a field of forces that act on masses.
They float freely in three dimensions without any forces acting on them.
But as that space shuttle returns to Earth, and as the astronauts enter the Earth's gravitational field, they begin to see the effects of gravity.
And as they land, they're fully aligned in the gravitational field.
In cancer, cells rapidly divide and lead to uncontrolled tumor growth.
We can think of a cell from an electrical perspective as if it's a mini space station.
And in that space station we have the genetic material, the chromosomes, within a nucleus.
Importantly, those special proteins are among the most highly charged objects in our body.
These chains then progress and attach to the genetic material and pull the genetic material from one cell into two cells.
And this is exactly how one cancer cell becomes two cancer cells, two cancer cells become four cancer cells, and we have ultimately uncontrolled tumor growth.
And when that cellular space station is within the electric field, it acts on those highly charged proteins and aligns them.
What I'm going to show you next are two in vitro experiments.
We'll see two cells in the upper part of the screen attempting to divide.
In that time, Novocure's developed two systems -- one system for cancers in the head and another system for cancers in the trunk of the body.
The expected five year survival is less than five percent.
So these are patients who had received surgery, high dose radiation to the head and first-line chemotherapy, and that had failed and their tumors had grown back.
We divided the patients into two groups.
The first group received second-line chemotherapy, which is expected to double the life expectancy, versus no treatment at all.
Importantly, it was the first time ever that the FDA included in their approval of an oncology treatment a quality of life claim.
Robert Dill-Bundi is a famous Swiss cycling champion.
A year after this treatment -- in fact, this is his baseline MRI.
And a year after that treatment, his tumor grew back with a vengeance.
That cloudy white mass that you see is the recurrence of the tumor.
At this point, he was told by his doctors that he had about 3 months to live.
First of all, these electrodes are noninvasive.
And the therapy is delivered continuously at home, without having to go into the hospital either periodically or continually.
It's now five years since Robert's diagnosis, and he's alive, but importantly, he's healthy and he's at work.
I am the happiest, the happiest person in the world.
BD: Novocure's also working on lung cancer as the second target.
We've run a phase two trial in Switzerland on, again, recurrent patients -- patients who have received standard therapy and whose cancer has come back.
I'm going to show you another clip of a woman named Lydia.
Lydia's a 66 year-old farmer in Switzerland.
You can see, in her case, she's wearing her transducer arrays, one of the front of her chest, one on the back, and then the second pair side-to-side over the liver.
And when we talked to her, she said that when she was undergoing chemotherapy, she had to go to the hospital every month for her infusions.
There's now a new research project underway at the Karolinska in Sweden to prove that hypothesis.
We have more trials planned for lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer and breast cancer.
I'm also very hopeful that in the next decades, we will make big strides on reducing that death rate that has been so challenging in this disease.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed.
I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground.
So I did the only thing my frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy.
And we know that's a measurement error because it's messing up my data.
The reason this graph is important to me is, on the news, the majority of the information is not positive.
(Laughter) We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.
And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we can then affect reality.
What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.
(Laughter) I said, "That's most people's Friday nights."
In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn.
I'm going to talk to you today about the design of medical technology for low-resource settings.
In the background there is a very sophisticated anesthesia machine.
This is the electrical supply for a hospital in rural Malawi.
And finally, I think you can see that infrastructure is not very strong.
Similarly, compressed oxygen and other medical supplies are really a luxury, and can often be out of stock for months or even a year.
It's not just inappropriate, it becomes really unsafe.
One of our partners at Johns Hopkins was observing surgeries in Sierra Leone about a year ago.
And the first surgery of the day happened to be an obstetrical case.
35 million surgeries are attempted every year without safe anesthesia.
Let me show you a little bit about how this machine works.
Now you've heard me mention oxygen a few times at this point.
Now we know room air is gloriously free, it is abundant, and it's already 21 percent oxygen.
Now before that mixture hits the patient's lungs, it's going to pass by here -- you can't see it, but there's an oxygen sensor here -- that's going to read out on this screen the percentage of oxygen being delivered.
The only difference is that now you're only working with 21 percent oxygen.
You do not need to be a highly trained, specialized anesthesiologist to use this machine, which is good because, in these rural district hospitals, you're not going to get that level of training.
And so it's not going to break very easily, but if it does, virtually every piece in this machine can be swapped out and replaced with a hex wrench and a screwdriver.
And finally, it's affordable.
But we still want to be sure that this is the most effective and safe device that we can be putting into hospitals.
One of those partnerships is with Johns Hopkins just here in Baltimore.
Who gets surgery and who doesn't?
If more people in the health-delivery space really working on some of these challenges in low-income countries could start their design process, their solution search, from outside of that proverbial box and inside of the hospital -- In other words, if we could design for the environment that exists in so many parts of the world, rather than the one that we wished existed -- we might just save a lot of lives.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
This happens to be a slide of some analysis that we were doing about the power of RISC microprocessors versus the power of local area networks.
And the interesting thing about it is that this slide, like so many technology slides that we're used to, is a sort of a straight line on a semi-log curve.
Something really weird is going on here.
But when something like this happens, things are qualitatively changing.
So if transportation technology was moving along as fast as microprocessor technology, then the day after tomorrow, I would be able to get in a taxi cab and be in Tokyo in 30 seconds.
If so, that means that what we're in the middle of right now is a transition.
We're sort of on this line in a transition from the way the world used to be to some new way that the world is.
Because the transition seems very, very confusing when we're right in the middle of it.
Now when I was a kid growing up, the future was kind of the year 2000, and people used to talk about what would happen in the year 2000.
Now here's a conference in which people talk about the future, and you notice that the future is still at about the year 2000.
Because I think the only way to understand this is to really step back and take a long time scale look at things.
Now that's sort of just a very simple chemical form of life, but when things got interesting was when these drops learned a trick about abstraction.
In fact the recipe for us, our genes, is exactly that same code and that same way of writing.
In fact, every living creature is written in exactly the same set of letters and the same code.
(Laughter) So what was the next step?
Writing down the DNA was an interesting step.
But then there was another really interesting step where things became completely different, which is these cells started exchanging and communicating information, so that they began to get communities of cells.
Now that's why, for instance, antibiotic resistance has evolved.
And so the next stage that's interesting in life took about another billion years.
And at that stage, we have multi-cellular communities, communities of lots of different types of cells, working together as a single organism.
Your skin cell is really useless without a heart cell, muscle cell, a brain cell and so on.
Now the next step that happened is within these communities.
These communities of cells, again, began to abstract information.
And those are the neural structures.
And that was the brains and the nervous system of those communities.
It's really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it.
So for example, the invention of language was a tiny step in that direction.
Telephony, computers, videotapes, CD-ROMs and so on are all our specialized mechanisms that we've now built within our society for handling that information.
So now, evolution can take place on a scale of microseconds.
Then the next steps, like language and so on, took less than a million years.
And these next steps, like electronics, seem to be taking only a few decades.
The process is feeding on itself and becoming, I guess, autocatalytic is the word for it -- when something reinforces its rate of change.
I don't know what every transistor in the connection machine does.
One method that's particularly interesting that I've been using a lot lately is evolution itself.
So for example, in the most extreme cases, we can actually evolve a program by starting out with random sequences of instructions.
And let's reproduce them by a process of recombination analogous to sex."
Take two programs and they produce children by exchanging their subroutines, and the children inherit the traits of the subroutines of the two programs.
So I can do the equivalent of millions of years of evolution on that within the computer in a few minutes, or in the complicated cases, in a few hours.
In fact, their life depended on doing the job.
(Laughter) I was riding in a 747 with Marvin Minsky once, and he pulls out this card and says, "Oh look. Look at this.
So we're beginning to depend on computers to do a process that's very different than engineering.
We're now using those programs to make much faster computers so that we'll be able to run this process much faster.
And what we are is we're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms.
So we're the amoebas and we can't quite figure out what the hell this thing is we're creating.
We're right at that point of transition.
(Applause)
In fact, I'm one of the majority of my generation who can't afford a home.
And in 2017, home ownership amongst young Australians has fallen to the lowest level in recorded history.
So, foolishly or otherwise, I decided to build my own home.
And I realized what I wanted was democratized design and construction.
And that led to me asking one very simple question: What is building a house?
Well, it turns out that building a house is making a series of decisions, some with physical consequences, within a defined set of parameters.
Using modular components, players select items from their library and drag them into their world.
Sustainable housing is often associated with wealth and affluence, but that shouldn't be the case.
Every hour -- in the space of your intermission -- 4,000 new homes are needed in the world.
And in Australia alone, we have a shortfall of 250,000 dwellings.
Between now and 2050, when the global population is set to move from today's 7.6 billion to tomorrow's 9.8 billion people, hundreds of millions of people will experience security, health and safety issues.
It's the 21st century.
And I know this sounds like a lofty goal, and it is ridiculously ambitious, but today, our current operating model operates at a ten-to-one ratio.
So for every 10 homes we build, we can build a home for someone in need.
And this is just to name a few, but some of the really exciting innovations happening all over the world are happening in Italy, France, Dubai and Australia.
In Italy, they have developed a technique using sorel cement.
Sorel cement was originally invented in 1867, and it's the beautiful chemical marriage of magnesium oxide and local sand, which they can now use to print solid stone walls.
And in Dubai, sitting at the foot of those two glorious Emirates Towers, is a vision of the future in the middle of the desert.
They've got their experimental office of the future, which is constructed using 3-D printed concrete which was printed in China and shipped and assembled on location in Dubai.
But all of these things are tools -- hammer of tomorrow, if you like.
We will need models to build using these techniques, models like the ones being developed by players in our game.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) Like any good dad joke should.
More specifically, I identify as genderqueer.
Trust me, the discomfort can range from minor annoyance to feeling physically unsafe.
Like the time at a bar in college when a bouncer physically removed me by the back of the neck and threw me out of a woman's restroom.
And it wasn't until my experience as a trans person collided with my new identity as a parent that I understood the depth of my vulnerabilities and how they are preventing me from being my most authentic self.
And I spent nine months wrestling with the reality that being called "mama" or something like it didn't feel like me at all.
But, before I knew it, the time had come and Elliot came screaming into the world, like most babies do, and my new identity as a parent began.
I decided on becoming a daddy, and our new family faced the world.
Do you want to be a man?"
So I weigh the costs against the risks and sometimes the safety of my family comes before my own authenticity.
I don't want my fears and insecurities to be placed on her, to dampen her spirit or make her question her own voice.
Now I was a little annoyed to be confronted with a lot of pink things, and having studied gender and spent countless hours teaching about it in workshops and classrooms, I thought I was pretty well versed on the social construction of gender and how sexism is a devaluing of the feminine and how it manifests both explicitly and implicitly.
If I only dress my baby in greens and blues and grays, the outside world doesn't think, "Oh, that's a cute gender-neutral baby."
And in my attempts to create gender neutrality, I was inadvertently privileging masculinity over femininity.
So, rather than toning down or eliminating femininity in our lives, we make a concerted effort to celebrate it.
Now this work to develop a healthy relationship with gender for Elliot made me rethink and evaluate how I allowed sexism to manifest in my own gender identity.
And while I certainly haven't overcome all the feelings of dissatisfaction, I realized that by not engaging with that discomfort and coming to a positive and affirming place with my body, I was reinforcing sexism, transphobia and modeling body shaming.
If I hate or am uncomfortable with my body, how can I expect my kid to love hers?
But I have to choose option two every day.
So I work every day to try and be more comfortable in this body and in the ways I express femininity.
And about a year later, Sarah switched shifts and we started working with a new nurse -- we'll call her Becky.
Now out of the corner of my eye, I could see Becky swing around in her chair and make daggers at Sarah.
So each day I affirm my promise to Elliot and that same promise to myself.
To give room for growth, to push beyond comfort in hopes of attaining and living a more meaningful life.
I know in my head and in my heart that there are hard and painful and uncomfortable days ahead.
Thank you.
(Applause)
You have the power to change the world.
I’m not saying that to be cliché, you really have the power to change the world.
But an idea is powerless if it stays inside of you.
Because if you communicate an idea in a way that resonates, change will happen, and you can change the world.
In my family, we collect these vintage European posters.
The thing I loved about this poster was the irony.
And changing the world is hard.
It won't happen with just one person with one single idea.
And the way that ideas are conveyed the most effectively is through story.
So I wanted to figure out, how do you incorporate story into presentations.
We studied poetics and rhetoric, and a lot of presentations don't even have that in its most simple form.
And then when I moved on to studying hero archetypes, I thought, "OK, the presenter is the hero, they're up on the stage, they're the star of the show."
So if you look at Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, just in the front part, there were some really interesting insights there.
And that's the role of the presenter.
A story has an arc -- well, an arc is a shape.
So I thought, hey, if presentations had a shape, what would that shape be?
So I'll never forget, it was a Saturday morning.
Isn't it amazing?
(Laughter) I was crying.
At the beginning of any presentation, you need to establish what is.
Now interesting, if you capture the wind just right and you set your sail just right, your ship will actually sail faster than the wind itself.
So after you've moved back and forth between what is and what could be, the last turning point is a call to action, which every presentation should have, but at the very end.
You need to use that as your ending, in a very poetic and dramatic way.
So I want to zoom in on this: the white line is him speaking, he's talking.
And then towards the end you'll see a blue line, which will be the guest speaker.
So he's the master communicator, and he turns to story to keep the audience involved.
He leaves them with the promise that Apple will continue to build revolutionary new products.
And this is the shape of the "I Have a Dream" speech.
But then he also used a lot of metaphors and visual words.
Well, everyone knows what it's like to not have money in your account.
So he used the metaphor people were very familiar with.
Now, that's a familiar song that was specifically very significant for the black people at the time, because this song was the song they chose to change the words to as an outcry, saying that promises had not been kept.
"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last!"
So he was a great man. He had a big, big dream.
It's not easy to change the world; it's a big job.
And you know, if anyone -- if I can do this, anybody can do this.
Fell in love. I went to a year of college.
I did what every single, bright, young girl should do -- I got married when I was eighteen years old.
But I chose a different story for my life.
But you know, you can change your world.
You can change your life.
(Applause)
How should we make the rules that govern us?
This has always been an important question.
And today, I think it's even more important than ever if we want to address rising inequality, climate change, the refugee crisis, just to name a few major issues.
It's also a very old question.
Humans have been asking themselves this question ever since we lived in organized societies.
He thought we needed benevolent guardians who could make decisions for the greater good of everyone.
Kings and queens thought they could be those guardians, but during various revolutions, they tended to lose their heads.
His answer was brutal, cruel and inhumane.
But a different answer, a different kind of answer, which went more or less into hibernation for 2,000 years, has had profound recent success.
That answer is, of course, democracy.
So I'm going to ask you two questions, and I want you to put your hands up if you agree.
The first question is: Who thinks living in a democracy is a good thing?
But my point is, if liberal democracy is the end of history, then there's a massive paradox or contradiction here.
Why is that?
But in practice, it's not working.
Our politics is broken, our politicians aren't trusted, and the political system is distorted by powerful vested interests.
I think there's two ways to resolve this paradox.
Which brings me to my epiphany, my moment of enlightenment.
And the idea is actually very simple: we randomly select people and put them in parliament.
(Laughter) Let's think about that for a few more minutes, shall we?
(Laughter) Very interestingly, random selection was a key part of how democracy was done in ancient Athens.
If you give people responsibility, they act responsibly.
Of course not.
How could we fix our broken system and remake democracy for the 21st century?
Well, there are several things that we can do, and that are, in fact, happening right now.
We can introduce it to schools and workplaces and other institutions, like Democracy In Practice is doing in Bolivia.
We can hold policy juries and citizens' assemblies, like the newDemocracy Foundation is doing in Australia, like the Jefferson Center is doing in the US and like the Irish government is doing right now.
We could build a social movement demanding change, which is what the Sortition Foundation is doing in the UK.
That would be kind of like a Trojan horse right into the heart of government.
Change can and does happen.
Thank you. (Hungarian) Thank you.
(Applause)
The digital divide is a mother that's 45 years old and can't get a job, because she doesn't know how to use a computer.
"Digital divide" is also defined as: the gap between individuals and communities that have access to information technologies and those that don't.
The third is because they don't know the benefits derived from technology.
The population of the world is nearly seven billion people.
This is approximately 30% of the entire world population, which means that the remaining 70% of the world -- close to five billion people -- do not have access to a computer or the internet.
Let's think about that number for a second.
Five billion people; that's four times the population of India, that have never touched a computer, have never accessed the internet.
So this is a digital abyss that we're talking about, this is not a digital divide.
Here we can see a map by Chris Harrison that shows the internet connections around the world.
What we can see is that most of the internet connections are centered on North America and Europe, while the rest of the world is engulfed in the dark shadow of digital divide.
So what does this mean?
We are living in a world that seems to be having a digital revolution, a revolution that everyone here thinks that we're part of, but the 70% of the world that is digitally excluded is not part of this.
Internet should not be a luxury, it should be a right, because it is a basic social necessity of the 21st century.
(Applause) Thank you.
It gives us social participation. It is a tool for change.
Also, let's not forget about the carbon footprint.
Imagine five billion laptops.
This is not a sustainable model.
So with this in mind, we created a different model.
We created the RIA, in Spanish, or in English, Learning and Innovation Network, which is a network of community centers that bring education through the use of technology.
The RIA has 1,650 computers.
out of which, 34,000 have already graduated from our courses.
Technology is nothing without that content.
Well, you can't just go into a community and pretend to change it, you need to look at a lot of factors.
We first start by looking at the basic geography of a site.
So take, for example, Ecatepec.
This is one of the most densely populated municipalities in Mexico.
Then we look at income, we look at education.
And so, there are four basic elements that we need to consider when we're using education through technology.
We need to create a space that is welcoming to the community, a space that is according to the needs of the children and of the elders and of every possible person that lives within that community.
And second, connection.
The internet is a very complex organism that is fueled of the ideas, the thoughts and the emotions of human beings.
We need to create networks that aid in exchanging information.
Education is nothing without content.
And you can't pretend to have a relationship of only a computer with a child.
We need to train not only the users, but we need to train the people that will facilitate learning for these people.
When you're talking about the digital divide, people have stigmas, people have fears; people don't understand how it can complement their lives.
So what we do is train facilitators so that they can help in breaking that digital barrier.
We have created a digital learning community.
So it creates a virtuous circle.
In 2006, I went to live here.
This is one of the poorest communities in all of Mexico.
And after two months of living with them, of seeing the children and the way they work, I understood that the only thing that can change and that can break the poverty cycle is education.
And we can use technology to bring education to these communities.
I'm sure everybody here has experienced it; what moves technology is human energy.
So let's use this energy to make the world a better place.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When we park in a big parking lot, how do we remember where we parked our car?
And we're going to try to understand what's happening in his brain.
So we'll start with the hippocampus, shown in yellow, which is the organ of memory.
It's named after Latin for "seahorse," which it resembles.
So the human brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it.
The hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells, which are very densely interconnected.
And scientists have begun to understand how spatial memory works by recording from individual neurons in rats or mice while they forage or explore an environment looking for food.
So we're going to imagine we're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here.
So this predicts that sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you -- extended buildings and so on -- is particularly important for the hippocampus.
And indeed, on the inputs to the hippocampus, cells are found which project into the hippocampus, which do respond exactly to detecting boundaries or edges at particular distances and directions from the rat or mouse as it's exploring around.
In that case, we can see how where they think the flag had been changes as a function of how you change the shape and size of the environment.
And place cells also get this kind of path integration input from a kind of cell called a grid cell.
Now grid cells are found, again, on the inputs to the hippocampus, and they're a bit like place cells.
And if you record from several grid cells -- shown here in different colors -- each one has a grid-like firing pattern across the environment, and each cell's grid-like firing pattern is shifted slightly relative to the other cells.
And indeed, you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex, which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats.
He's probably remembering where his car was in terms of the distances and directions to extended buildings and boundaries around the location where he parked.
So this is just one example of a new era really in cognitive neuroscience where we're beginning to understand psychological processes like how you remember or imagine or even think in terms of the actions of the billions of individual neurons that make up our brains.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Both myself and my brother belong to the under 30 demographic, which Pat said makes 70 percent, but according to our statistics it makes 60 percent of the region's population.
Qatar is no exception to the region.
It's a very young nation led by young people.
We have been reminiscing about the latest technologies and the iPods, and for me the abaya, my traditional dress that I'm wearing today.
We are changing our culture from within, but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions.
We don't want to be all the same, but we want to respect each other and understand each other.
We're continuously trying to straddle different worlds, different cultures and trying to meet the challenges of a different expectation from ourselves and from others.
So I want to ask a question: What should culture in the 21st century look like?
In a time where the world is becoming personalized, when the mobile phone, the burger, the telephone, everything has its own personal identity, how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others?
How does that impact our desert culture?
I'm not sure of how many of you in Washington are aware of the cultural developments happening in the region and, the more recent, Museum of Islamic Art opened in Qatar in 2008.
The existential and social and political impact an artist has on his nation's development of cultural identity is very important.
You know, art and culture is big business.
So I think women in our society are becoming leaders, because they realize that for their future generations, it's very important to maintain our cultural identities.
Our mission is of cultural integration and independence.
In a few days, we will be opening the Arab Museum of Modern Art.
(Laughter) Now this museum is just as important to us as the West.
Some of you might have heard of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, but I doubt a lot of people know that this artist worked in Picasso's studio in Paris in the 1930s.
In a similar way, we have created the Doha Film Institute.
Useless.
(Applause) SM: Going back to straddling between East and West, last month we had our second Doha Tribeca Film Festival here in Doha.
It attracted 42,000 people, and we showcased 51 films.
First, it allows us to showcase our Arab filmmakers and voices to one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, New York City.
Culture's a very important tool to bring people together.
"Know thyself," that is the journey of self-expression and self-realization that we are traveling.
(Applause)
This remarkable story is a case study in the power of teaming.
So what's "teaming"?
It's coordinating and collaborating with people across boundaries of all kinds -- expertise, distance, time zone, you name it -- to get work done.
Now, sports teams win because they practice.
You can think of teaming as a kind of pickup game in the park, in contrast to the formal, well-practiced team.
The answer is obvious.
So why do I study teaming?
They come from different shifts, different specialties, different areas of expertise, and they may not even know each other's name.
Of course, in teaming, the stakes aren't always life and death.
Now, taking care of patients in the emergency room and designing an animated film are obviously very different work.
Yet underneath the differences, they have a lot in common.
Paul Polman, the Unilever CEO, put this really well when he said, "The issues we face today are so big and so challenging, it becomes quite clear we can't do it alone, and so there is a certain humility in knowing you have to invite people in."
Take the quest for smart cities.
And now around the world in various locations, people have been teaming up to design and try to create green, livable, smart cities.
Their goal was to build a demo smart city from scratch.
It seemed that teaming across industry boundaries was really, really hard.
I think this is a bigger problem than most of us realize.
In fact, I think professional culture clash is a major barrier to building the future that we aspire to build.
Now, to begin to get just a glimpse of the answer to this question, let's go back to Chile.
In Chile, we witnessed 10 weeks of teaming by hundreds of individuals from different professions, different companies, different sectors, even different nations.
And as this process unfolded, they had lots of ideas, they tried many things, they experimented, they failed, they experienced devastating daily failure, but they picked up, persevered, and went on forward.
And then for the next 53 days, that narrow lifeline would be the path where food and medicine and communication would travel, while aboveground, for 53 more days, they continued the teaming to find a way to create a much larger hole and also to design a capsule.
This is the capsule.
And then on the 69th day, over 22 painstaking hours, they managed to pull the miners out one by one.
So how did they overcome professional culture clash?
Let's call this "situational humility."
They overcame what I like to call the basic human challenge: it's hard to learn if you already know.
And to explain it, I'm going to quote from the movie "The Paper Chase."
Abraham Lincoln said once, "I don't like that man very much. I must get to know him better."
Think about that -- I don't like him, that means I don't know him well enough.
But when we step back and reach out and reach across, miracles can happen.
Because for us to team up to build the future we know we can create that none of us can do alone, that's the mindset we need.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The kind of harassment that women face in Pakistan is very serious and leads to sometimes deadly outcomes.
This kind of harassment keeps women from accessing the internet -- essentially, knowledge.
It's a form of oppression.
Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world, with 140 million people having access to mobile technologies, and 15 percent internet penetration.
Pakistan is also the birthplace of the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai.
But that's just one aspect of Pakistan.
Another aspect is where the twisted concept of honor is linked to women and their bodies; where men are allowed to disrespect women and even kill them sometimes in the name of so-called "family honor"; where women are left to die right outside their houses for speaking to a man on a mobile phone, in the name of "family honor."
Let me say this very clearly: it's not honor; it's a cold-blooded murder.
I come from a very small village in Punjab, Pakistan, where women are not allowed to pursue their higher education.
The elders of my extended family didn't allow their women to pursue their higher education or their professional careers.
However, unlike the other male guardians of my family, my father was one who really supported my ambitions.
And that was the time when I first asked myself, "Why?
Why are women not allowed to enjoy the same equal rights enshrined in our Constitution?
While the law states that a woman has the same equal access to the information, why is it always men -- brothers, fathers and husbands -- who are granting these rights to us, effectively making the law irrelevant?"
And I founded the Digital Rights Foundation in 2012 to address all the issues and women's experiences in online spaces and cyberharassment.
From lobbying for free and safe internet to convincing young women that access to the safe internet is their fundamental, basic, human right, I'm trying to play my part in igniting the spark to address the questions that have bothered me all these years.
I think of the women who do not have the necessary support to deal with the mental trauma when they feel unsafe in online spaces, and they go about their daily activities, thinking that there is a rape threat in their in-box.
Safe access to the internet is an access to knowledge, and knowledge is freedom.
When I fight for women's digital rights, I'm fighting for equality.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Applause) Dinosaurs are kind of funny, you know.
(Laughter) People ask me a lot -- in fact, one of the most asked questions I get is, why do children like dinosaurs so much?
Lots of different kinds.
A long time ago, back in the early 1900s, museums were out looking for dinosaurs.
By about 1970, some scientists were sitting around and they thought, "What in the world -- Look at these dinosaurs, they're all big.
(Laughter) Well, go to a museum, you'll see, see how many baby dinosaurs there are.
(Laughter) And so every time they found something that looked a little different, they named it something different.
Dr. Peter Dodson at the University of Pennsylvania actually realized that dinosaurs grew kind of like birds do, which is different than the way reptiles grow.
And it's kind of cool -- if you look at the cassowary, or any of the birds that have crests on their heads, they grow to about 80 percent adult size before the crest starts to grow.
So this was a problem, and Peter Dodson pointed this out using some duck-billed dinosaurs then called Hypacrosaurus.
You can tell it's mature bone.
(Laughter) So here are 12 dinosaurs.
And we want to look at these three first.
And the assumption is that they're related like cousins or whatever.
But no one ever considered that they might be more closely related.
So people were looking at these and they were talking about how different they are.
Pachycephalosaurus has a big, thick dome on its head, and it's got some little bumps on the back of its head, and it's got a bunch of gnarly things on the end of its nose.
And then Stygimoloch, another dinosaur from the same age, lived at the same time, has spikes sticking out the back of its head.
And then there's this thing called Dracorex hogwartsia.
Dracorex is the littlest one, Stygimoloch is the middle-size one, Pachycephalosaurus is the largest one.
Scientists like to name things.
So just with these three dinosaurs, as a scientist, we can easily hypothesize that it is just a growth series of the same animal.
Which of course means that Stygimoloch and Dracorex are extinct.
(Laughter) OK.
So a colleague of mine at Berkeley -- he and I were looking at Triceratops.
And then as they get older, the horns grow forward.
If you look along the edge of the frill, they have these little triangular bones that actually grow big as triangles and then they flatten against the frill pretty much like the spikes do on the Pachycephalosaurs.
And this is a skull that is two meters long.
It's a big skull.
But there's another dinosaur that is found in this formation that looks like a Triceratops, except it's bigger, and it's called Torosaurus.
And Torosaurus, when we cut into it, has mature bone.
And they said, "Well, no, but it has holes in its frill."
I mean, here's Edmontosaurus and Anatotitan.
Anatotitan: giant duck.
So we look at the bone histology.
And sure enough, Nanotyrannus has juvenile bone and the bigger one has more mature bone.
And that's a good number.
(Laughter) Fourth-graders love their dinosaurs, they memorize them.
If there's one city in the world where it's hard to find a place to buy or rent, it's Sydney.
37 percent.
Or if you're looking for a month, take 37 percent of that time -- 11 days, to set a standard -- and then you're ready to act.
I'm a computational cognitive scientist.
To do that, I think about the computational structure of the problems that arise in everyday life, and compare the ideal solutions to those problems to the way that we actually behave.
As a side effect, I get to see how applying a little bit of computer science can make human decision-making easier.
(Laughter) She pointed out that I was taking the wrong approach to solving this problem -- and she later became my wife.
(Laughter) (Applause) Whether it's as basic as trying to decide what restaurant to go to or as important as trying to decide who to spend the rest of your life with, human lives are filled with computational problems that are just too hard to solve by applying sheer effort.
(Laughter) When you're looking for life advice, computer scientists probably aren't the first people you think to talk to.
This is a problem that has a particular computational structure.
In that situation, you run up against what computer scientists call the "explore-exploit trade-off."
It's also the problem that technology companies face when they're trying to do something like decide what ad to show on a web page.
Over the last 60 years, computer scientists have made a lot of progress understanding the explore/exploit trade-off, and their results offer some surprising insights.
When you're trying to decide what restaurant to go to, the first question you should ask yourself is how much longer you're going to be in town.
But if you're going to be there for a longer time, explore.
Try something new, because the information you get is something that can improve your choices in the future.
The value of information increases the more opportunities you're going to have to use it.
You don't have to go to the best restaurant every night.
Take a chance, try something new, explore.
You might learn something.
And the information that you gain is going to be worth more than one pretty good dinner.
Computer science can also help to make it easier on us in other places at home and in the office.
Martha Stewart turns out to have thought very hard about this -- (Laughter) and she has some good advice.
She says, "Ask yourself four questions: How long have I had it?
But there's another group of experts who perhaps thought even harder about this problem, and they would say one of these questions is more important than the others.
Over the years, computer scientists have tried a few different strategies for deciding what to remove from the fast memory.
So if we go back to Martha's four questions, the computer scientists would say that of these, the last one is the most important.
This idea of organizing things so that the things you are most likely to need are most accessible can also be applied in your office.
As a result, the documents would be ordered from left to right by how recently they had been used.
Organizing your wardrobe or your desk are probably not the most pressing problems in your life.
Sometimes the problems we have to solve are simply very, very hard.
But even in those cases, computer science can offer some strategies and perhaps some solace.
The best algorithms are about doing what makes the most sense in the least amount of time.
When computers face hard problems, they deal with them by making them into simpler problems -- by making use of randomness, by removing constraints or by allowing approximations.
(Laughter) 37 percent.
But that's the best that you can do.
Ultimately, computer science can help to make us more forgiving of our own limitations.
And as long as you've used the best process, you've done the best that you can.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And when you take a photograph with a camera, the process ends when you press the trigger.
I felt like anyone could do that.
And despite that, it retains a level of realism.
So it's more about capturing an idea than about capturing a moment really.
What creates the illusion?
But in the end, it comes down to how we interpret the world and how it can be realized on a two-dimensional surface.
So I think the basics are quite simple.
And let me show you a simple example.
So the things that make a photograph look realistic, I think it's the things that we don't even think about, the things all around us in our daily lives.
So I would like to say that there are three simple rules to follow to achieve a realistic result.
So the first rule is that photos combined should have the same perspective.
Secondly, photos combined should have the same type of light.
And these two images both fulfill these two requirements -- shot at the same height and in the same type of light.
So here's another example.
I personally think that it's easier to actually create a place than to find a place, because then you don't need to compromise with the ideas in your head.
So for example, the fish was captured on a fishing trip.
And yeah, I even turned the house on top of the island red to make it look more Swedish.
And if you do a good job capturing the photos, the result can be quite beautiful and also quite realistic.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And on my last day there, a girl came up to me and said, "I remember the first time I met you."
(Laughter) A year and a half after I moved to Toronto, I got an invitation to their wedding.
That was such an eye-opening, transformative moment for me, to think that maybe the biggest impact I'd ever had on anyone's life, a moment that had a woman walk up to a stranger four years later and say, "You've been an important person in my life," was a moment that I didn't even remember.
It's interesting, because it was six years ago when I was pregnant with my first child that I discovered that the most commonly used preservative in baby care products mimics estrogen when it gets into the human body.
Now it's very easy actually to get a chemical compound from products into the human body through the skin.
And these preservatives had been found in breast cancer tumors.
And many of these chemicals are now linked to the skyrocketing incidents of chronic childhood disease that we're seeing across industrialized nations.
So for example, in the United Kingdom, the incidence of childhood leukemia has risen by 20 percent just in a generation.
In Canada, we're now looking at one in 10 Canadian children with asthma.
Again, we're seeing that trend across Europe, across North America.
So a real skyrocketing of chronic childhood disease that includes other things like obesity and juvenile diabetes, premature puberty.
In fact, my involvement in the whole pesticide issue was sort of a surprise as well when I was approached by the largest chemical company in the world and they asked me if I would evaluate how atrazine affected amphibians, or my frogs.
It turns out, atrazine is the largest selling product for the largest chemical company in the world.
(Laughter) even for amphibians.
Normally the testes should make testosterone, the male hormone.
But what atrazine does is it turns on an enzyme, the machinery if you will, aromatase, that converts testosterone into estrogen.
So when you develop a cancerous cell in your breast, aromatase converts androgens into estrogens, and that estrogen turns on or promotes the growth of that cancer so that it turns into a tumor and spreads.
PJC: So speaking of estrogen, one of the other compounds that Tyrone talks about in the film is something called bisphenol A, BPA, which has been in the news recently.
It's a plasticizer.
And what's interesting about BPA is that it's such a potent estrogen that it was actually once considered for use as a synthetic estrogen in hormone placement therapy.
And there have been many, many, many studies that have shown that BPA leaches from babies' bottles into the formula, into the milk, and therefore into the babies.
So we're dosing our babies, our newborns, our infants, with a synthetic estrogen.
Now two weeks ago or so, the European Union passed a law banning the use of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups.
But just two weeks before that, the U.S. Senate refused to even debate the banning of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups.
Scientists agree now.
We are losing species from the Earth faster than the dinosaurs disappeared, and leading that loss are amphibians.
80 percent of all amphibians are threatened and in come decline.
And given the life of many of these chemicals, generations, years, dozens of years, that means that we right now are affecting the health of our grandchildren's grandchildren by things that we're putting into the environment today.
And this is not just philosophical, it's already known, that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol and estrogen, PCBs, DDT cross the placenta and effectively determine the likelihood of developing breast cancer and obesity and diabetes already when the baby's in the womb.
We already know that chemicals like DDT and DES and atrazine can also pass over into milk, again, affecting our babies even after their born.
What is it?
Help me.
And so when Tyrone talks about the fetus being trapped in a contaminated environment, this is my contaminated environment.
And perhaps it's the connection to our next generation -- like my wife and my beautiful daughter here about 13 years ago -- perhaps it's that connection that makes women activists in this particular area.
And the frogs that are exposed to atrazine, the testes are full of holes and spaces, because the hormone imbalance, instead of allowing sperm to be generated, such as in the testis here, the testicular tubules end up empty and fertility goes down by as much as 50 percent.
And of course, we don't do these experiments in humans, but just by coincidence, my colleague has shown that men who have low sperm count, low semen quality have significantly more atrazine in their urine.
Men who actually work in agriculture have much higher levels of atrazine.
And the men who actually apply atrazine have even more atrazine in their urine, up to levels that are 24,000 times what we know to be active are present in the urine of these men.
Of course, most of them, 90 percent are Mexican, Mexican-American.
They're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin, which was originally used as a nerve gas.
We turn on the faucet, the water comes out, we assume it's safe, and we assume that we are masters of our environment, rather than being part of it.
We know what we're putting out there, we have a sense of those repercussions, but we are so ignorant of this sense of what happens when we put things, or things are put into our bodies.
Thank you.
(Applause)
A whip-like straw.
And that’s extremely useful to scientists because when they encounter an unfamiliar insect in the wild, they can learn a lot about it just by examining how it eats.
The features of an insect’s mouthparts can help identify which order it belongs to, while also providing clues about how it evolved and what it feeds on.
The chewing mouthpart is the most common.
It’s also the most primitive— all other mouthparts are thought to have started out looking like this one before evolving into something different.
You can find this mouthpart on ants from the Hymenoptera order, grasshoppers and crickets of the Orthoptera order, dragonflies of the Odonata order, and beetles of the Coleoptera order.
House flies, fruit flies, and the other non-biting members of the Diptera order are the only insects that use this technique.
The juvenile stages of some insects, for example, have completely different kinds of mouths than their adult versions, like caterpillars, which use chewing mouthparts to devour leaves before metamorphosing into butterflies and moths with siphoning mouthparts.
She takes him to Arthur Murray for ballroom-dancing lessons.
even though we know, statistically, half of them will be divorced within a decade.
And researchers want to know why.
Well, researchers spend billions of your tax dollars trying to figure that out.
(Laughter) Research also suggests that the happiest couples are the ones that focus on the positives.
(Laughter) One of my favorite studies found that the more willing a husband is to do housework, the more attractive his wife will find him.
One study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce.
Now, I don't know how old all of you are, but when I was a kid, your parents took pictures with a special kind of camera that held something called "film."
So, what else can you do to safeguard your marriage?
Thank you so much.
I am a journalist.
My job is to talk to people from all walks of life, all over the world.
My story begins in Caracas, Venezuela, in South America, where I grew up; a place that to me was, and always will be, filled with magic and wonder.
I remember one time when I was around seven years old, my dad came up to me and said, "Mariana, I'm going to send you and your little sister..."
I want you to experience different cultures."
(Laughter) I got really excited.
My dad, however, had a slightly different plan.
Frоm Caracas, he he sent us to Brainerd, Minnesota.
We got there, and one of the first things I noticed was that the other kids' hair was several shades of blonde, and most of them had blue eyes.
The first night, the camp director gathered everyone around the campfire and said, "Kids, we have a very international camp this year; the Atencios are here from Venezuela."
(Laughter) The other kids looked at us as if we were from another planet.
Or, "Do you go to school on a donkey or a canoe?"
(Laughter) I would try to answer in my broken English, and they would just laugh.
I know they were not trying to be mean; they were just trying to understand who we were, and make a correlation with the world they knew.
But I had my little sister to take care of, and she cried every day at summer camp.
Making a friend was a special reward.
Later on, when I was in high school, my dad expanded on his summer plan, and from Caracas he sent me to Wallingford, Connecticut, for the senior year of high school.
I opened the door, and there she was, sitting on the bed, with a headscarf.
She probably sensed my disappointment when I looked at her because I didn't do too much to hide it.
See, as a teenager, I wanted to fit in even more, I wanted to be popular, maybe have a boyfriend for prom, and I felt that Fatima just got in the way with her shyness and her strict dress code.
I didn't realize that I was making her feel like the kids at summer camp made me feel.
I was consumed by my own selfishness and unable to put myself in her shoes.
So, how do we recognize our blind spots?
But I was determined to find something of value.
It seemed like the whole school raised their hand to bid.
My dance class really stood out from, like, the 10th violin class offered that day.
I felt really special.
That's when I started thinking about Fatima, a person that I had failed to see as special, when I first met her.
She was from the Middle East, just like Shakira's family was from the Middle East.
When I went back home to Venezuela, I began to understand how these experiences were changing me.
Being able to speak different languages, to navigate all these different people and places, it gave me a unique sensibility.
I was finally beginning to understand the importance of putting myself in other people's shoes.
That is a big part of the reason why I decided to become a journalist.
I was able to come on a scholarship to study journalism.
It takes courage to show respect.
In the words of Voltaire: "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it."
Without a dialogue, we will keep repeating the same mistakes, because we will not learn anything new.
I covered the 2016 election for NBC News.
And I wanted to do something different.
I watched election results with undocumented families.
When it became apparent that Donald Trump was winning, this eight-year-old girl named Angelina rushed up to me in tears.
By giving camera time to her and families like hers, I tried to make people see them as human beings, and not simply "illegal aliens."
I've already told you how my path to personal growth started.
The day, April 10th, 2014, I was driving to the studio, and I got a call from my parents.
"What happened?" I said.
"It's your sister; she's been in a car accident."
It was as if my heart stopped.
They say your life can change in a split second.
Throughout the course of two years, my sister underwent 15 surgeries, and she spent the most of that time in a wheelchair.
The worst was something so painful, it's hard to put into words, even now.
It was the way people looked at her, looked at us, changed.
(Applause) Thank you.
I have traveled the world, and talked to people from all walks of life.
Let's celebrate those imperfections that make us special.
We are all quirky, and unique, and that is what makes us wonderfully human.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
For the last three years – I host a syndicated radio show.
Five days a week, I go live in forty cities and I talk to men and women across America who feel stuck.
Do you know that a third of Americans feel dissatisfied with their lives right now?
(Laughter) (Applause) Sorry, Simon.
And of course you know I'm talking about the word "fine".
"How you doing?" "Oh, I'm fine."
What a flimsy and feeble word!
"I'm fine. We've got to wait until the kids graduate, before we get divorced, so we'll just sleep in separate bedrooms."
"I'm fine. I lost my job, I can barely pay my bills, but whatever – It's hard to get a job."
And do you realize that the odds, the odds of you, yeah, right here, put your computer away, stand up for me, Doug! (Laughter) So the odds of Doug here, turn around, say "hi" to everybody – the odds of Doug being born at the moment in time he was born, to the parents you were born to, with the DNA structure that you have, one in four hundred trillion!
Isn't that amazing? Doug: I'm so lucky!
All day long you have ideas that could change your life, that could change the world, that could change the way that you feel, and what do you do with them? Nothing!
What's the first decision you made this morning?
If you're lucky, you've got somebody that you love next to you, or in my case, I've got my husband and my two kids and possibly the dog.
Scientists call it activation energy.
So try this test tomorrow.
(Laughter) Try this.
Tomorrow morning, set your alarm for thirty minutes earlier.
And the reason why I want you to do it is because you will come face to face with the physical, and I mean physical force that's required to change your behavior.
And even when you get good at something, you'll figure out something else you don't want to do.
But it's not easy.
I have this theory about why people get stuck in life.
So, most of you've probably taken your Basic Psych 101 class, and you've bumped into Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs"?
And your body is wired to send you signals.
If you need food, what do you feel?
If you need water, what do you feel?
If you need sex, what do you feel? (Laughter) Thank you.
I think when you feel stuck or dissatisfied in your life, it's a signal.
So one more thing that you can use, I call it the five-second-rule.
So I want you to practice this today.
And one more thing, I want you to know that everything that I do, whether it's the radio show, or the television show, or the book that I wrote, or the column, it's for you.
(Applause) Thank you! Thank you, yes! Stand up!
Because I am a millennial computer scientist book author standing on a TEDx stage, and yet, I've never had a social media account.
So I'm here for two reasons; I want to deliver two messages.
The first message I want to deliver is that even though I've never had a social media account, I'm OK, you don't have to worry.
I think I'm happier, I think I find more sustainability in my life, and I think I've been more successful professionally because I don't use social media.
Let's see if I could actually convince more of you that you too would be better off if you quit social media.
So, if the theme of this TEDx event is "Future Tense," I guess, in other words, this would be my vision of the future, would be one in which fewer people actually use social media.
Hipster or hermit? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
This first objection goes as follows, "Cal, social media is one of the fundamental technologies of the 21st century.
My reaction to that objection is I think that is nonsense.
My use of the slot machine image up here also is not accidental because if you look a little bit closer at these technologies, it's not just that they're a source of entertainment but they're a somewhat unsavory source of entertainment.
We now know that many of the major social media companies hire individuals called attention engineers, who borrow principles from Las Vegas casino gambling, among other places, to try to make these products as addictive as possible.
The objection goes as follows, "Cal, I can't quit social media because it is vital to my success in the 21st century economy.
If I do not have a well-cultivated social media brand, people won't know who I am, people won't be able to find me, opportunities won't come my way, and I will effectively disappear from the economy."
I recently published this book that draws on multiple different strands of evidence to make the point that, in a competitive 21st century economy, what the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
To put it another way: if you can write an elegant algorithm, if you can write a legal brief that can change a case, if you can write a thousand words of prose that's going to fixate a reader right to the end; if you can look at a sea of ambiguous data and apply statistics, and pull out insights that could transform a business strategy, if you can do these type of activities which require deep work, that produce outcomes that are rare and valuable, people will find you.
Again, I look back and I say: this objection also is nonsense.
In this case, what it misses is what I think is a very important reality that we need to talk about more frankly, which is that social media brings with it multiple, well-documented, and significant harms.
One of these harms that we know this technology brings has to do with your professional success.
But right before that, I argued that social media tools are designed to be addictive.
We have a growing amount of research which tells us that if you spend large portions of your day in a state of fragmented attention - large portions of your day, breaking up your attention, to take a quick glance, to just check, - "Let me quickly look at Instagram" - that this can permanently reduce your capacity for concentration.
So social media use is not harmless, it can actually have a significant negative impact on your ability to thrive in the economy.
If you lose your ability to sustain concentration, you're going to become less and less relevant to this economy.
We know from the research literature that the more you use social media, the more likely you are to feel lonely or isolated.
It short-circuits the brain, and we're starting to find it has actual cognitive consequences, one of them being this sort of pervasive background hum of anxiety.
If you talk to mental health experts on college campuses, they'll tell you that along with the rise of ubiquitous smartphone use and social media use among the students on the campus, came an explosion of anxiety-related disorders on those campuses.
So there's real cost to social media use; which means when you're trying to decide, "Should I use this or not?", saying it's harmless is not enough.
People often ask, "OK, but what is life like without social media?"
It actually is like a true detox process.
The first two weeks can be uncomfortable: you feel a little bit anxious, you feel like you're missing a limb.
First, it can be quite productive.
I'm a professor at a research institution, I've written five books, I rarely work past 5 pm on a weekday.
It's surprising how much you can get done in a eight-hour day if you're able to give each thing intense concentration after another.
So life without social media is really not so bad.
And then I emphasized the point that there's real harms with it.
So it's not just harmless.
Some of you might disagree, some of you might have scathing but accurate critiques of me and my points, and of course, I welcome all negative feedback.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Hello everyone.
I'm Sam, and I just turned 17.
A few years ago, before my freshman year in High School, I wanted to play snare drum in the Foxboro High School Marching Band, and it was a dream that I just had to accomplish.
So my family and I worked with an engineer to design a snare drum harness that would be lighter, and easier for me to carry.
(Applause) I just want to give you some more information about Progeria.
Last year my Mom and her team of scientists published the first successful Progeria Treatment Study, and because of this I was interviewed on NPR, and John Hamilton asked me the question: "What is the most important thing that people should know about you?"
And my answer was simply that I have a very happy life.
(Applause) So even though there are many obstacles in my life, with a lot of them being created by Progeria, I don't want people to feel bad for me.
Now people sometimes ask me questions like, "Isn’t it hard living with Progeria?" or "What daily challenges of Progeria do you face?"
But instead, I choose to focus on the activities that I can do through things that I’m passionate about, like scouting, or music, or comic books, or any of my favorite Boston sports teams.
Yeah, so -- (Laughter) However, sometimes I need to find a different way to do something by making adjustments, and I want to put those things in the "can do" category.
Kind of like you saw with the drum earlier.
So here’s a clip with me playing Spider-Man with the Foxboro High School Marching Band at halftime a couple of years ago.
(Video) ♫ Spider-Man theme song ♫ (Applause) Thank you.
All right, all right, so -- That was pretty cool, and so I was able to accomplish my dream of playing snare drum with the marching band, as I believe I can do for all of my dreams.
I’m extremely lucky to have an amazing family, who have always supported me throughout my entire life.
Now we’re kind of goofy, a lot of us are band geeks, but we really enjoy each other’s company, and we help each other out when we need to.
(Applause) Thank you.
When I was younger, I wanted to be an engineer.
I wanted to be an inventor, who would catapult the world into a better future.
Now today my ambitions have changed a little bit, I’d like to go into the field of Biology, maybe cell biology, or genetics, or biochemistry, or really anything.
About four years ago, HBO began to film a documentary about my family and me called “Life According to Sam”.
That was a pretty great experience, but it was also four years ago.
And like anyone, my views on many things have changed, and hopefully matured, like my potential career choice.
So, and it takes a burden off of me because now I don’t have to think about Progeria as an entity.
(Applause) Thank you.
So with this philosophy, I hope that all of you, regardless of your obstacles, can have a very happy life as well.
My school’s homecoming dance is tomorrow night, and I will be there.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
There is no other woman like you.
And thick thighs, you are just so sexy, you can't stop rubbing each other.
I love you.
I felt free once I realized I was never going to fit the narrow mold that society wanted me to fit in.
And that's OK.
My name is Ashley Graham, and I'm a model and body activist.
Over the last 15 years, I've come to the conclusion that there is no one perfect body.
Because I, like you, possess a wonderfully unique and diverse physique.
Now, the fashion industry may persist to label me as "plus size", but I like to think of it as 'my size'.
In fact, did you know that the plus size fashion industry actually starts at a US size 8?
I really feel like we need to start looking beyond the plus size model paradigms to what it actually means to be a model in 2015.
My journey begins in Lincoln, Nebraska.
I was 12 years old and scouted in a mall.
At 17, I graduated and moved to New York, and while most kids are going through their self-discovery stage in college, my self discovery stage was in the midst of catwalks, catalogs, and casting calls.
I was working as a full time plus size model.
I struggled to achieve true confidence.
And Dove's global report on attitudes towards beauty actually did a survey with thousands of women in ten different countries.
2%!
We need to work together to redefine the global vision of beauty.
And it starts with becoming your own role model.
Plus-size fashion is an 18-billion-dollar industry.
And now IMG, the world's number one modeling agency, has signed me and other models that are not defined by their size.
My body, like my confidence, has been picked apart, manipulated, and controlled by others who didn't necessarily understand it.
I had to learn to reclaim my body as my own.
But you know, people in the fashion industry actually told me that I would never be in magazines let alone the covers of them.
(Applause) Thank you.
My goal is to give a voice to young women.
For girls who struggle to look inside the mirror and say, I love you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I've got a question for you: how many people here would say they can draw?
Because when people say they can't draw, I think it's more to do with beliefs rather than talent and ability.
So I think when you say you can't draw, that's just an illusion, and today I'd like to prove that to you.
But would you be happy if, by the end of this session, you could draw pictures a little bit like this?
(Audience murmuring) Oh, yes!
(Audience) Yes!
It's a character called Spike.
Next, some spiky hair.
Line to the left, line to the right.
(Laughter) OK.
Nose.
Smile.
But this time we'll change the eyes slightly.
Look, two circles together like that.
And this time we'll change the mouth slightly. Watch.
Nice curly hair.
Line to the left, line to the right.
I think we'll call him Jeff.
Next, the mouth slightly different.
Triangle at the bottom, rest of the hair.
Line to the left, line to the right.
Next, draw some frames, so two circles like that with a little bit in between.
I'm going to save what I think is my favorite, most surprising example until last.
Actually the little ones, they just draw fine, but when they get to about 15 or 16, most of them think they can't draw.
The other people I worked with are many adults in all walks of life, and particularly in business, and they often will want to make presentations memorable.
This is my favorite.
Have you ever been at the party when someone asks you what you do?
It turns out it was all part of a charity called TALK.
This TALK charity is a wonderful charity that helps people who've suffered strokes, but have a particular condition known as aphasia.
(Audience) Oh.
Let's look at another picture.
At the end of it, I had a lovely email from doctor Mike Jordan, and he's the chair of the TALK group; happens to be a medical doctor, but he's the chair of the group.
So it's great. I thought that was a lovely example to share.
(Audience) Yes.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
But the thing is that it's made this simple that whenever I hop on, it sends my data to Google Health as well.
We made an application for Layar: Augmented Reality, to find these AEDs.
So please help us on this one and try to make not only health a little bit better, but take control of it.
(Applause)
"Listen.
my grandmother asked me.
With the keenest of ears, I would hear family chatter, laughter, the wind howling and even crickets chirping.
Then I would beat my plate with a spoon and my chest with my tiny hands trying to recreate what I was hearing.
A few years later, I came to understand what tradition and culture meant, and what was considered taboo or otherwise.
I believe this taboo stems from the psychological and traditional belief that the woman is an inferior being.
Essentially, the drum is a very sensual instrument.
Drumming has essentially represented the strong African heritage, and its importance can be seen in the many aspects of the African tradition.
However, this same drum is disappearing very fast from the music scene, and the traditional genre is losing its popularity very quickly amongst the people.
In my journey as a percussion teacher, I have realized that very many women actually want to play the drum, but at the same time, they fear it.
Others fear the physical pain that comes with playing.
Oh yes, it's not that easy.
Some, because their spouses don't approve of them, and others generally fear the responsibility of being a bearer of culture.
My roots shaped me and my culture is here to stay with me.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Chiming) (Metallic drumming) (Chiming) (Rattling) (Drumming) (Applause)
Basking sharks are awesome creatures.
They're the second-largest fish in the world.
They were very important to coastal communities, going back hundreds of years, especially around the Claddaghduff, Connemara region where subsistence farmers used to sail out on their hookers and open boats, sometimes way offshore to a place called the Sunfish Bank, about 30 miles west of Achill Island, to kill the basking sharks.
In fact, the streetlights in 1742, of Galway, Dublin and Waterford, were lit with sunfish oil.
"Sunfish" is one of the words for basking sharks.
We kill about 100 million sharks a year.
About two and a half, 3,000 sharks were killed up till '85, mainly by Norwegian vessels.
The importance of basking sharks to the coast communities is recognized through the language.
"Liabhán mór," suggesting a big animal.
It's a fantastic opportunity for a scientist to see and experience basking sharks.
So we concentrated mainly in North Donegal and West Kerry as the two areas where I was mainly active.
We tagged 105 sharks last summer.
We use a pole camera on the boat to actually film the shark.
We also deployed some satellite tags, so we did use high-tech stuff as well.
What happens is, you set the tag to detach from the shark after a fixed period -- in this case, eight months -- and literally to the day, the tag popped off, drifted up, said hello to the satellite and sent, not all the data, but enough data for us to use.
Colleagues from the Isle of Man last year actually tagged one shark that went from the Isle of Man to Nova Scotia in about 90 days.
One thing that I think is a very surprising and strange thing is just how low the genetic diversity of sharks is.
I'm not a geneticist, so I won't pretend to understand the genetics.
So when they looked at the genetics of basking sharks, they found that the diversity was incredibly low.
I think this means they're all sharks and they've come from a common ancestry.
But if you look at nucleotide diversity, which is more genetics that are passed on through the parents, you see that basking sharks, if you look at the first study, was order of magnitude less diverse even than other shark species.
So he did another study using microsatellites, which is much more expensive, much more time-consuming, and to his surprise, came up with almost identical results.
So it does seem to be that basking sharks, for some reason, have incredibly low diversity.
And yet, if you look at the whale shark, which is the other plankton-eating large shark, its diversity is much greater.
I don't understand or pretend to understand this; I suspect most geneticists don't either, but they produce the numbers.
So what it tells us, actually, is that there's actually a risk of extinction of this species because its population is so small.
So, where do you get samples from for your genetic analysis?
That's banned now, and that'll be good news for the sharks.
So if you look at all those studies I showed you, the total number of samples worldwide is 86, at present.
And then when myself and Emmett got back to Malin Head, to the pier, I noticed some black slime on the front of the boat.
I had a little tube with alcohol in it to send to the geneticists.
And this was into August now, and normally sharks peak in June, July, and you rarely see them, or rarely can be in the right place to find sharks into August.
We were desperate, so we rushed out to the Blaskets as soon as we heard there were sharks there, and managed to find some sharks.
Look at that lovely black shark slime.
(Laughter) (Applause) I've been working on whales and dolphins in Ireland for 20 years now, and they're a bit more dramatic.
So you can quite easily tell the gender of the shark.
If we can tell the gender of the shark before we sample it, we can tell the geneticist this was taken from a male or a female.
(Applause)
The catalyst for this change was the major earthquake that struck Haiti on the 12th of January in 2010.
The earthquake destroyed the capital of Port-au-Prince, claiming the lives of some 320,000 people, rendering homeless about 1.2 million people.
I remember standing on the roof of the Ministry of Justice in downtown Port-au-Prince.
Haiti allowed us to glimpse into a future of what disaster response might look like in a hyper-connected world where people have access to mobile smart devices.
Outside Haiti also, things were looking different.
Tens of thousands of so-called digital volunteers were scouring the Internet, converting tweets that had already been converted from texts and putting these into open-source maps, layering them with all sorts of important information -- people like Crisis Mappers and Open Street Map -- and putting these on the Web for everybody -- the media, the aid organizations and the communities themselves -- to participate in and to use.
We started talking with a local telecom provider called Voilà, which is a subsidiary of Trilogy International.
We had basically three requirements.
Out of this rubble of Haiti and from this devastation came something that we call TERA -- the Trilogy Emergency Response Application -- which has been used to support the aid effort ever since.
It's used for public health awareness campaigns such as the prevention of cholera.
And it is even used for sensitive issues such as building awareness around gender-based violence.
Some 74 percent of people received the data.
The TERA system was developed from Haiti with support of engineers in the region.
Right across the developing world, citizens and communities are using technology to enable them to bring about change, positive change, in their own communities.
The grassroots has been strengthened through the social power of sharing and they are challenging the old models, the old analog models of control and command.
One illustration of the transformational power of technology is in Kibera.
Kibera is one of Africa's largest slums.
It's on the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya.
If you were to arrive in Nairobi today and pick up a tourist map, Kibera is represented as a lush, green national park devoid of human settlement.
Young people living in Kibera in their community, with simple handheld devices, GPS handheld devices and SMS-enabled mobile phones, have literally put themselves on the map.
People like Josh and Steve are continuing to layer information upon information, real-time information, Tweet it and text it onto these maps for all to use.
They also have their own news network on YouTube with 36,000 viewers at the moment.
In Mongolia for instance, where 30 percent of the people are nomadic, SMS information systems are being used to track migration and weather patterns.
In Nigeria, open-source SMS tools are being used by the Red Cross community workers to gather information from the local community in an attempt to better understand and mitigate the prevalence of malaria.
By 2015, there will be three billion smartphones in the world.
We are hurtling towards a hyper-connected world where citizens from all cultures and all social strata will have access to smart, fast mobile devices.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
It stretches right across Northern Canada, in Labrador, it's home to the largest remaining wild caribou herd in the world: the George River caribou herd, numbering approximately 400,000 animals.
Wetlands, globally, are one of the most endangered ecosystems.
In Manitoba, this is an image from the east side of Lake Winnipeg, and this is the home of the newly designated UNESCO Cultural Heritage site.
And the Tombstone Valley is home to the Porcupine caribou herd.
And I think particularly now, as we see ourselves in a time of environmental crisis, we can learn so much from these people who have lived so sustainably in this ecosystem for over 10,000 years.
Trapped underneath the boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta are these vast reserves of this sticky, tar-like bitumen.
If you look at that truck there, it is the largest truck of its kind on the planet.
It is a 400-ton-capacity dump truck and its dimensions are 45 feet long by 35 feet wide and 25 feet high.
If I stand beside that truck, my head comes to around the bottom of the yellow part of that hubcap.
That would be a huge, vast metropolitan area, probably much larger than the city of Victoria.
And this is just one of a number of mines, 10 mines so far right now.
And here, massive amounts of water are superheated and pumped through the ground, through these vasts networks of pipelines, seismic lines, drill paths, compressor stations.
The oil produced from either method produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other oil.
This is one of the reasons why it's called the world's dirtiest oil.
It's also one of the reasons why it is the largest and fastest-growing single source of carbon in Canada, and it is also a reason why Canada is now number three in terms of producing carbon per person.
Oil sands -- or rather, I should say tar sands -- oil sands is a PR-created term so that the oil companies wouldn't be trying to promote something that sounds like a sticky tar-like substance that's the world's dirtiest oil.
So they decided to call it oil sands.
The tar sands consume more water than any other oil process, three to five barrels of water are taken, polluted and then returned into tailings ponds, the largest toxic impoundments on the planet.
And the tailings ponds range in size up to 9,000 acres.
That's two-thirds the size of the entire island of Manhattan.
That's like from Wall Street at the southern edge of Manhattan up to maybe 120th Street.
In Fort Chipewyan, the 800 people there, are finding toxins in the food chain, this has been scientifically proven.
And not that many years ago, I was lent a boat by a First Nations man, and he said, "When you go out on the river, do not under any circumstances eat the fish.
And we're replacing that with the largest industrial project in the history of the world, which is producing the most high-carbon greenhouse-gas emitting oil in the world.
And we're doing this on the second largest oil reserves on the planet.
This is one of the reasons why Canada, originally a climate change hero -- we were one of the first signatories of the Kyoto Accord.
This is a globally significant wetland, perhaps the greatest on the planet.
And also the last refuge for the largest herd of wild bison, and also, of course, critical habitat for another whole range of other species.
And you can see here the Keystone Pipeline, which would take tar sands raw down to the Gulf Coast, punching a pipeline through the agricultural heart of North America, of the United States, and securing the contract with the dirtiest fuel in the world by consumption of the United States, and promoting a huge disincentive to a sustainable clean-energy future for America.
And the Great Bear Rainforest is generally considered to be the largest coastal temperate rainforest ecosystem in the world.
And yet there's a proposal, of course, to build a pipeline to take huge tankers, 10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez, through some of the most difficult-to-navigate waters in the world, where only just a few years ago, a BC ferry ran aground.
The world does not need any more tar mines.
We need to ensure that these wetlands and forests that are our best and greatest and most critical defense against global warming are protected, and we are not releasing that carbon bomb into the atmosphere.
And we need to all gather together and say no to the tar sands.
Everyone in this room, everyone across Canada, everyone listening to this presentation has a role to play and, I think, a responsibility.
Because what we do here is going to change our history, it's going to color our possibility to survive, and for our children to survive and have a rich future.
It could destroy the Athabasca Delta, the largest and possibly greatest freshwater delta in the planet.
It could destroy the Great Bear Rainforest, the largest temperate rainforest in the world.
I hope that you will all, if you've been moved by this presentation, join with the growing international community to get Canada to step up to its responsibilities, to convince Canada to go back to being a climate change champion instead of a climate change villain, and to say no to the tar sands, and yes to a clean energy future for all.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
Now, there's a tendency to think that the loss of our dark night skies is the inevitable outcome of progress, change, technology.
But first, I want to tell you about my experience of the dark night sky.
I never saw a truly dark night sky until I was 15.
And I looked up, and the sky was just filled with an impossible number of stars.
But I'll never forget that experience of the first time I saw the dark night sky.
And I was just flabbergasted at how many stars there were.
When you see the planet looking like a blue-green marble the way it does in this picture, you're seeing it because the sunlight is reflecting off of it, and that's why you can see the oceans, the clouds, the land.
This is our earth at night, and it is one of the most striking examples of how we have affected our planet on a global scale.
But really what that picture shows you is that it's not just these extreme examples, it's anywhere that uses outdoor lighting.
An individual light bulb can light up your whole room, more or less.
Now, that's great if you're lighting the indoors, but in its application in outdoor lighting, that traditional shape of the light bulb, the sort of globe that spreads light everywhere, is actually very inefficient.
What it does is scatters up into the sky and becomes what we call "light pollution."
Even if you don't care anything about stargazing, this should worry you, because it means that 60-70% of the energy we use to light the outdoors is wasted by blotting out the stars.
Obviously, I use technology every day; I'm a scientist.
Indeed, technology is allowing us to access the sky in ways that are impossible otherwise.
One of the greatest examples of this is, of course, the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble went up into space, it returns pictures daily, and it allows us to see things that we are incapable of seeing with our naked eye, in ways that we've never been able to do before in all of human history.
In the past couple of years, planetarium shows have become more high-tech with these great visualizations, and even though this isn't access directly to the sky, it's at least access to our knowledge about the sky.
All of you have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope and of planetariums.
These are called "citizen science projects."
Citizen science is when large research projects put their data online, teach ordinary people, like you, to go and interact with that data and actually contribute to the research by making interesting or necessary characterizations about it.
One such example of this is what I'm showing here, called "Galaxy Zoo."
Now, it's easy to understand why Galaxy Zoo would be an easy sell for people to be involved with: it involves pretty pictures; galaxies are, generally speaking, pretty attractive.
One such example of this is the citizen science project associated with the mission that I'm part of, called the Kepler Mission.
Kepler is a space telescope and it looks for planets around other stars by measuring the light from those stars very precisely.
We have an associated citizen science project called "Planet Hunters."
Planet Hunters gives you, like Galaxy Zoo, a short tutorial, and within a couple of minutes, you're up and running; you're looking at data from the Kepler Mission and looking for planets.
However, not only are people interested in doing this, but the citizen scientists that work with Planet Hunters have actually found planets in the data that would have gone undiscovered otherwise.
You'll notice if you look carefully, this is the first academic acknowledgment of the importance of Irish coffee in the discovery process.
So clearly, what this is feeding into is people's curiosity and their willingness to be part of the scientific discovery process.
Think about that for a moment.
The sky that you see is shared by every other living thing that we know of in existence.
Our night sky is like a natural resource, it's as though it's a park that you can visit without ever having to travel there.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many.
It's about the size of a rugby ball.
It's made of clay, and it's been fashioned into a cylinder shape, covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun.
The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change.
Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar who'd conquered Israel, sacked Jerusalem and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon.
Belshazzar, his son, decides to have a feast.
He's already at war with the Iranians, with the king of Persia.
And that very night Cyrus, king of the Persians, entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell.
In ringing Babylonian -- it was written in Babylonian -- he says, "I am Cyrus, king of all the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four quarters of the world."
And they'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way, in their own place.
It's a central document in Jewish history.
What was going on was the fundamental shift in Middle Eastern history.
The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians, united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire.
And by the time of his son Darius, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control.
This empire is, in fact, the Middle East as we now know it, and it's what shapes the Middle East as we now know it.
And throughout European culture afterward, Cyrus remained the model.
And Xenophon's book on Cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution.
Jefferson was a great admirer -- the ideals of Cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state.
Meanwhile, back in Babylon, things had not been going well.
After Alexander, the other empires, Babylon declines, falls into ruins, and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost -- until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a British Museum exhibition digging in Babylon.
We only knew about the return of the Jews and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures.
No other evidence.
Suddenly, this appeared.
"Marduk, we hold, called Cyrus by his name."
Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand, calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon.
The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament, you will not be surprised to learn, take a rather different view of this.
And so in Isaiah, we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this, not to Marduk but to the Lord God of Israel -- the Lord God of Israel who also called Cyrus by name, also takes Cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people.
And it's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk.
And there's a slight sense that Isaiah knows this, because he says, this is God speaking, of course, "I have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me."
Because interestingly, of course, Cyrus is a good Iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts.
(Laughter) That's 1879.
And across Eastern Europe, Jews display pictures of Cyrus and of George V side by side -- the two great rulers who have allowed the return to Jerusalem.
10 years later, another story: Iranian Revolution, 1979.
Then another Iran-Iraq war.
And it becomes critical for the Iranians to remember their great past, their great past when they fought Iraq and won.
It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians -- Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews living in Iran, people who are devout, not devout.
And last year, the Cyrus cylinder went to Tehran for the second time.
It was a huge event.
And in the current Iran, Zoroastrians and Christians have guaranteed places in the Iranian parliament, something to be very, very proud of.
Is Iran still to be the defender of the oppressed?
Will Iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated?
A replica of this is at the United Nations.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Gabriel García Márquez is one of my favorite writers, for his storytelling, but even more, I think, for the beauty and precision of his prose.
Which struck me as particularly remarkable during one session with the novel when I realized that I was being swept along on this remarkable, vivid journey in translation.
Now I was a comparative literature major in college, which is like an English major, only instead of being stuck studying Chaucer for three months, we got to read great literature in translation from around the world.
Even as a child, I remember thinking that what I really wanted most in life was to be able to understand everything and then to communicate it to everyone else.
That it's about communication that doesn't just produce greater understanding within the individual, but leads to real change.
Now if you think back on Tina Fey's impersonations on Saturday Night Live of the newly nominated vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, they were devastating.
And there's this mental delight that's followed by the physical response of laughter, which, not coincidentally, releases endorphins in the brain.
This is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic, all of the flight-or-fight responses, operate.
And the comedy comes along, dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest -- race, religion, politics, sexuality -- only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin, we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows, revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view.
Because from what I can tell, the three things gay Americans seem to want most are to join the military, get married and start a family.
There are few phrases that pack a more concentrated dose of subject and symbol than the perfect punchline.
(Laughter) That's an entire childhood in three words.
Back in 1980 when comedian Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire during a freebasing accident, I was in Los Angeles the day after it happened and then I was in Washington D.C. two days after that.
I was visiting with Joel the weekend before the Copenhagen conference on climate change opened in December of 2009.
So we started talking about climate change.
And Perry's policy solution was to ask the people of Texas to pray for rain.
Not for God, not for country, not for profit -- just as a basic metric for global decision-making.
(Applause)
And we were in conversation about how nothing had changed since the time of the ancient Indian epic "The Mahabharata."
Now we do the same with airplanes.
Back then, when Arjuna, the great Indian warrior prince, when he was thirsty, he'd take out a bow, he'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out.
I was terrified by this idea that I would lose the ability to enjoy and appreciate the sunset without having my camera on me, without tweeting it to my friends.
When I was a little girl, my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch.
And so when I saw the iPad, I saw it as a storytelling device that could connect readers all over the world.
Another idea that really fascinated me as a child was that an entire galaxy could be contained within a single marble.
Another thing that's actually really important to me is creating content that is Indian and yet very contemporary.
So we've all heard about fairies and we've all heard about nymphs, but how many people outside of India know about their Indian counterparts, the Apsaras?
And a story that actually deals with new issues like the environmental crisis.
But now with mobile technology, we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology.
One of the interactions in the book is that you're sent off on this quest where you need to go outside, take out your camera on the iPad and collect pictures of different natural objects.
When I was a child, I had multiple collections of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells.
A child in London puts up a picture of a fox and says, "Oh, I saw a fox today."
A child in India says, "I saw a monkey today."
And it creates this kind of social network around a collection of digital photographs that you've actually taken.
In the possibilities of linking together magic, the earth and technology, there are multiple possibilities.
We're moving, we're all moving here, to a world where the forces of nature come closer together to technology, and magic and technology can come closer together.
We're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Now you might ask, what is behavioral finance?
So let's think about how we manage our money.
A lot of people buy the biggest house they can afford, and actually slightly bigger than that.
Let's also think about how we manage risks -- for example, investing in the stock market.
We were risk takers, of course.
How many of you have iPhones?
I would bet many more of you insure your iPhone -- you're implicitly buying insurance by having an extended warranty.
What if you lose your iPhone?
Behavioral finance is really a combination of psychology and economics, trying to understand the money mistakes people make.
And that's what I really want to focus on today.
How do we take an understanding of the money mistakes people make, and then turning the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions?
We have on the screen a representative sample of 100 Americans.
First thing to notice is, half of them do not even have access to a 401(k) plan.
They cannot have money go away from their paycheck into a 401(k) plan before they see it, before they can touch it.
What about the remaining half of the people?
They're just too lazy.
How many people end up saving to a 401(k) plan?
One third of Americans.
Nine out of 10 either cannot save through their 401(k) plan, decide not to save -- or don't decide -- or save too little.
We have one person -- well, actually we're going to slice him in half because it's less than one percent.
We have to understand why people are not saving, and then we can hopefully flip the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions, and then see how powerful it might be.
Suppose we had another wonderful TED event next week.
And during the break there would be a snack and you could choose bananas or chocolate.
Wonderful.
I predict scientifically 74 percent of you will go for bananas.
The same people that imagined themselves eating the bananas ended up eating chocolates a week later.
Or as some economists call it, present bias.
We think about saving. We know we should be saving.
So this issue of present bias causes us to think about saving, but end up spending.
But again, a little diversion to the topic of organ donation.
Wonderful study comparing different countries.
And in Germany, if you would like to donate your organs -- God forbid something really bad happens to you -- when you get your driving license or an I.D., you check the box saying, "I would like to donate my organs."
Austria, a neighboring country, slightly similar, slightly different.
What's the difference?
You will decide whether you want to donate your organs or not.
But when you get your driving license, you check the box if you do not want to donate your organ.
Doing nothing is very common.
Therefore, 99 percent of people are organ donors.
In too many 401(k) plans, if people do nothing, it means they're not saving for retirement, if they don't check the box.
No, no, no, this is a real study and it's got a lot to do with behavioral economics.
One group of monkeys gets an apple, they're pretty happy.
This is the notion of loss aversion.
We hate losing stuff, even if it doesn't mean a lot of risk.
So this notion of loss aversion kicks in when it comes to savings too, because people, mentally and emotionally and intuitively frame savings as a loss because I have to cut my spending.
Whether you think about immediate gratification, and the chocolates versus bananas, it's just painful to save now.
If people have to check a lot of boxes to join a 401(k) plan, they're going to keep procrastinating and not join.
And last, we talked about loss aversion, and the monkeys and the apples.
So we've got these challenges, and what Richard Thaler and I were always fascinated by -- take behavioral finance, make it behavioral finance on steroids or behavioral finance 2.0 or behavioral finance in action -- flip the challenges into solutions.
And we came up with an embarrassingly simple solution called Save More, not today, Tomorrow.
Now we also talked about checking the box and the difficulty of taking action.
It's an autopilot.
But what are we going to do about the monkeys and loss aversion?
Next January comes and people might feel that if they save more, they have to spend less, and that's painful.
It's not just numbers on a piece of paper.
By now, about 60 percent of the large companies actually have programs like this in place.
It's been part of the Pension Protection Act.
One is behavioral finance is extremely powerful.
This is just one example.
Message two is there's still a lot to do.
This is really the tip of the iceberg.
If you think about people and mortgages and buying houses and then not being able to pay for it, we need to think about that.
If you're thinking about people taking too much risk and not understanding how much risk they're taking or taking too little risk, we need to think about that.
If you think about people spending a thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets, we need to think about that.
The average household spends $4,000 a year on lottery tickets.
How many of you feel you have a solid plan for the future when it comes to post-retirement decisions.
Less than three percent of a very sophisticated audience.
There's a lot of opportunities to make it powerful again and again and again.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Imagine the first piece: a man burning his life's work.
He is a poet, a playwright, a man whose whole life had been balanced on the single hope of his country's unity and freedom.
My mother, Mai, was 18 when her father died -- already in an arranged marriage, already with two small girls.
The greatest fear was of pirates, rape and death.
Like most adults on the boat, my mother carried a small bottle of poison.
My first memories are from the boat -- the steady beat of the engine, the bow dipping into each wave, the vast and empty horizon.
After three months in a refugee camp, we landed in Melbourne.
My mother worked on farms, then on a car assembly line, working six days, double shifts.
My mother, my sister and I slept in the same bed.
My mother was exhausted each night, but we told one another about our day and listened to the movements of my grandmother around the house.
I didn't know how to talk about anything.
I met people from all walks of life, so many of them doing the thing they loved, living on the frontiers of possibility.
At the end of each day, I made a huge pot of soup which we all shared.
Before I close, though, let me tell you about my grandmother.
(Applause) Trevor Neilson: And also, Tan's mother is here today, in the fourth or fifth row.
(Applause)
I'm a computer science professor, and my area of expertise is computer and information security.
Now medical devices have come a long way technologically.
You can see in 1926 the first pacemaker was invented.
1960, the first internal pacemaker was implanted, hopefully a little smaller than that one that you see there, and the technology has continued to move forward.
In 2006, we hit an important milestone from the perspective of computer security.
Because that's when implanted devices inside of people started to have networking capabilities.
Now what a research team did was they got their hands on what's called an ICD.
This is a defibrillator, and this is a device that goes into a person to control their heart rhythm, and these have saved many lives.
Now, wireless and the Internet can improve health care greatly.
The modern car is a sophisticated multi-computer device.
One is short-range wireless, where you can actually communicate with the device from nearby, either through Bluetooth or wi-fi, and the other is long-range, where you can communicate with the car through the cellular network, or through one of the radio stations.
The first threat model was to see what someone could do if an attacker actually got access to the internal network on the car.
Once you have control of the car's computers, you can do anything.
Well, what if you make the car always say it's going 20 miles an hour slower than it's actually going?
One of the things they were able to do from the chase car is apply the brakes on the other car, simply by hacking the computer.
You remotely unlock the doors through the computer that controls that, start the engine, bypass anti-theft, and you've got yourself a car.
They videotaped people on a bus, and then they post-processed the video.
P25 radios are used by law enforcement and all kinds of government agencies and people in combat to communicate, and there's an encryption option on these phones.
This is what the phone looks like. It's not really a phone.
Motorola makes the most widely used one, and you can see that they're used by Secret Service, they're used in combat, it's a very, very common standard in the U.S. and elsewhere.
You see the difference?
There's one little dot that shows up on the screen, and one little tiny turn of the switch.
The accelerometer is the thing that determines the vertical orientation of the smartphone.
They put a smartphone next to a keyboard, and they had people type, and then their goal was to use the vibrations that were created by typing to measure the change in the accelerometer reading to determine what the person had been typing.
They had pretty good success. This is an article from the USA Today.
Why does this matter? Well, in the Android platform, for example, the developers have a manifest where every device on there, the microphone, etc., has to register if you're going to use it so that hackers can't take over it, but nobody controls the accelerometer.
If someone is able to put malware on your iPhone, they could then maybe get the typing that you do whenever you put your iPhone next to your keyboard.
There's several other notable attacks that unfortunately I don't have time to go into, but the one that I wanted to point out was a group from the University of Michigan which was able to take voting machines, the Sequoia AVC Edge DREs that were going to be used in New Jersey in the election that were left in a hallway, and put Pac-Man on it.
But it's very important, and these researchers are showing, that the developers of these things need to take security into account from the very beginning, and need to realize that they may have a threat model, but the attackers may not be nice enough to limit themselves to that threat model, and so you need to think outside of the box.
What we can do is be aware that devices can be compromised, and anything that has software in it is going to be vulnerable. It's going to have bugs.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Hi. I'm Kevin Allocca, I'm the trends manager at YouTube, and I professionally watch YouTube videos.
So we're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters.
Any one of you could be famous on the Internet by next Saturday.
But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
So how does it happen?
KA: Last year, Bear Vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in Yosemite National Park.
In 2010, it was viewed 23 million times.
(Laughter) And he had posted lots of nature videos in fact.
So what happened here?
Jimmy Kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become.
Because tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience.
So what happened on this day?
Well Tosh.0 picked it up, a lot of blogs starting writing about.
And now there are 10,000 parodies of "Friday" on YouTube.
(Music) So "Nyan Cat" is a looped animation with looped music.
It's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year.
And if you think that that is weird, you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that's been viewed four million times.
(Laughter) Even cats were watching this video.
(Laughter) Cats were watching other cats watch this video.
And who could have predicted any of this?
In a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute, only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have.
When a friend of mine told me that I needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in New York City, I admit I wasn't very interested.
And so it all brings us to one big question ...
(Video) Bear Vasquez: What does this mean?
Tastemakers, creative participating communities, complete unexpectedness, these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity.
The oceans cover some 70 percent of our planet.
And I think Arthur C. Clarke probably had it right when he said that perhaps we ought to call our planet Planet Ocean.
And the oceans are hugely productive, as you can see by the satellite image of photosynthesis, the production of new life.
In fact, the oceans produce half of the new life every day on Earth as well as about half the oxygen that we breathe.
And so 10 years ago, an international program began called the Census of Marine Life, which set out to try and improve our understanding of life in the global oceans.
As you can see, these are the footprints of the different projects.
There are actually four to five new species described everyday for the oceans.
Now, I come from Newfoundland in Canada -- It's an island off the east coast of that continent -- where we experienced one of the worst fishing disasters in human history.
So what we're experiencing is something called shifting baselines.
And so at that time, of course, there was no refrigeration.
So fishermen could only catch what they could either eat or sell that day.
But the Romans developed salting.
And with salting, it became possible to store fish and to transport it long distances.
And so began industrial fishing.
So it's not all hopeless.
By 2007, the catch was actually laughable in terms of the size for a trophy fish.
The oceans have lost a lot of their productivity and we're responsible for it.
So what's left? Actually quite a lot.
And I want to start with a bit on technology, because, of course, this is a TED Conference and you want to hear something on technology.
And the advantage of sound waves is that they actually pass well through water, unlike light.
And so for animals that come to the surface to breathe, such as this elephant seal, it's an opportunity to send data back to shore and tell us where exactly it is in the ocean.
For animals that don't surface, we have something called pop-up tags, which collect data about light and what time the sun rises and sets.
But then, of course, there was the Deep Horizon oil spill.
Where do we find the most species of ocean life?
And what we find if we plot up the well-known species is this sort of a distribution.
Similarly this Golden V kelp collected in Alaska just below the low water mark is probably a new species.
Now this guy, this bigfin squid, is seven meters in length.
This particular shrimp, we've dubbed it the Jurassic shrimp, it's thought to have gone extinct 50 years ago -- at least it was, until the census discovered it was living and doing just fine off the coast of Australia.
And it shows that the ocean, because of its vastness, can hide secrets for a very long time.
One of the things that we're taught in high school is that all animals require oxygen in order to survive.
So now they know that, in fact, animals can live without oxygen, at least some of them, and that they can adapt to even the harshest of conditions.
If you were to suck all the water out of the ocean, this is what you'd be left behind with, and that's the biomass of life on the sea floor.
And we also found this spectacular yeti crab that lives near boiling hot hydrothermal vents at Easter Island.
So we've done pretty well.
So we still have quite a lot of work to do in terms of unknowns.
And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye.
But the really intriguing thing about the microbes is just how diverse they are.
A single drop of seawater could contain 160 different types of microbes.
We actually don't know.
For example, these tuna that were once so abundant in the North Sea are now effectively gone.
Ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with, as well as ocean warming, and the effects they're going to have on coral reefs.
And the oceans are so productive, there's so much going on in there that's of relevance to humans that we really need to, even from a selfish perspective, try to do better than we have in the past.
So we need to recognize those hot spots and do our best to protect them.
(Applause)
Let's say that you wanted to conduct an experiment.
This is an area about the size of Delaware but it is spread over a footprint as large as Vermont and New Hampshire combined.
Over 1,500 tons of explosives are used for coal mining in West Virginia alone.
So far, over 500 mountains have been destroyed.
This cleaning takes place on-site.
The process produces more air pollution and contaminates billions of gallons of water with metals, sulfates, cleaning chemicals and other impurities.
What are the health impacts of mountaintop-removal mining?
I began to research this issue in 2006.
I had just taken a job at West Virginia University.
Before then, I hadn't done any research related to coal.
But I started to hear stories from people who lived in these mining communities.
They were worried about how common cancer was in their neighborhoods.
I met with many people in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky to listen to those stories and hear their concerns.
I searched the scientific literature and was surprised to learn that nothing had been published on the public health effects of coal mining in the United States.
They predicted that the health problems could be explained by poverty or by lifestyle issues, like smoking and obesity.
We've seen evidence for higher rates of birth defects and for babies born at low birth weight.
These studies did not include data on the actual environmental conditions in mining communities.
We found that violations of public drinking-water standards are seven times more common in MTR areas versus non-mining areas.
The dust in mining communities contains a complex mixture, but includes high levels of silica, a known lung carcinogen, and potentially harmful organic compounds.
We used the dust in laboratory experiments and found that it induced cardiovascular dysfunction in rats.
I'd been attacked at public testimony at a Congressional hearing by a congressman with ties to the energy industry.
I worked with scientists at the US Geological Survey on environmental sampling for more than two years.
In August of this year, the National Academy of Sciences was suddenly instructed by the federal government to stop their independent review of the public health consequences of surface mining.
At conferences or meetings, they express skepticism.
"Have you considered that alternative interpretation?"
Technically, you have to acknowledge that they could be right, but you know, maybe these health problems are not the result of some unmeasured confound.
Maybe they result from blowing up mountains over people's heads.
I've published over 30 papers on this topic so far.
As scientists, we follow the data wherever it goes, but sometimes data can only take us so far and we have to decide, as thinking, feeling human beings, what it means and when it is time to act.
Obviously, scientists are responsible for telling the truth as they see it, based on evidence.
It can be extremely frustrating to wait around for public opinion or political consensus to catch up to the scientific understanding.
But the more controversial the subject and the more frustrating the debate, the more critical it is for scientists to preserve our objectivity and our reputation for integrity.
Without an acknowledged integrity on the part of scientists, no amount of data will ever convince people to believe painful or difficult truths.
Eventually, scientific truth does and will win out.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And the first story is about Charles Darwin, one of my heroes.
(Laughter) Because I was there in '71, studying a lagoon in West Africa.
I was there because I grew up in Europe and I wanted later to work in Africa.
And I got a big sunburn, and I was convinced that I was really not from there.
This was my first sunburn.
And the lagoon was surrounded by palm trees, as you can see, and a few mangrove.
When I went there 27 years later, the fish had shrunk to half of their size.
And the fish also were happy to be there.
In the '70s -- well, beginning in the '60s -- Europe did lots of development projects.
This is a dead turtle.
And hence, the enormous role that a marine protected area can play.
There I think that the arts and film can perhaps fill the gap, and simulation.
This is a simulation of Chesapeake Bay.
And so my recommendation, it's the only one I will provide, is for Cameron to do "Avatar II" underwater.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
This is not a philosophical statement, this is just science based in physics, chemistry and biology.
But of course, you can't borrow natural resources, so we're burning through our capital, or stealing from the future.
I'm not saying it's not nice or pleasant or that it's bad for polar bears or forests, though it certainly is.
The only problem with this plan is that it's not possible.
In response, some people argue, but we need growth, we need it to solve poverty.
This is about food and water, soil and climate, the basic practical and economic foundations of our lives.
So the idea that we can smoothly transition to a highly-efficient, solar-powered, knowledge-based economy transformed by science and technology so that nine billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads is a delusion.
We've had economic analysis pointing out that, not only can we afford it, it's cheaper to act early.
Last year on climate, for example, we had the highest global emissions ever.
But it is also time that we ended our denial and recognized that we're not acting, we're not close to acting and we're not going to act until this crisis hits the economy.
I want to talk to you about fear.
The crisis is now inevitable.
Of course, we can't know what will happen.
Imagine China, India and Pakistan going to war as climate impacts generate conflict over food and water.
Imagine our highly-tuned, just-in-time food industry and our highly-stressed agricultural system failing and supermarket shelves emptying.
Imagine 30 percent unemployment in America as the global economy is gripped by fear and uncertainty.
Perhaps anger.
Of course, we can't know what's going to happen and we have to live with uncertainty.
We are in danger, all of us, and we've evolved to respond to danger with fear to motivate a powerful response, to help us bravely face a threat.
You see, those people that have faith that humans can solve any problem, that technology is limitless, that markets can be a force for good, are in fact right.
Think about war.
And how cool would it be to tell your grandchildren that you were part of that?
Scientists like James Hansen tell us we may need to eliminate net CO2 emissions from the economy in just a few decades.
We developed a plan called "The One Degree War Plan" -- so named because of the level of mobilization and focus required.
To my surprise, eliminating net CO2 emissions from the economy in just 20 years is actually pretty easy and pretty cheap, not very cheap, but certainly less than the cost of a collapsing civilization.
We can do this.
We've built a powerful foundation of science, knowledge and technology -- more than enough to build a society where nine billion people can lead decent, meaningful and satisfying lives.
Well it's time to grow up, to be wiser, to be calmer, to be more considered.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector.
Over the last hundred years, the average human lifespan has more than doubled, average per capita income adjusted for inflation around the world has tripled.
Steve Pinker has showed us that, in fact, we're living during the most peaceful time ever in human history.
And Charles Kenny that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent in the last 130 years.
And many people forget this.
And we keep setting our expectations higher and higher.
In fact, we redefine what poverty means.
That's why the cellphone in your pocket is literally a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster than a supercomputer of the '70s.
Now look at this curve.
This is Moore's Law over the last hundred years.
The rate at which the technology is getting faster is itself getting faster.
Jeopardy's not an easy game.
Four years ago here at TED, Ray Kurzweil and I started a new university called Singularity University.
Think about that, the fact that, literally, a group of students can touch the lives of a billion people today.
Today we can point at dozens of companies that have done just that.
Let me give you an example.
So this is a story of Napoleon III in the mid-1800s.
He invited over to dinner the king of Siam.
But the King of Siam, he was fed with aluminum utensils.
You see, aluminum was the most valuable metal on the planet, worth more than gold and platinum.
You see, even though aluminum is 8.3 percent of the Earth by mass, it doesn't come as a pure metal.
16 terawatts of energy hits the Earth's surface every 88 minutes.
"A Pale Blue Dot."
Because we live on a water planet.
We live on a planet 70 percent covered by water.
And there is technology coming online, not 10, 20 years from now, right now.
My goodness, we're going to hit 70 percent penetration of cellphones in the developing world by the end of 2013.
They're living in a world of information and communication abundance that no one could have ever predicted.
So literally, imagine this device in the middle of the developing world where there are no doctors, 25 percent of the disease burden and 1.3 percent of the health care workers.
I call it the rising billion.
And rather than having economic shutdown, we're about to have the biggest economic injection ever.
And they will get healthier by using the Tricorder, and they'll become better educated by using the Khan Academy, and by literally being able to use 3D printing and infinite computing [become] more productive than ever before.
What will these three billion people bring?
Let me share and close with a story that really got me excited.
And it's very important for research in medicine.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good morning.
It consumes about 15 watts of power.
So it has four rotors.
And the other way around, if you increase the speed of rotor three and decrease the speed of rotor one, then the robot pitches forward.
So one of the advantages of this design is when you scale things down, the robot naturally becomes agile.
So as a result, the angular acceleration, denoted by the Greek letter alpha here, goes as 1 over R.
It's inversely proportional to R.
The smaller you make it, the more quickly you can turn.
So on the left, you see Daniel throwing this robot up into the air, and it shows you how robust the control is.
No matter how you throw it, the robot recovers and comes back to him.
So here are robots carrying beams, columns and assembling cube-like structures.
The robots can be used for transporting cargo.
So one of the problems with these small robots is their payload-carrying capacity.
This is a picture of a recent experiment we did -- actually not so recent anymore -- in Sendai, shortly after the earthquake.
So robots like this could be sent into collapsed buildings, to assess the damage after natural disasters, or sent into reactor buildings, to map radiation levels.
So one fundamental problem that the robots have to solve if they are to be autonomous, is essentially figuring out how to get from point A to point B.
And it does that avoiding obstacles.
Here you have overhead motion capture cameras on the top that tell the robot where it is 100 times a second.
And here, you'll see Daniel throw this hoop into the air, while the robot is calculating the position of the hoop, and trying to figure out how to best go through the hoop.
So one of the disadvantages of these small robots is its size.
And I told you earlier that we may want to employ lots and lots of robots to overcome the limitations of size.
Actually you take any object coated with fig juice, and the ants will carry it back to the nest.
So when we have a robot which is surrounded by neighbors -- and let's look at robot I and robot J -- what we want the robots to do, is to monitor the separation between them, as they fly in formation.
Again, if you have lots and lots of robots, it's impossible to coordinate all this information centrally fast enough in order for the robots to accomplish the task.
So this is what we call anonymity.
So what I want to show you next is a video of 20 of these little robots, flying in formation.
One of the disadvantages of doing that is, as you scale things up -- so if you have lots of robots carrying the same thing, you're essentially increasing the inertia, and therefore you pay a price; they're not as agile.
And again, everything is autonomous, and all Quentin has to do is to give them a blueprint of the design that he wants to build.
So what happens when you leave your lab, and you go outside into the real world?
And what if there's no GPS?
And it uses these sensors to build a map of the environment.
The coordinate system is defined based on the robot, where it is and what it's looking at.
So I want to show you a clip of algorithms developed by Frank Shen and Professor Nathan Michael, that shows this robot entering a building for the very first time, and creating this map on the fly.
So this robot is actually being commanded remotely by Frank, but the robot can also figure out where to go on its own.
You will see nine robots play six different instruments.
When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time.
And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do.
Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity.
(Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.
I did my best.
And I felt kind of guilty about this.
And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them.
Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss.
Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best.
So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society.
So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments.
Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation.
And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.
And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research.
(Laughter) Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces.
And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface.
Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi -- all these people described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy.
Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert.
And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts.
This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them.
So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations.
Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California.
And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude.
So that's the world we're living in today.
The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust.
And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together.
But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems.
Here's Margaret Atwood, "Cat's Eye."
Here's a novel by Milan Kundera.
My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books.
But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi.
Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years.
And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way.
So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write.
And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching.
And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision.
We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own.
This is especially important for extroverted children too.
Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there.
So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books.
But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase.
But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
I spend most of my time in jails, in prisons, on death row.
And so I want to talk about the power of identity.
She was tough, she was strong, she was powerful.
And I remember, when I was about eight or nine years old, waking up one morning, going into the living room, and all of my cousins were running around.
And my grandmother was sitting across the room staring at me.
I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger.
When I was about 14 or 15, one day my brother came home and he had this six-pack of beer -- I don't know where he got it -- and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods.
(Laughter) And I'm going to admit something to you.
But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol.
We can get them to do things that they don't think they can do.
My grandfather was in prison during prohibition.
This country is very different today than it was 40 years ago.
In 1972, there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons.
The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
We have seven million people on probation and parole.
And mass incarceration, in my judgment, has fundamentally changed our world.
One out of three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole.
In urban communities across this country -- Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington -- 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole.
We're actually projecting in another 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it's been since prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
A lot of my clients are very young.
We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country.
I represent people on death row.
It's not our problem.
I talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill.
And it's interesting, when I teach my students about African-American history, I tell them about slavery.
And that era of terrorism, of course, was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid.
We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation.
I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty.
He said, "We don't have the death penalty in Germany.
It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people."
What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish?
And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people -- where you're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white -- in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched.
Well I believe that our identity is at risk.
We love technology. We love creativity.
Because ultimately we are talking about a need to be more hopeful, more committed, more dedicated to the basic challenges of living in a complex world.
And it's that mind-heart connection that I believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzly things, but also the dark and difficult things.
I had the great privilege, when I was a young lawyer, of meeting Rosa Parks.
We're trying to end mass incarceration."
And I actually believe that the TED community needs to be more courageous.
We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering.
Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone's humanity.
I've come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.
I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar.
And because of that there's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law.
I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth.
And I had a client who was 14 years old, a young, poor black kid.
And to my horror, not only had I written it, but I had sent it to court.
And I finally got out of the car and I started walking up to the courthouse.
And as I was walking up the steps of this courthouse, there was an older black man who was the janitor in this courthouse.
And he whispered in my ear.
It connected deeply with something in me about identity, about the capacity of every person to contribute to a community, to a perspective that is hopeful.
And finally, this older black man with this very worried look on his face came into the courtroom and sat down behind me, almost at counsel table.
About 10 minutes later the judge said we would take a break.
That we cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity.
That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion and justice.
Thank you very much.
For example, here in California we're going to spend one billion dollars on the death penalty in the next five years -- one billion dollars.
And yet, 46 percent of all homicide cases don't result in arrest.
So there's an opportunity to change that.
Thank you so much for coming to TED. Thank you.
"You see that stone wall out there?
"You see that pier on the lake out there?
We all love stories.
The children's television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, "Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story."
The film is "John Carter." It's based on a book called "The Princess of Mars," which was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Editors and screenwriters have known this all along.
Even after his father died, he was still trying to scratch that itch.
In 1998, I had finished writing "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" and I was completely hooked on screenwriting.
And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: "Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty."
You've got to remember that in this time of year, 1993, what was considered a successful animated picture was "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin," "Lion King."
And we got a hold of that fax.
(Voice Over) Woody: What do you think you're doing?
Hey, off the bed!
Slinky? Slink ... Slinky!
Slinky: I'm sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them.
And before I'd even decided to make storytelling my career, I can now see key things that happened in my youth that really sort of opened my eyes to certain things about story.
And that was the year that they restored and re-released "Lawrence of Arabia."
(Video) Boy: Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
Who are you?
Everything Lawrence did in that movie was an attempt for him to figure out where his place was in the world.
A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.
And I was in the hospital for months.
And many blood transfusions later, I lived, and that made me special.
I don't know if my parents really believe that, but I didn't want to prove them wrong.
I promise, I will never let anything happen to you, Nemo.
It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university.
And I was really lucky to go to the University of Iowa where I could study under Professor James Van Allen who built instruments for the first U.S. satellites.
Professor Van Allen told me about observations of Venus, that there was intense microwave radiation.
The right answer, confirmed by the Soviet Venera spacecraft, was that Venus was very hot -- 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
I was fortunate to join NASA and successfully propose an experiment to fly to Venus.
Eventually, I resigned as principal investigator on our Venus experiment because a planet changing before our eyes is more interesting and important.
The greenhouse effect had been well understood for more than a century.
British physicist John Tyndall, in the 1850's, made laboratory measurements of the infrared radiation, which is heat.
And he showed that gasses such as CO2 absorb heat, thus acting like a blanket warming Earth's surface.
I worked with other scientists to analyze Earth climate observations.
That paper was reported on the front page of the New York Times and led to me testifying to Congress in the 1980's, testimony in which I emphasized that global warming increases both extremes of the Earth's water cycle.
Heatwaves and droughts on one hand, directly from the warming, but also, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor with its latent energy, rainfall will become in more extreme events.
There will be stronger storms and greater flooding.
By 15 years later, evidence of global warming was much stronger.
I had the privilege to speak twice to the president's climate task force.
By then we had two grandchildren, Sophie and Connor.
I gave the talk at the University of Iowa in 2004 and at the 2005 meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
This led to calls from the White House to NASA headquarters and I was told that I could not give any talks or speak with the media without prior explicit approval by NASA headquarters.
After I informed the New York Times about these restrictions, NASA was forced to end the censorship.
Over the next few years I was drawn more and more into trying to communicate the urgency of a change in energy policies, while still researching the physics of climate change.
So the key quantity is Earth's energy imbalance.
Is there more energy coming in than going out?
The total energy imbalance now is about six-tenths of a watt per square meter.
It's about 20 times greater than the rate of energy use by all of humanity.
It's equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year.
This imbalance, if we want to stabilize climate, means that we must reduce CO2 from 391 ppm, parts per million, back to 350 ppm.
That is the change needed to restore energy balance and prevent further warming.
Climate change deniers argue that the Sun is the main cause of climate change.
But the measured energy imbalance occurred during the deepest solar minimum in the record, when the Sun's energy reaching Earth was least.
As you see, there's a high correlation between temperature, CO2 and sea level.
Climate change deniers like to use this fact to confuse and trick the public by saying, "Look, the temperature causes CO2 to change, not vice versa."
Small changes in Earth's orbit that occur over tens to hundreds of thousands of years alter the distribution of sunlight on Earth.
When there is more sunlight at high latitudes in summer, ice sheets melt.
A warmer ocean releases CO2, just as a warm Coca-Cola does.
Methane is also beginning to escape from the permafrost.
The last time CO2 was 390 ppm, today's value, sea level was higher by at least 15 meters, 50 feet.
Hundreds of New Orleans-like devastations around the world.
The monarch butterfly could be one of the 20 to 50 percent of all species that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates will be ticketed for extinction by the end of the century if we stay on business-as-usual fossil fuel use.
Global warming is already affecting people.
So we can say with a high degree of confidence that the severe Texas and Moscow heatwaves were not natural; they were caused by global warming.
Now the tragedy about climate change is that we can solve it with a simple, honest approach of a gradually rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies and distributed 100 percent electronically every month to all legal residents on a per capita basis, with the government not keeping one dime.
It is the principal requirement for moving us rapidly to a clean energy future.
Jim DiPeso of Republicans for Environmental Protection describes it thusly: "Transparent. Market-based.
But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true cost to society, our governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels by 400 to 500 billion dollars per year worldwide, thus encouraging extraction of every fossil fuel -- mountaintop removal, longwall mining, fracking, tar sands, tar shale, deep ocean Arctic drilling.
If we had started in 2005, it would have required emission reductions of three percent per year to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate this century.
But we aren't even starting.
Thank you.
(Applause)
But really what they're doing is they're showing what's possible with technology today.
It's probably the smallest of the 21 apps that the fellows wrote last year.
We had a team that worked on a project in Boston last year that took three people about two and a half months.
And there are projects like this at every level of government.
Now there's a very large community of people that are building the tools that we need to do things together effectively.
It's not just Code for America fellows, there are hundreds of people all over the country that are standing and writing civic apps every day in their own communities.
They haven't given up on government.
And these folks know something that we've lost sight of.
And because government ultimately derives its power from us -- remember "We the people?" -- how we think about it is going to effect how that change happens.
Now I didn't know very much about government when I started this program.
Well after two years, I've come to the conclusion that, especially local government, is about opossums.
Boston doesn't just have a call center.
And it's also a great example of government getting in on the crowd-sourcing game.
So one citizen helped another citizen, but government played a key role here.
When one neighbor helps another, we strengthen our communities.
We call animal control, it just costs a lot of money.
That our input to the system of government is voting.
And we say that word with such contempt.
It's a group of concerned citizens that have written a very detailed 325-page report that's a response to the SEC's request for comment on the Financial Reform Bill.
The good news is that technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society.
And there's a generation out there that's grown up on the Internet, and they know that it's not that hard to do things together, you just have to architect the systems the right way.
We're more than that, we're citizens.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) Solar technology is ...
(Applause)
I'm Kelli Anderson.
I work as an artist and designer.
(Laughter) It educates the public about renewable energy.
People arrive at experiences like these with expectations.
The small things we make can work to reinforce our assumptions about the world.
"Ken doll is near dot com."
(Laughter) A little bit creepy.
And "A colder melon skin."
Period.
Sometimes, there's meaning, justice and logic present in the way things are.
And I did that through a holiday card, of course.
(Laughter) This card is literally a four-frame documentary about receiving the card.
(Applause) Oh, well, thank you.
And that's why cliches aren't interesting, and why people get in car wrecks near their homes.
So while paper does have all of these astonishing, overlooked capabilities, it takes a hell of a lot of intervention into getting us to see it as new again.
This next project I want to show you is a wedding invitation, which is a format practically begging for reinvention.
We're all total music nerds, and Karen and Mike have even recorded songs together.
And we found some with this guy, Mr. Wizard -- (Laughter) who had a much-beloved TV show, teaching kids about the science behind everyday things.
If you can make a record player out of a piece of paper and a sewing needle, what isn't possible out of the world?
And I started getting really nervous, because I'm the one who had to actually make it work.
(Music and singing) (Music ends) We were so excited when we finally got that to work.
We have assumptions about material experience, like that paper should be silent or that websites should be flat.
This is something we actually did do in the fall of 2008, in a project that was conceptualized by artist Steve Lambert, organized by The Yes Men and executed by many, many people, some of whom are me.
(Laughter) (Applause and cheers) Thanks!
(Applause) "Why?," you might ask.
"Why make a fake newspaper?"
Well, quite frankly, because the real newspaper is depressing.
We ostensibly live in a democracy where we should have some say in what happens in the world.
Years before the withdrawal was even discussed, we ended the war in Iraq.
Years before Occupy Wall Street, we put in a maximum wage law -- (Laughter) to end the ginormous wage inequities between the lowest and highest income earners.
(Laughter) While the real "New York Times" has this slogan of, "All the News that's Fit to Print," we offered a more forward-thinking message of, "All the News We Hope to Print."
He made sure that the typography, the layout, the smell of the ink -- everything -- was just like a real "New York Times."
So for Ikea, what if instead of cheap furniture, you could buy your own wind farm?
It comes flat-packed, clearly easy to assemble -- (Laughter) with that little zigzag tool and the wooden pegs.
And this is our take on a used car dealership ad.
If you haven't taken a ride on the New York City subway, you may not know Dr. Z.
(Laughter) So the news of our fake paper made it onto the real news all around the world.
These unexpected messages of hope were able to get out there through our sheer brazenness in ripping off the "New York Times," but also because we leveraged this pathway that no one had expected.
With those three projects, I demonstrate that by rejecting normal order, by messing things up and by rearranging the pieces, we can expand our notion of what we demand from reality.
(Applause)
Words matter.
When I was in eighth grade, my teacher gave me a vocabulary sheet with the word "genocide."
You need to know, in this kind of war, husbands kills wives, wives kill husbands, neighbors and friends kill each other.
I want words to stop it.
I was born in Kigali, Rwanda.
When I lost my front tooth, my brother looked at me and said, "Oh, it has happened to you, too?
(Laughter) I enjoyed playing everywhere, especially my mother's garden and my neighbor's.
I loved my kindergarten.
We sang songs, we played everywhere and ate lunch.
But when I was six, the adults in my family began to speak in whispers and shushed me any time that I asked a question.
One night, my mom and dad came.
They had this strange look when they woke us.
They sent my older sister Claire and I to our grandparent's, hoping whatever was happening would blow away.
We hid, we crawled, we sometimes ran.
You see, I did not know what those noises were.
When I was 12, I came to America with Claire and her family on refugee status.
(Laughter) (Applause) I told you, I told you.
(Laughter) But after the show, as I spent time with my mom and dad and my little sister and my two new siblings that I never met, I felt anger.
Soon, my parents moved to the United States, but like Claire, they don't talk about our past.
You see, the chaos of the violence continues inside in the words we use and the stories we create every single day.
Words will never be enough to quantify and qualify the many magnitudes of human-caused destruction.
(Applause)
Then, your other excuse is, "Yes, there are special people who pursue their passions, but they are geniuses.
You know, a fine line between madness and genius.
But, are you so sure that that's going to give you a great career, when all the evidence is to the contrary?
Passion is the thing that will help you create the highest expression of your talent.
I love you more than any other woman I've ever encountered.
Your friends and family will be gathered in the cemetery, and there beside your gravesite will be a tombstone, and inscribed on that tombstone it will say, "Here lies a distinguished engineer, who invented Velcro."
I want to be a great parent, and I will not sacrifice them on the altar of great accomplishment."
(Laughter) What do you want me to say?
Last time I saw him, he was on the stairs crying.
Do you really think it's appropriate that you should actually take children and use them as a shield?
Says your kid, "I have decided I want to be a magician.
But then, you were born."
There was something you could have said to your kid, when he or she said, "I have a dream."
Just like I did."
But you're afraid.
Thank you.
When you think about the brain, it's difficult to understand, because if I were to ask you right now, how does the heart work, you would instantly tell me it's a pump.
If I were to ask about your lungs, you would say it exchanges oxygen for carbon dioxide.
It's not a mechanical object, not a pump, not an airbag.
Your brain is made out of 100 billion cells, called neurons.
But we're not going to record my brain or your brain or your teachers' brains, we're going to use our good friend the cockroach.
This is the leg of a cockroach.
This is what your brain is doing right now.
You have 100 billion cells making these raindrop-type noises.
You've got 100 billion cells in your brain doing this right now, sending all this information back about what you're seeing, hearing.
(Blowing) (Sound changes) Let me just touch this with a little pen here.
The other way is that your brain is not only taking in electrical impulses, you're also sending out.
It's my iPhone actually.
Do you guys know how your earbuds work in your ears?
(Laughter) So you see what's moving. It's moving on the bass.
Human beatbox to a cockroach leg.
(Applause)
Do fish feel pain?
How about insects?
Was the Big Bang just an accident?
Why do so many innocent people and animals suffer terrible things?
Will robots become conscious one day?
(Music) [How many universes are there?] Sometimes when I'm on a long plane flight, I gaze out at all those mountains and deserts and try to get my head around how vast our Earth is.
There are maybe 100 billion galaxies detectable by our telescopes.
So if each star was the size of a single grain of sand, just the Milky Way has enough stars to fill a 30-foot by 30-foot stretch of beach three feet deep with sand.
I mean, first of all, the 100 billion galaxies within range of our telescopes are probably a minuscule fraction of the total.
Still, our physical reality here on Earth is intimately connected to those distant, invisible galaxies.
However, recent theories in physics, including one called string theory, are now telling us there could be countless other universes built on different types of particles, with different properties, obeying different laws.
But nonetheless, combined, they make up a vast multiverse of possible universes in up to 11 dimensions, featuring wonders beyond our wildest imagination.
The leading version of string theory predicts a multiverse made up of 10 to the 500 universes.
(Laughter) But even that number is minuscule compared to another number: infinity.
Some physicists think the space-time continuum is literally infinite and that it contains an infinite number of so-called pocket universes with varying properties.
The only meaningful answer to the question of how many universes there are is one.
Only one universe.
And a few philosophers and mystics might argue that even our own universe is an illusion.
All we know is the answer is somewhere between zero and infinity.
We just might be undergoing the biggest paradigm shift in knowledge that humanity has ever seen.
Conspiracy theorists claim that UFOs are visiting all the time and the reports are just being covered up, but honestly, they aren't very convincing.
In the past year, the Kepler space observatory has found hundreds of planets just around nearby stars.
If any one in 10,000 has conditions that might support a form of life, that's still 50 million possible life-harboring planets right here in the Milky Way.
If just a few of them had spawned intelligent life and started creating technologies, those technologies would have had millions of years to grow in complexity and power.
On Earth, we've seen how dramatically technology can accelerate in just 100 years.
In millions of years, an intelligent alien civilization could easily have spread out across the galaxy, perhaps creating giant energy-harvesting artifacts or fleets of colonizing spaceships or glorious works of art that fill the night sky.
After all, it's only happened once on Earth in four billion years.
Maybe we are the first such civilization in our galaxy.
Only a tiny fraction of the stars in our galaxy have really been looked at closely for signs of interesting signals.
Maybe as civilizations develop, they quickly discover communication technologies far more sophisticated and useful than electromagnetic waves.
Maybe all the action takes place inside the mysterious recently discovered dark matter, or dark energy, that appear to account for most of the universe's mass.
Perhaps intelligent civilizations come to realize that life is ultimately just complex patterns of information interacting with each other in a beautiful way, and that that can happen more efficiently at a small scale.
So, just as on Earth, clunky stereo systems have shrunk to beautiful, tiny iPods, maybe intelligent life itself, in order to reduce its footprint on the environment, has turned itself microscopic.
So the Solar System might be teeming with aliens, and we're just not noticing them.
Maybe the very ideas in our heads are a form of alien life.
Well, within the next 15 years, we could start seeing real spectroscopic information from promising nearby planets that will reveal just how life-friendly they might be.
And meanwhile, SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is now releasing its data to the public so that millions of citizen scientists, maybe including you, can bring the power of the crowd to join the search.
All of this will help us understand whether the universe is teeming with life or whether, indeed, it's just us.
And it's the crazy possibilities, the unanswered questions, that pull us forward.
So stay curious.
But in this picture here, you'll see that Earth is mostly water.
Seventy percent of Earth is covered with water.
And when you go outside and look up at the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, the average depth of the ocean is 15 of those on top of one another.
So what I want to do today is show you some things about this planet, about the oceans.
But what you probably don't know is in the very deep part of the ocean, we have volcanic eruptions.
Most volcanoes on Earth are at the bottom of the sea -- more than 80 percent.
All over the world -- in the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean.
In this place, the ocean floor, the rocks actually turn to liquid.
And all around the water there's a little cliff, there's a little white sandy beach.
The thing that's special about this water is that it's at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
Water is actually flowing through there.
And there's animals that only live in that water.
The largest waterfall on the planet is actually under the ocean, up near Iceland.
So the deal about the ocean is that to explore it, you've got to have technology.
In this case, it's our ship, Atlantis, and the submarine, Alvin.
That's like a little lobster.
The ocean is full of life.
And yet the deepest part of the ocean -- when we go to that mountain range, we find hot springs.
Incredibly cool.
(Laughter) "Vampire" squid, because when it gets protective, it pulls this black cape over its whole body, and curls up into a ball.
This ship, "The Ship of Dreams" -- a hundred years ago this coming April, this ship was supposed to show up in New York.
It's the Titanic.
Microbes are actually eating the hull of the Titanic.
And what's exciting to me is that we're making a virtual Titanic, so you can sit there at home with your joystick and your headset on, and you can actually explore the Titanic for yourself.
Seven billion people live on this planet and all of us are impacted by the sea, because the oceans control the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat.
There's a lot more cool stuff -- every dive we go on in the ocean, we find something new about the sea.
So what's in that other 95 percent?
And I'm here to tell you that the ocean is full of surprises.
There's a quote I love by Marcel Proust: "The true voyage of exploration is not so much in seeking new landscapes," which we do, "but in having new eyes."
And so I hope today, by showing you some of this, it's given you some new eyes about this planet, and for the first time, I want you to think about it differently.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
(Applause)
Inertia is the name that scientists give to the phenomenon of the ball going to the back of the wagon."
Feynman went on to earn degrees at MIT, Princeton, he solved the Challenger disaster, he ended up winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his Feynman diagrams, describing the movement of subatomic particles.
Eratosthenes was the third librarian at the great Library of Alexandria, and he made many contributions to science.
360 degrees divided by 7.2 equals 50.
In fact, he invented the word geography.
It needed to know the exact distance, so he knew very precisely that the distance between the two cities was 500 miles.
Now, we live in an age where multi-billion-dollar pieces of machinery are looking for the Higgs boson.
Armand Fizeau was an experimental physicist in Paris.
And he was familiar with Galileo's experiments in trying to determine whether or not light had a speed.
Galileo had worked out this really wonderful experiment where he and his assistant had a lamp, each one of them was holding a lamp.
Most people think of science as a closed, black box, when in fact it is an open field.
The people that made these discoveries just thought a little bit harder about what they were looking at, and they were a little bit more curious.
And their curiosity changed the way people thought about the world, and thus it changed the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I have a question for you: Are you religious?
Please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person.
Let's see, I'd say about three or four percent.
I had no idea there were so many believers at a TED Conference.
(Laughter) Okay, here's another question: Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way, shape or form? Raise your hand.
My Talk today is about the main reason, or one of the main reasons, why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way, shape or form.
My Talk today is about self-transcendence.
And when that happens, the feeling is ecstatic and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings.
Now it's really hard to think about anything abstract like this without a good concrete metaphor.
So here's the metaphor I'm offering today.
But sometimes it's as though a doorway appears from out of nowhere and it opens onto a staircase.
We climb the staircase and experience a state of altered consciousness.
In 1902, the great American psychologist William James wrote about the many varieties of religious experience.
One of the most exciting to me is this young man, Stephen Bradley, had an encounter, he thought, with Jesus in 1820.
And here's what Bradley said about it.
(Music) (Video) Stephen Bradley: I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, "Come."
My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die.
And on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving.
The world's many religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase.
Others use psychedelic drugs.
This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god.
Others use dancing, spinning and circling to promote self-transcendence.
Others overcome their self at raves.
So many books about war say the same thing, that nothing brings people together like war.
And that bringing them together opens up the possibility of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences.
Gray was a soldier in the American army in World War II.
And after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers and wrote about the experience of men in battle.
Durkheim even called us Homo duplex, or two-level man.
The lower level he called the level of the profane.
Now profane is the opposite of sacred.
And in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals.
We want to satisfy our individual desires.
We pursue our individual goals.
But sometimes something happens that triggers a phase change.
Individuals unite into a team, a movement or a nation, which is far more than the sum of its parts.
Durkheim called this level the level of the sacred because he believed that the function of religion was to unite people into a group, into a moral community.
Durkheim believed that anything that unites us takes on an air of sacredness.
And once people circle around some sacred object or value, they'll then work as a team and fight to defend it.
Think of the collective joy in Britain on the day World War II ended.
Think of the collective anger in Tahrir Square, which brought down a dictator.
And think of the collective grief in the United States that we all felt, that brought us all together, after 9/11.
I'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence is just a basic part of being human.
I'm offering the metaphor of a staircase in the mind.
I'm saying we are Homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred.
So here's the million-dollar question for social scientists like me: Is the staircase a feature of our evolutionary design?
Is it a product of natural selection, like our hands?
Or is it a bug, a mistake in the system -- this religious stuff is just something that happens when the wires cross in the brain -- Jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience, it's just a mistake?
Well many scientists who study religion take this view.
The New Atheists, for example, argue that religion is a set of memes, sort of parasitic memes, that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff, self-destructive stuff, like suicide bombing.
Well let me show you.
Darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves, but they're of great use to our groups.
He wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition.
He said, "If the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other."
In other words, Charles Darwin believed in group selection.
So here's a group of guys on a college crew team.
Within this team there's competition.
There are guys competing with each other.
Maybe one of them will make it to the Olympics.
So within the team, their interests are actually pitted against each other.
But while that competition is going on within the boat, this competition is going on across boats.
Suppose we've got a group of little organisms -- they can be bacteria, they can be hamsters; it doesn't matter what -- and let's suppose that this little group here, they evolved to be cooperative.
Well that's great. They graze, they defend each other, they work together, they generate wealth.
And as you'll see in this simulation, as they interact they gain points, as it were, they grow, and when they've doubled in size, you'll see them split, and that's how they reproduce and the population grows.
But suppose then that one of them mutates.
There's a mutation in the gene and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy.
And so when a green interacts with a blue, you'll see the green gets larger and the blue gets smaller.
We start with just one green, and as it interacts it gains wealth or points or food.
If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem then it cannot reap the benefits of cooperation and group selection cannot get started.
It's not that hard a problem.
In fact, nature has solved it many, many times.
And nature's favorite solution is to put everyone in the same boat.
For example, why is it that the mitochondria in every cell has its own DNA, totally separate from the DNA in the nucleus?
And now let's rerun the simulation putting one of these superorganisms into a population of free-riders, of defectors, of cheaters and look what happens.
And pretty soon the whole population is actually composed of these new superorganisms.
What I've shown you here is sometimes called a major transition in evolutionary history.
Darwin's laws don't change, but now there's a new kind of player on the field and things begin to look very different.
Now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature that just happened with some bacteria.
It happened again about 120 or a 140 million years ago when some solitary wasps began creating little simple, primitive nests, or hives.
These early wasps gave rise to the bees and the ants that have covered the world and changed the biosphere.
And it happened again, even more spectacularly, in the last half-million years when our own ancestors became cultural creatures, they came together around a hearth or a campfire, they divided labor, they began painting their bodies, they spoke their own dialects, and eventually they worshiped their own gods.
Once they were all in the same tribe, they could keep the benefits of cooperation locked inside.
And they unlocked the most powerful force ever known on this planet, which is human cooperation -- a force for construction and destruction.
In fact, often, as we've seen happen in a lot of the Arab Spring revolts, often those divisions are along religious lines.
Look at the people in these photos I've been showing you.
And now I'm going to give the whole Talk over again in three minutes in a more full-spectrum sort of way.
(Music) (Video) Jonathan Haidt: We humans have many varieties of religious experience, as William James explained.
One of the most common is climbing the secret staircase and losing ourselves.
The staircase takes us from the experience of life as profane or ordinary upwards to the experience of life as sacred, or deeply interconnected.
We are Homo duplex, as Durkheim explained.
And we are Homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection, as Darwin explained.
I can't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug, but if it is an adaptation, then the implications are profound.
If it is an adaptation, then we evolved to be religious.
I mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects, people and ideas.
This is why politics is so tribal.
Politics is partly profane, it's partly about self-interest, but politics is also about sacredness.
It's about joining with others to pursue moral ideas.
It's about the eternal struggle between good and evil, and we all believe we're on the good team.
And most importantly, if the staircase is real, it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life.
We unleashed Earth-changing creativity and generated vast wealth and comfort.
Nowadays we fly around like individual bees exulting in our freedom.
But sometimes we wonder: Is this all there is?
What should I do with my life?
What's missing is that we are Homo duplex, but modern, secular society was built to satisfy our lower, profane selves.
I see this desire in my students at the University of Virginia.
Most people long to overcome pettiness and become part of something larger.
And this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago.
"No man is an island entire of itself.
JH: Thank you.
(Applause)
In order to do that, we have to put you as a user back in the driver's seat.
We need cooperation between you and the computing network and the computer.
So Virtual Earth is about starting off creating the first digital representation, comprehensive, of the entire world.
Well, we collect data from satellites, from airplanes, from ground vehicles, from people.
Well, a little unknown secret is his brother actually works on the Virtual Earth team.
We think about the user interface.
What we're trying to do is build a virtual world.
I thank you very much for your time.
(Applause)
The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional.
But it's also a morally important one.
But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math.
Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year since Napster first came on the scene.
(Laughter) It's true.
Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people.
And this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day.
(Laughter) (Applause) These days an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs, which is to say eight billion dollars-worth of stolen media.
I hope you'll join me next time when I will be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to he American economy.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to tell you a little bit about my TEDxHouston Talk.
I woke up the morning after I gave that talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life.
(Laughter) And she said, "I saw your talk live-streamed.
(Laughter) And she said, "Well, I think it's too late."
(Laughter) And she goes, "Uh... no."
(Laughter) So I looked back up and she said, "Are you really going to try to break in and steal the video before they put it on YouTube?"
(Laughter) She said, "You're like the worst vulnerability role model ever."
"If 500 turns into 1,000 or 2,000, my life is over."
The first is: vulnerability is not weakness.
How many of you think of vulnerability and weakness synonymously?
Vulnerability is not weakness.
I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty.
And I've come to the belief -- this is my 12th year doing this research -- that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage -- to be vulnerable, to let ourselves be seen, to be honest.
(Laughter) What would you like for me to talk about?
(Laughter) So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.
(Applause) To create is to make something that has never existed before.
The second thing, in addition to really finally understanding the relationship between vulnerability and courage, the second thing I learned, is this: We have to talk about shame.
About three months ago, I was in a sporting goods store buying goggles and shin guards and all the things that parents buy at the sporting goods store.
And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability.
I learned about these things from studying shame.
Here's why.
I've failed miserably, many times.
And that's what this conference, to me, is about.
Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake.
There's a huge difference between shame and guilt.
I don't know how much perfume that commercial sold, but I guarantee you, it moved a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.
(Laughter) Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we're supposed to be.
For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations.
If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment.
(Applause)
He is the guy who made bionics a household word in the form of the polyester-clad Six Million Dollar Man that I grew up with.
The problem is, we're constrained by mass production, which makes a million identical things but can't make one unique, individualized thing.
And you create a product that, no matter what, it's going to be as unique as their fingerprint.
Chad is a competitive soccer player, lost his leg eight years ago to cancer.
Two things happened.
And let me take you back 100 years to 1912.
But go back to 1912, 100 years ago, and look at that point what we, our country, was faced with.
A hundred years ago we were looking at coal, of course, and we were looking at whale oil and we were looking at crude oil.
So at that point, 1912, we selected crude oil over whale oil and some more coal.
And one trillion of that goes to OPEC.
One is under construction by the Chinese and the other 11 belong to us.
Why do we have 11 aircraft carriers?
And the United States uses about 20 million barrels a day, which is about 25 percent of all the oil used everyday in the world.
The slide you're looking at here is 1990 to 2040.
If you go forward the next 10 years and cap the price of oil at 100 dollars a barrel, you will pay 2.2 trillion.
But the days of cheap oil are over.
There is no free market for oil.
It's 25 percent cleaner than oil.
Do we have enough natural gas?
I think it's probably 175 billion barrels.
There are 250 million vehicles in America.
So what you have is natural gas is the bridge fuel, is the way I see it.
If we could do that, I think we would take our first step to an energy plan.
What happened?
TBP: I lost 150 million dollars.
We are overwhelmed with natural gas.
I'm not a big natural gas producer.
Somebody the other day said I was the second largest natural gas producer in the United States.
But I also am in the fueling business.
CA: But natural gas is a fossil fuel.
So you believe in the threat of climate change.
But if that's it and that becomes the reason that renewables don't get invested in, then, long-term, we're screwed anyway, right?
But Chris, I think where we're headed, the long-term, I don't mind going back to nuclear.
And I can tell you what the last page of the report that will take them five years to write will be.
CA: One of the questions from the audience is, with fracking and the natural gas process, what about the problem of methane leaking from that, methane being a worse global warming gas than CO2?
I mean seriously, the Department of Energy did not have anything to do with fracking.
Now the largest aquifer in North America is from Midland, Texas to the South Dakota border, across eight states -- big aquifer: Ogallala, Triassic age.
I don't understand why the media is focused on Eastern Pennsylvania.
Your picture then I guess of how the world eventually gets off fossil fuels is through innovation ultimately, that we'll someday make solar and nuclear cost competitive?
TBP: Solar and wind, Jim and I agreed on that in 13 seconds.
And I say, that is your problem.
Because, again, I'm trying to get energy solved for America.
In addition to making this personal -- so we're going to talk about your relationship with your heart and all women's relationship with their heart -- we're going to wax into the politics.
So it's a woman's disease now.
And you see the female line since 1984, the gap is widening.
Heart disease kills more women at all ages than breast cancer.
Breast cancer, mortality is down to four percent.
We owe an incredible debt of gratitude to these two women.
Bernadine Healy, Dr. Healy, was a cardiologist.
And right around that time, in the 1980's, that we saw women and heart disease deaths going up, up, up, up, up, she wrote an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine and said, the Yentl syndrome.
Mortality is not going down, it's going up.
And she questioned, she hypothesized, is this a Yentl syndrome?
Is it because women don't look like men, they don't look like that male-pattern heart disease that we've spent the last 50 years understanding and getting really good diagnostics and really good therapeutics, and therefore, they're not recognized for their heart disease.
Doctor Healy then subsequently became the first female director of our National Institutes of Health.
It was a very big deal for her to become director.
Why are more and more women dying of ischemic heart disease?
(Laughter) So I'll describe the male-pattern heart attack first.
Horrible chest pain.
That's a man heart attack.
So we picked up on that and we said, "You know, we now have the ability to look inside human beings with these special catheters called IVUS: intravascular ultrasound."
Cellulite here, cellulite here.
(Laughter) And if you did that angiogram, which is the red, you can see the man's disease.
So that was a discovery.
And we're about two and a half years into a five-year study.
This is a figure from an editorial that I published in the European Heart Journal this last summer.
And that is female-pattern and why we think the Yentl syndrome actually is explaining a lot of these gaps.
And one of the the cutting-edge areas that we're just incredibly excited about is stem cell therapy.
If you ask, what is the big difference between women and men physiologically?
So we hypothesized that female stem cells might be better at identifying the injury, doing some cellular repair or even producing new organs, which is one of the things that we're trying to do with stem cell therapy.
These are female and male stem cells.
Too many lives are at stake.
So I implore you to join the Red Dress Campaign in this fundraising.
(Applause)
So my name is Taylor Wilson.
I am 17 years old and I am a nuclear physicist, which may be a little hard to believe, but I am.
So nuclear fusion is our energy future.
Well I built a fusion reactor when I was 14 years old.
That is the inside of my nuclear fusion reactor.
I started building this project when I was about 12 or 13 years old.
And I assembled this in my garage, and it now lives in the physics department of the University of Nevada, Reno.
And it slams together deuterium, which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron in it.
So this is similar to the reaction of the proton chain that's going on inside the Sun.
I developed a detector that replaces the current detectors that Homeland Security has.
(Applause) And I've developed a system to produce medical isotopes.
Instead of requiring multi-million-dollar facilities I've developed a device that, on a very small scale, can produce these isotopes.
So that's my fusion reactor in the background there.
That is me at the control panel of my fusion reactor.
This is me at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, which is the preeminent particle physics laboratory in the world.
So thank you very much.
(Applause)
And the way I'm going to do that is present to you five animations of five of my poems.
Because the mixing of those two media is a sort of unnatural or unnecessary act.
And I was initially resistant, because I always think poetry can stand alone by itself.
Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results, in all cases.
And surely, if you're reading a poem that mentions a cow, you don't need on the facing page a drawing of a cow.
I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Loony Tunes cartoons.
And I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places -- poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.
When I was Poet Laureate, there I go again -- I can't help it, it's true -- (Laughter) I created a poetry channel on Delta Airlines that lasted for a couple of years.
It's a little poem called "Budapest," and in it I reveal, or pretend to reveal, the secrets of the creative process.
My pen moves along the page like the snout of a strange animal shaped like a human arm and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater.
(Applause) Writing is not actually as easy as that for me.
One of my students came up after class, an introductory class, and she said, "You know, poetry is harder than writing," which I found both erroneous and profound.
(Laughter) The next poem is also rather short.
Poetry just says a few things in different ways.
And it uses the imagery of dollhouse furniture.
All afternoon they face one another, the man in the brown suit, the woman in the blue dress -- perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.
And the poem begins with a certain species of forgetfulness that someone called literary amnesia, in other words, forgetting the things that you have read.
Long ago, you kissed the names of the nine muses good-bye and you watched the quadratic equation pack its bag.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the Moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
(Applause) Thank you. And the last poem is called "The Dead."
The dead are always looking down on us, they say.
And when we lie down in a field or on a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, they think we are looking back at them, which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait like parents for us to close our eyes.
(Applause) BC: I'm not sure if other poems will be animated.
(Laughter) I just have time to read a more recent poem to you.
It's called "To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl."
"Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born, you would be all done in only one more year?
(Laughter) A few centuries later, when he was your age, Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family, but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies, four operas and two complete masses as a youngster.
(Laughter) But of course, that was in Austria at the height of Romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
(Laughter) By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes, but that doesn't mean he never helped out around the house."
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause) Thanks.
(Applause)
While I give this talk, in the next 10 minutes, a hundred million of my cells will die, and over the course of today, 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back, so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in the piece.
So there you go. That's the truth.
What we do is prolong people's lives, and delay death, and redirect death, but we can't, strictly speaking, save lives on any sort of permanent basis.
Which is a familiar phrase to us.
And she looked at me and said, "No, of course not!"
Jim was 94. (Laughter) And I realized that something wasn't happening here.
This is John Hunter Hospital.
Only one in 10 people who are over 80 will die of cancer.
Thank you. (Applause)
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.
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.
I did a performance with two singers who specialize in making strange noises with their mouths.
I told you three things last year.
So three things have happened.
This is 1950 -- those were the industrialized countries, those were developing countries.
There was a huge difference in the world.
And this was 2007.
The last century, 1870, was bad for the kids in Europe, because most of this statistics is Europe.
This is India coming up, with the first data from India.
And we will soon see China coming up in the very far end corner here.
And look here -- compare to the Philippines of today.
There's a discrepancy in what's happening today in the emerging economies.
This is really a change, that you have this lag of more or less 30, 40 years' difference on the health.
And the Volvo is doing quite fine.
This is the war. The Toyota got off track, and now the Toyota is coming on the healthier side of Sweden -- can you see that?
And this changes gradually.
And this is my family.
This is Sweden, 1830, when my great-great-grandma was born.
And this is when my grandma was born, 1891.
She took care of me as a child, so I'm not talking about statistic now -- now it's oral history in my family.
(Laughter) I think it's the best way of verifying historical statistics.
It's interesting to see the enormous diversity within sub-Saharan Africa.
And my daughter, she was born in Chile, and the grand-daughter was born in Singapore, now the healthiest country on this Earth.
Singapore is the best one.
Now this looks also like a very good story.
But it's not really that easy, that it's all a good story.
Carbon-dioxide emission, metric ton per capita.
This is 1962, and United States was emitting 16 tons per person.
The Minister of the Environment of India said, "Well, you were the one who caused the problem."
The OECD countries -- the high-income countries -- they were the ones who caused the climate change.
But from now on, we count per capita.
From now on we count per capita.
And everyone is responsible for the per capita emission."
The world is quite a messy place.
This we can call Dollar Street.
This family earns about one dollar per day.
And the interesting thing, when you go around here in the photo panorama, you see the family still sitting on the floor there.
And if you really want to see the difference, you look at the toilet over here.
I spent 20 years in interviews with African farmers who were on the verge of famine.
And these two young farmers, they are girls now -- because the parents are dead from HIV and AIDS -- they discuss with a trained agronomist.
This is one of the best agronomists in Malawi, Junatambe Kumbira, and he's discussing what sort of cassava they will plant -- the best converter of sunshine to food that man has found.
And they are very, very eagerly interested to get advice, and that's to survive in poverty.
Technology will bring you out of poverty, but there's a need for a market to get away from poverty.
But she's very thankful for the public investment in schooling so she can count, and won't be cheated when she reaches the market.
She wants her kid to be healthy, so she can go to the market and doesn't have to stay home.
And she wants the infrastructure -- it is nice with a paved road.
You can do this.
I find my experience from 20 years of Africa is that the seemingly impossible is possible.
I would say that sub-Saharan Africa has done best in the world during the last 50 years.
We have to know a little more about the world.
I have a neighbor who knows 200 types of wine.
I only know two types of wine -- red and white.
(Laughter) But my neighbor only knows two types of countries -- industrialized and developing.
(Applause) But I have to get serious. And how do you get serious?
If you are fighting in a non-governmental organization, you love equity between gender.
We need everything.
Economic growth to me, as a public-health professor, is the most important thing for development because it explains 80 percent of survival.
It was the government that made law function finally.
Education, human resources are important.
Environment is important.
Money is not a goal.
Environment is very, very crucial.
But where are the important goals?
Of course, it's human rights.
And culture. Culture is the most important thing, I would say, because that's what brings joy to life.
So the seemingly impossible is possible.
Even African countries can achieve this.
And remember, please remember my main message, which is this: the seemingly impossible is possible.
(Laughter) (Applause) Bring me my sword!
Sword swallowing is from ancient India.
(Laughter) And I will now prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible by taking this piece of steel -- solid steel -- this is the army bayonet from the Swedish Army, 1850, in the last year we had war.
You see, the battery is the key enabling device here.
It's called the liquid metal battery.
It's a new form of energy storage that I invented at MIT along with a team of my students and post-docs.
(Applause) Now let's get started.
The battery was invented about 200 years ago by a professor, Alessandro Volta, at the University of Padua in Italy.
His invention gave birth to a new field of science, electrochemistry, and new technologies such as electroplating.
Here's the first battery -- a stack of coins, zinc and silver, separated by cardboard soaked in brine.
This is the starting point for designing a battery -- two electrodes, in this case metals of different composition, and an electrolyte, in this case salt dissolved in water.
We need to think about the problem differently.
And in order to adopt a fresh perspective, I sought inspiration from beyond the field of electricity storage.
And just a few short years following their discovery, aluminum changed from a precious metal costing as much as silver to a common structural material.
Volta's battery works at room temperature.
It's fitted with solid electrodes and an electrolyte that's a solution of salt and water.
The electrolyte is not a solution of salt and water, but rather salt that's melted.
That's the economic miracle of modern electrometallurgy.
I made the battery all liquid -- liquid metals for both electrodes and a molten salt for the electrolyte.
So I put low-density liquid metal at the top, put a high-density liquid metal at the bottom, and molten salt in between.
Magnesium for the top layer.
(Laughter) So to produce current, magnesium loses two electrons to become magnesium ion, which then migrates across the electrolyte, accepts two electrons from the antimony, and then mixes with it to form an alloy.
The electrons go to work in the real world out here, powering our devices.
Now to charge the battery, we connect a source of electricity.
And the current passing between the electrodes generates enough heat to keep it at temperature.
It's pretty cool, at least in theory.
Now do I hire seasoned professionals?
(Applause) So this is the evolution of the liquid metal battery.
I call it the hockey puck.
We call that the pizza.
That's enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of 200 American households.
So what have we learned from all this?
(Applause) So what have we learned from all this?
Temperature: Conventional wisdom says set it low, at or near room temperature, and then install a control system to keep it there.
Liquid metal battery is designed to operate at elevated temperature with minimum regulation.
And finally, human resources: Conventional wisdom says hire battery experts, seasoned professionals, who can draw upon their vast experience and knowledge.
So you see, the liquid metal battery story is more than an account of inventing technology, it's a blueprint for inventing inventors, full-spectrum.
(Applause)
Scientists and engineers change the world.
If you really ask yourself this question, you can't help but feel uncomfortable.
Because it's not failure itself that constrains us.
The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way.
Clemenceau said, "Life gets interesting when we fail, because it's a sign that we've surpassed ourselves."
In 1895, Lord Kelvin declared that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible.
In October of 1903, the prevailing opinion of expert aerodynamicists was that maybe in 10 million years we could build an aircraft that would fly.
And two months later on December 17th, Orville Wright powered the first airplane across a beach in North Carolina.
That was 1903.
Ferdinand Foch, a French army general credited with having one of the most original and subtle minds in the French army, said, "Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value."
40 years later, aero experts coined the term transonic.
In 1947, there was no wind tunnel data beyond Mach 0.85.
And yet, on Tuesday, October 14th, 1947, Chuck Yeager climbed into the cockpit of his Bell X-1 and he flew towards an unknown possibility, and in so doing, he became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound.
Six of eight Atlas rockets blew up on the pad.
After 11 complete mission failures, we got our first images from space.
That's still true today.
At Mach 20, we can fly from New York to Long Beach in 11 minutes and 20 seconds.
DARPA's hypersonic test vehicle is the fastest maneuvering aircraft ever built.
It's boosted to near-space atop a Minotaur IV rocket.
That's an unnatural act for a rocket.
We call it rocketcam.
And it's pointed at the hypersonic glider.
This is the actual rocketcam footage from flight one.
Now to conceal the shape, we changed the aspect ratio a little bit.
But this is what it looks like from the third stage of the rocket looking at the unmanned glider as it heads into the atmosphere back towards Earth.
But we collected more hypersonic flight data than in 30 years of ground-based testing combined.
And in the second flight, three minutes of fully-controlled, aerodynamic flight at Mach 20.
You can't learn to fly at Mach 20 unless you fly.
If a Mach 20 glider takes 11 minutes and 20 seconds to get from New York to Long Beach, a hummingbird would take, well, days.
You see, hummingbirds are not hypersonic, but they are maneuverable.
In fact, the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards.
It can fly up, down, forwards, backwards, even upside-down.
Many prototypes crashed -- many.
But there's no way to learn to fly like a hummingbird unless you fly.
(Applause) It's beautiful, isn't it.
Matt is the first ever hummingbird pilot.
(Applause) Failure is part of creating new and amazing things.
Or perhaps, Spider Man will one day be Gecko Man.
Today we can manufacture structures that mimic the hairs of a gecko's foot.
That's enough to stick six 42-inch plasma TV's to your wall, no nails.
This is a spider mite.
It's one millimeter long, but it looks like Godzilla next to these micromachines.
In the world of Godzilla spider mites, we can make millions of mirrors, each one-fifth the diameter of a human hair, moving at hundreds of thousands of times per second to make large screen displays, so that we can watch movies like "Godzilla" in high-def.
And if we can build machines at that scale, what about Eiffel Tower-like trusses at the microscale?
Today we are making metals that are lighter than Styrofoam, so light they can sit atop a dandelion puff and be blown away with a wisp of air -- so light that you can make a car that two people can lift, but so strong that it has the crash-worthiness of an SUV.
There are 44 lightning strikes per second around the globe.
Experiments suggest that lightning could be the next GPS.
Using a grid the size of your thumb, with 32 electrodes on the surface of his brain, Tim uses his thoughts to control an advanced prosthetic arm.
This is the first time a human has controlled a robot with thought alone.
And it is the first time that Tim has held Katie's hand in seven years.
It was made in tobacco plants.
Tobacco plants can make millions of doses of vaccine in weeks instead of months, and it might just be the first healthy use of tobacco ever.
Last September, the gamers of Foldit solved the three-dimensional structure of the retroviral protease that contributes to AIDS in rhesus monkeys.
They were able to work together because they're connected by the Internet.
The Internet is home to two billion people, or 30 percent of the world's population.
It allows us to amplify our voices and our power as a group.
In 1969, the internet was but a dream, a few sketches on a piece of paper.
And then on October 29th, the first packet-switched message was sent from UCLA to SRI.
So who are these scientists and engineers at a magical place called DARPA?
They remind us that we can change the world if we defy the impossible and we refuse to fear failure.
You see, there was a time when you weren't afraid of failure, when you were a great artist or a great dancer and you could sing, you were good at math, you could build things, you were an astronaut, an adventurer, Jacques Cousteau, you could jump higher, run faster, kick harder than anyone.
Scientists and engineers can indeed change the world.
Doubt and fear always creep in.
Jason started at DARPA on March 18th, 2010.
I saw Jason nearly every day, sometimes twice a day.
And on one particularly dark day for me, Jason sat down and he wrote an email.
In that moment and still today when I doubt, when I feel afraid, when I need to reconnect with that feeling, I remember his words, they were so powerful.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
And so in the second flight, we were able to get three minutes of fully aerodynamic control of the vehicle before we lost it.
CA: What do you picture that glider being used for?
How it's ultimately used will be determined by the military.
The folks at AeroVironment tried 300 or more different wing designs, 12 different forms of the avionics.
But there's something really interesting about a flying machine that looks like something you'd recognize.
I mean, do you worry about the Pandora's box issue here?
That's what we do.
CA: I mean, you're clearly a really inspiring leader.
And you persuade people to go to these great feats of invention, but at a personal level, in a way I can't imagine doing your job.
Do you wake up in the night sometimes, just asking questions about the possibly unintended consequences of your team's brilliance?
1998: A single mother of four, three months after the birth of my fourth child, I went to do a job as a research assistant.
This girl happened to be the only girl in the entire village who had made it to the ninth grade.
Her mother was often told by other women, "You and your child will die poor."
After two weeks of working in that village, it was time to go back.
With tears in my eyes, I said, "No."
Two months later, I go to another village on the same assignment and they asked me to live with the village chief.
Her mother died while giving birth to her, and no one had any idea who her father was."
For two weeks, she became my companion, slept with me.
I bought her used clothes and bought her her first doll.
I wish to go with you.
I wish to go to school."
Dirt poor, no money, living with my parents, I again said, "No."
The story of this little girl: She had been raped by her paternal grandfather every day for six months.
I wish to go to school."
2010: A young woman stands before President Sirleaf and gives her testimony of how she and her siblings live together, their father and mother died during the war.
Great people have made commitments -- we will protect our children from want and from fear.
All of these great works by great people aimed at getting young people to where we want to get them globally, I think, has failed.
In Liberia, for example, the teenage pregnancy rate is three to every 10 girls.
In one community, we're told, you wake up in the morning and see used condoms like used chewing gum paper.
Girls as young as 12 being prostituted for less than a dollar a night.
And then someone asked me, just before my TEDTalk, a few days ago, "So where is the hope?"
Several years ago, a few friends of mine decided we needed to bridge the disconnect between our generation and the generation of young women.
And some of those girls who walked in the room very shy have taken bold steps, as young mothers, to go out there and advocate for the rights of other young women.
One day she said to me, "My wish is to finish college and be able to support my children."
She sells water, sells soft drinks and sells recharge cards for cellphones.
This is the dream of the African girl.
Several years ago, there was one African girl.
Angry, frustrated, really upset about the state of her society and the state of her children, this young girl started a movement, a movement of ordinary women banding together to build peace.
This is another African girl's wish.
Women came out, protested a brutal dictator, fearlessly spoke.
Today, this young woman is me, a Nobel laureate.
Thank you.
LG: I've been asked to lead the Liberian Reconciliation Initiative.
We took 50 of those girls and we worked with them.
And this was at the beginning of elections.
These girls banded together and formed a group and launched a campaign for voter registration.
And the theme they used was: "Even pretty girls vote."
They were able to mobilize young women.
Rape is not barbaric, but the law, he said, was barbaric.
The first concrete blocks were manufactured in 1868 with a very simple idea: modules made of cement of a fixed measurement that fit together.
Very quickly concrete blocks became the most-used construction unit in the world.
Essentially concrete blocks had become the building block of our time.
Almost a hundred years later in 1947, LEGO came up with this.
And in a few short years, LEGO bricks took place in every household.
You don't have to be an engineer to make beautiful houses, beautiful bridges, beautiful buildings.
LEGO has essentially taken the concrete block, the building block of the world, and made it into the building block of our imagination.
Like the concrete block, the transistor allows you to build much larger, more complex circuits, one brick at a time.
Eight years ago when I was at the Media Lab, I started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists and designers.
A few years ago I started developing littleBits.
LittleBits are electronic modules with each one specific function.
Green is output, blue is power, pink is input and orange is wire.
Add this buzzer for some extra punch and you've created a noise machine.
So beyond simple play, littleBits are actually pretty powerful.
For example, how a nightlight works, or why an elevator door stays open, or how an iPod responds to touch.
So for example, we've had designers with no experience with electronics whatsoever start to play with littleBits as a material.
And we want to make this material accessible to everyone.
Thank you.
(Applause)
It's a demonstration of augmented reality.
Augmented reality is the melding of the real world with computer-generated imagery.
It seems the perfect medium to investigate magic and ask, why, in a technological age, we continue to have this magical sense of wonder.
It was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who first suggested this receptive state of mind.
Without it, a script is just words.
It was Jean Robert-Houdin, France's greatest illusionist, who first recognized the role of the magician as a storyteller.
There are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome.
Magicians play with fire and steel, defy the fury of the buzzsaw, dare to catch a bullet or attempt a deadly escape.
But audiences don't come to see the magician die, they come to see him live.
Because the best stories always have a happy ending.
Jokes lead us down a path to an expected destination.
The finale defies logic, gives new insight into the problem, and audiences express their amazement with laughter.
One of the key qualities of all stories is that they're made to be shared.
That makes my job more difficult, because, if I want to surprise them, I need to tell a story that starts the same, but ends differently -- a trick with a twist on a twist.
We all want to share our stories, whether it is the trick we saw at the party, the bad day at the office or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation.
Today, thanks to technology, we can share those stories as never before, by email, Facebook, blogs, tweets, on TED.com.
The tools of social networking, these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story.
We turn facts into similes and metaphors, and even fantasies.
Our stories make us the people we are and, sometimes, the people we want to be.
And if the story is a good one, it might even make us smile.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
So, without romanticizing this too much: imagine that you light your home with kerosene and candles every night, and that you do all of your cooking with charcoal.
This is how the world's two billion poorest people cook and light their homes every day.
This isn't just inconvenient, this is inefficient, it's expensive, it's harmful to human health, harmful to the environment, and it's unproductive.
And that's energy poverty.
So let me give you a couple of examples.
I work in Haiti, where about 80% of the population lives in energy poverty.
The average household spends 10% of its income on kerosene for lighting – that's an order of magnitude greater than what the average US household spends on electricity to light their homes.
The 2008 hurricane season in Haiti caused about one billion dollars in damage.
That's not the case for Haiti. They can't afford this.
So it turns out that those fuels and technologies exist, and this is an example of that.
This is a solar LED lightbulb that we sell for a retail price of about 10 dollars in rural Haiti.
The prescriptions to solve energy poverty seems pretty straightforward: you develop these technologies that have a great return on investment, and people should be snatching them up.
And at night, I would go around sometimes and I would speak with the street vendors and see if they were interested in buying these solar LED lamps.
One woman who I encountered turned down my offer, and she said, “Mon chéri, c'est trop Cher,” which basically means, “My dear, it's too expensive.” But I tried to explain to her, “Look, this is going to save you a lot of money, and it's going to give you even better light than what you're using now with the kerosene.” So I didn't make the sale, but I did learn a really important lesson, which is that technology, products, were not going to end energy poverty.
Specifically, there are two types of access that are going to end energy poverty: there's physical access, and there's financial access.
So, physical access -- what does that mean?
“The last mile” is a phrase that's normally associated with the telecommunications industry.
What we need for ending energy poverty are last-mile retailers that bring these clean energy products to the people.
You can go to the most remote village in Haiti and you will find somebody selling kerosene and charcoal.
So the other type of access: financial.
What they do have is microfinance.
So the prescription to end energy poverty is much more complicated than simply products.
We need to integrate financial access directly into new, innovative distribution models.
So the next time you hear about a technology or product that's going to change the world, be a little bit skeptical.
The inventor Dean Kamen, the guy who invented the Segway, a genius by any standards, once said that his job is easy, inventing things is easy, the hard part is the technology dissemination -- it's getting those technologies and products to the people who need it most.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The world of plankton.
A teaspoon of seawater can contain more than a million living creatures.
Trillions are born here, but only a few make it to adulthood.
But the real powers of this place come from phytoplankton.
Phytoplankton are the base for the largest food web in the world.
Some of these snare their prey with sticky tentacles, while others just take a bite out of their cousins.
But my favorite would have to be the crustacean Phronima.
Best of all, they make the perfect snack for a small fish like me.
Here among the plankton, the food web is so tangled and complex, even scientists don't know who eats whom.
Just a moment ago, my daughter Rebecca texted me for good luck.
1996, when I gave my first TEDTalk, Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row.
I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired magazine.
In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities.
I'm back here on the TED stage again.
My daughter's 20. She's a college student.
And I've just written a new book, but this time it's not one that will get me on the cover of Wired magazine.
Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they've quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things.
This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together.
And some people think that's a good thing.
I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right.
An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully, "Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation."
It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're going to say."
Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding.
And we clean them up with technology.
And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.
I was caught off guard when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question, a profound question.
And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves.
For kids growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development.
So for example, many people share with me this wish, that some day a more advanced version of Siri, the digital assistant on Apple's iPhone, will be more like a best friend, someone who will listen when others won't.
I believe this wish reflects a painful truth that I've learned in the past 15 years.
That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology.
We're developing robots, they call them sociable robots, that are specifically designed to be companions -- to the elderly, to our children, to us.
During my research I worked in nursing homes, and I brought in these sociable robots that were designed to give the elderly the feeling that they were understood.
And one day I came in and a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal.
It seemed to be looking in her eyes.
It seemed to be following the conversation.
It comforted her.
But that woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of a human life.
And we're vulnerable.
So during that moment when that woman was experiencing that pretend empathy, I was thinking, "That robot can't empathize.
We expect more from technology and less from each other.
And I believe it's because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable.
And we are vulnerable.
We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control.
We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone.
And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.
And we're afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance.
We grew up with digital technology and so we see it as all grown up.
But it's not, it's early days.
Create sacred spaces at home -- the kitchen, the dining room -- and reclaim them for conversation.
Do the same thing at work.
Technology is making a bid to redefine human connection -- how we care for each other, how we care for ourselves -- but it's also giving us the opportunity to affirm our values and our direction.
I'm optimistic.
An ad campaign promises that online and with avatars, you can "Finally, love your friends love your body, love your life, online and with avatars."
We're drawn to virtual romance, to computer games that seem like worlds, to the idea that robots, robots, will someday be our true companions.
Thank you.
(Applause)
While our selection process is not as rigorous as NASA, it's nonetheless thorough.
We have already gone far beyond the limits of human endurance.
I should mention that everything you're seeing here, by the way, is artificially illuminated at great effort.
(Video) Now I have to tell you that the techniques being shown here are obsolete and dangerous.
Next year I'll be leading an international team to J2.
Now I remember that term really well for two reasons.
And we've since gone on to develop many generations of gadgets for exploring places like this.
This gadget you see right here was called the digital wall mapper, and it produced the first three-dimensional map anybody has ever done of a cave, and it happened to be underwater in Wakulla Springs.
This is Europa.
For those who have never seen this story, Jim Cameron produced a really wonderful IMAX movie couple of years ago, called "Aliens of the Deep."
There was a brief clip -- (Video) Narrator: A mission to explore under the ice of Europa would be the ultimate robotic challenge.
Europa is so far away that even at the speed of light, it would take more than an hour for the command just to reach the vehicle.
Now we have to get through the ice.
It's basically a nuclear-heated torpedo.
You need an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle.
BS: What Jim didn't know when he released that movie was that six months earlier NASA had funded a team I assembled to develop a prototype for the Europa AUV.
And as the movie says, this is one smart puppy.
It's got 96 sensors, 36 onboard computers, 100,000 lines of behavioral autonomy code, packs more than 10 kilos of TNT in electrical onboard equivalent.
It's been explored to a depth of 292 meters and beyond that nobody knows anything.
This is part of DEPTHX's mission.
How do you take a robot and turn it into a field microbiologist?
If we see something that looks interesting, we pull it into a microscope.
What I'm going to show you next is the first fully autonomous robotic exploration underground that's ever been done.
What then of manned space exploration?
The government recently announced plans to return to the moon by 2024.
And the first thing is everything you do in space you pay by the kilogram.
There is a little-known mission that was launched by the Pentagon, 13 years ago now, called Clementine.
And the most amazing thing that came out of that mission was a strong hydrogen signature at Shackleton crater on the south pole of the moon.
We can go and use inflatable systems for almost everything.
When you're coming back from the moon, you have to deal with orbital mechanics.
There's a myth that you can't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and 20 years.
We're living in one of the most exciting times in history.
We're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space.
To bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed.
We can do it by jump-starting with an industrial Lewis and Clark expedition to Shackleton crater, to mine the moon for resources, and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit.
(Applause) It can be done in seven years with the right backing.
Now we're at a time when boldness is required to move forward.
100 years after Sir Ernest Shackleton wrote these words, I intend to plant an industrial flag on the moon and complete the final piece that will open the space frontier, in our time, for all of us.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Hi.
(Laughter) I did that for two reasons.
(Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, I have devoted the past 25 years of my life to designing books.
Tell your kids.") It all sort of started as a benign mistake, like penicillin. (Laughter) What I really wanted was to be a graphic designer at one of the big design firms in New York City.
Because that is what Knopf is.
But they all have one thing in common: They all need to look like something.
Now, the first day of my graphic design training at Penn State University, the teacher, Lanny Sommese, came into the room and he drew a picture of an apple on the blackboard, and wrote the word "Apple" underneath, and he said, "OK. Lesson one. Listen up."
The first was Katharine Hepburn's memoirs, and the second was a biography of Marlene Dietrich.
Pure content and pure form, side by side.
("What's a Jurassic Park?") Now, what is the story here?
Someone is re-engineering dinosaurs by extracting their DNA from prehistoric amber.
Genius!
(Laughter) Now, luckily for me, I live and work in New York City, where there are plenty of dinosaurs.
(Laughter) So, I went to the Museum of Natural History, and I checked out the bones, and I went to the gift shop, and I bought a book.
And I was particularly taken with this page of the book, and more specifically the lower right-hand corner.
I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea where I was going, but at some point, I stopped -- when to keep going would seem like I was going too far.
And even back then, Michael was on the cutting edge.
(Laughter) I miss Michael.
And sure enough, somebody from MCA Universal calls our legal department to see if they can maybe look into buying the rights to the image, just in case they might want to use it.
(Laughter) But if you think about it, from my head to my hands to his leg.
I want you to look at the author's book and say, "Wow! I need to read that."
And the reason he went is because he had a fear of his body image, and he wanted to explore what was underlying that.
And David especially loved this design because at book signings, which he does a lot of, he could take a magic marker and do this.
(Laughter) Hello!
(Laughter) Augusten Burroughs wrote a memoir called ["Dry"], and it's about his time in rehab.
In his 20s, he was a hotshot ad executive, and as Mad Men has told us, a raging alcoholic.
It is a haiku, if you will, of the story.
All of these solutions derive their origins from the text of the book, but once the book designer has read the text, then he has to be an interpreter and a translator.
Huhh! And now the sultan is in danger.
(Laughter) And the last story I'm going to talk about is quite a story.
A woman named Aomame in 1984 Japan finds herself negotiating down a spiral staircase off an elevated highway. When she gets to the bottom, she can't help but feel that, all of a sudden, she's entered a new reality that's just slightly different from the one that she left, but very similar, but different.
So even if you don't know anything about this book, you are forced to consider a single person straddling two planes of existence.
So even though we love publishing as an art, we very much know it's a business too, and that if we do our jobs right and get a little lucky, that great art can be great business.
So to address this, we developed with a Dr. Brown in Stanford: virtual dissection table.
So with this Anatomage Table, students can experience the dissection without a human cadaver.
As you can see, I use my finger to interact with my digital body.
This shows a lot of internal structures.
And then you can see the inside of the heart.
So let me show you, I'm going to start with the skeletal structure, and I can add a few internal organs.
We can see tendons and muscles.
Wish I could build my muscle this fast.
(Laughter) And this is another way to learn anatomy.
So this is Anatomage Table. Thank you.
(Applause)
If you look really carefully in the upper right-hand corner, you're going to see a thin white line, which is a road that was built in the 1970s.
So soybeans have really exploded, showing how trade and globalization are really responsible for the connections to rainforests and the Amazon -- an incredibly strange and interconnected world that we have today.
The green areas are the areas we use to grow crops, like wheat or soybeans or corn or rice or whatever.
That's 16 million square kilometers' worth of land.
If you put it all together in one place, it'd be the size of South America.
So we're using an enormous amount of land for agriculture, but also we're using a lot of water.
But what's really interesting is, this water's got to come from some place, and it comes from here, the Colorado River in North America.
Those rivers are draining snowmelt from mountains far to the east, where snow melts, it travels down the river through the desert, and forms the great Aral Sea.
Weather patterns have changed.
Nineteen of the unique 20 fish species found only in the Aral Sea are now wiped off the face of the Earth.
This is a picture that Al Gore gave me a few years ago that he took when he was in the Soviet Union a long, long time ago, showing the fishing fleets of the Aral Sea.
We already use about 50 percent of the Earth's fresh water that's sustainable, and agriculture alone is 70 percent of that.
So we use a lot of water, a lot of land for agriculture.
So we have this incredible presence today of agriculture dominating our planet, whether it's 40 percent of our land surface, 70 percent of the water we use, 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions.
We've doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus around the world simply by using fertilizers, causing huge problems of water quality from rivers, lakes, and even oceans, and it's also the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss.
So without a doubt, agriculture is the single most powerful force unleashed on this planet since the end of the ice age. No question.
And they're both happening at the same time.
It's not optional. It's not a luxury. It's an absolute necessity.
We have to provide food and feed and, yeah, fiber and even biofuels to something like seven billion people in the world today, and if anything, we're going to have the demands on agriculture increase into the future. It's not going to go away.
So more people, eating more stuff, and richer stuff, and of course having an energy crisis at the same time, where we have to replace oil with other energy sources that will ultimately have to include some kinds of biofuels and bio-energy sources.
They have a lot of biodiversity, a lot of carbon, things we want to protect.
The green areas here show where corn yields, just showing corn as an example, are already really high, probably the maximum you could find on Earth today for that climate and soil, but the brown areas and yellow areas are places where we're only getting maybe 20 or 30 percent of the yield you should be able to get.
Plants need water and nutrients.
But we have to do it in a way that is sensitive to meeting the food security needs of the future and the environmental security needs of the future.
We need to figure out how to bring both of those together into a new kind of agriculture that brings them all together.
(Music) ("Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota: Driven to Discover") (Music) ("The world population is growing by 75 million people each year.
At this rate, we'll reach 9 billion people by 2040.
We already know climate change is a big problem.
But it's not the only problem.
We need to face 'the other inconvenient truth.' A global crisis in agriculture.
Population growth + meat consumption + dairy consumption + energy costs + bioenergy production = stress on natural resources.
More than 40% of Earth's land has been cleared for agriculture.
That's almost the size of South America.
That's the size of Africa.
We use 2,800 cubic kilometers of water on crops every year.
That's enough to fill 7,305 Empire State Buildings every day.
Fertilizers have more than doubled the phosphorus and nitrogen in the environment.
Surprisingly, agriculture is the biggest contributor to climate change.
It generates 30% of greenhouse gas emissions.
That's more than the emissions from all electricity and industry, or from all the world's planes, trains and automobiles.
As the world grows by several billion more people, We'll need to double, maybe even triple, global food production.
We need to invest in real solutions: incentives for farmers, precision agriculture, new crop varieties, drip irrigation, gray water recycling, better tillage practices, smarter diets.
Yeah, so we face one of the greatest grand challenges in all of human history today: the need to feed nine billion people and do so sustainably and equitably and justly, at the same time protecting our planet for this and future generations.
So thanks very much. (Applause)
As a body architect, I fascinate with the human body and explore how I can transform it.
I worked at Philips Electronics in the far-future design research lab, looking 20 years into the future.
I explored the human skin, and how technology can transform the body.
A maybe that could take the form of a gas or a liquid.
As a body architect, I've created this limitless and boundless platform for me to discover whatever I want.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you!
We have fought.
I just want to get my education. I just want to learn. I just want to grow.
Hi, my name is Frank, and I collect secrets.
It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004.
People began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards.
PostSecret.com is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world.
Secrets can take many forms.
This one obviously was made out of half a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address written on the other side.
Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism, playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now.
"Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead."
(Laughter) This next one takes a little explanation before I share it with you.
And this next postcard was made out of one of those photos.
(Laughter) "Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use.
It's in my pocket right now."
I read some to her, she reads some to me."
And he said, "She read it once and then she read it again."
(Laughter) And when she saw him, he was down on one knee, he had the ring out.
And he emailed me this picture.
Matty was inspired by that secret to start his own website, a website called IFoundYourCamera.
This one's my favorite.
(Laughter) Matty has found this ingenious way to leverage the kindness of strangers.
And it might seem like a simple idea, and it is, but the impact it can have on people's lives can be huge.
Matty shared with me an emotional email he received from the mother in that picture.
"That's me, my husband and son.
The other pictures are of my very ill grandmother.
Thank you for making your site.
This is the last postcard I have to share with you today.
When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones, sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died.
Secrets can take many forms.
(Applause) Thank you.
Have you ever sent yourself a postcard?
Have you ever sent in a secret to PostSecret?
I think in some ways, the reason I started the project, even though I didn't know it at the time, was because I was struggling with my own secrets.
And it was through crowd-sourcing, it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me, that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me.
(Laughter) (Applause)
I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after.
And what is interesting about him in relation to morality is that he lived at a time where religion's influence was waning, and he was sort of wondering, I think, what would happen with society if there was no religion or if there was less religion.
This is me at an early age with a baby chimpanzee.
(Laughter) And I discovered there that the chimpanzees are very power-hungry and wrote a book about it.
And at that time the focus in a lot of animal research was on aggression and competition.
(Laughter) Now in the process of doing all this work on power and dominance and aggression and so on, I discovered that chimpanzees reconcile after fights.
But the principle is exactly the same.
So my whole picture of the animal kingdom, and including humans also, started to change at that time.
One is reciprocity, and associated with it is a sense of justice and a sense of fairness.
This is a very old video from the Yerkes Primate Center, where they trained chimpanzees to cooperate.
What you have here is two young chimpanzees who have a box, and the box is too heavy for one chimp to pull in.
And of course, there's food on the box.
(Laughter) There are two interesting parts about this.
Another problem with elephants is that you cannot make an apparatus that is too heavy for a single elephant.
And so what we did in that case -- we do these studies in Thailand for Josh Plotnik -- is we have an apparatus around which there is a rope, a single rope.
And if you pull on this side of the rope, the rope disappears on the other side.
(Laughter) But it shows the intelligence that the elephants have.
Empathy is my main topic at the moment, of research.
And empathy has two qualities: One is the understanding part of it.
And that's sort of the body channel of emotional empathy, which many animals have.
And it's related to empathy.
And there's a chimpanzee watching, an actual real chimpanzee watching a computer screen on which we play these animations.
(Laughter) So yawn contagion that you're probably all familiar with -- and maybe you're going to start yawning soon now -- is something that we share with other animals.
We also recently published an experiment you may have heard about.
It's on altruism and chimpanzees, where the question is: Do chimpanzees care about the welfare of somebody else?
And we did that originally with Capuchin monkeys.
And I'm going to show you the first experiment that we did.
And so one philosopher even wrote us that it was impossible that monkeys had a sense of fairness because fairness was invented during the French Revolution.
(Applause)
This year, if you think about it, over a billion couples will have sex with one another.
(Laughter) And my idea is this -- all these men and women should be free to decide whether they do or do not want to conceive a child.
Over one billion people use birth control without any hesitation at all.
And as a result, birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda.
Here in Germany, the proportion of people that use contraception is about 66 percent.
In El Salvador, very similar, 66 percent.
But let's compare that to other places, like Uttar Pradesh, one of the largest states in India.
Chad, 2 percent.
Let's just take one country in Africa, Senegal.
But why is it so low?
This is the same story across the continent of Africa today.
And so what we've created as a world has become a life-and-death crisis.
There are 100,000 women [per year] who say they don't want to be pregnant and they die in childbirth -- 100,000 women a year.
There are another 600,000 women [per year] who say they didn't want to be pregnant in the first place, and they give birth to a baby and her baby dies in that first month of life.
What I'm talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children's lives and to give their families the best possible future.
We also need to help small farmers -- farmers who plow small plots of land in Africa -- so that they can grow enough food to feed their children.
My mom's great-uncle was a Jesuit priest.
My great-aunt was a Dominican nun.
And I went to Catholic schools for my entire childhood until I left home to go to university.
And one of the teachings that we girls and my peers questioned was is birth control really a sin?
I had a plan for my future. I wanted to go to college.
I studied really hard in college, and I was proud to be one of the very few female computer science graduates at my university.
I wanted to have a career, so I went on to business school and I became one of the youngest female executives at Microsoft.
I still remember, though, when I left my parents' home to move across the country to start this new job at Microsoft.
They had sacrificed a lot to give me five years of higher education.
I was free to decide what that would be.
Marianne, in the center of the screen in the red sweater, she summed up that entire two-hour conversation in a phrase that I will never forget.
That's universal.
There are many women who lack basic education.
Even many of the women who do have knowledge and do have power don't have access to contraceptives.
For 250 years, parents around the world have been deciding to have smaller families.
The French started bringing down their family size in the mid-1700s.
And over the next 150 years, this trend spread all across Europe.
The surprising thing to me, as I learned this history, was that it spread not along socioeconomic lines but around cultural lines.
It means that parents have the ability to affect the future, not just accept it as it is.
In France, the average family size went down every decade for 150 years in a row until it stabilized.
In Germany, this transition started in the 1880s, and it took just 50 years for family size to stabilize in this country.
And in Asia and Latin America, the transition started in the 1960s, and it happened much faster because of modern contraception.
Now, Indian women were really smart in this situation.
For decades in the United States, African-American women were sterilized without their consent.
The procedure was so common it became known as the Mississippi appendectomy -- a tragic chapter in my country's history.
And as recently as the 1990s, in Peru, women from the Andes region were given anesthesia and they were sterilized without their knowledge.
It's what propels societies forward.
In that same slum in Nairobi, I met a young businesswoman, and she was making backpacks out of her home.
She and her young kids would go to the local jeans factory and collect scraps of denim.
And when I talked with her, she had three children, and I asked her about her family.
In Bangladesh, there's a district called Matlab.
Twenty years later, following those villages, what we learned is that they had a better quality of life than their neighbors.
The women were less likely to die in childbirth.
People talk about the Asian economic miracle of the 1980s -- but it wasn't really a miracle.
One of the leading causes of economic growth across that region was this cultural trend towards smaller families.
When families in sub-Saharan Africa are given the opportunity to make those decisions for themselves, I think it will help spark a virtuous cycle of development in communities across the continent.
We can help poor families build a better future.
And for that to happen, it means that both rich and poor governments alike must make contraception a total priority.
We can do our part, in this room and globally, by talking about the hundreds of millions of families that don't have access to contraception today and what it would do to change their lives if they did have access.
I think if Marianne and the members of her women's group can talk about this openly and have this discussion out amongst themselves and in public, we can, too.
Thank you.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you.
(Applause ends) Thank you for your courage and everything else.
So, Melinda, in the last few years I've heard a lot of smart people say something to the effect of, "We don't need to worry about the population issue anymore.
Melinda Gates: If you look at the statistics across Africa, they are wrong.
And I think we need to look at it, though, from a different lens.
But the choices have to be made at the family level.
But, sex is sacred.
Tell your story about how contraception has either changed your life or somebody's life that you know.
And one of the things that we're going to do is do a large event July 11 in London, with a whole host of countries, a whole host of African nations, to all say we're putting this back on the global health agenda.
I have come to feel incredibly passionate about this issue because of what I've seen in the developing world.
I'm a process engineer, I know all about boilers and incinerators and fabric filters, and cyclones, and things like that.
But I also have Marfan syndrome.
And in 1992, I participated in a genetic study, and found to my horror, as you can see from the slide, that my ascending aorta was not in the normal range, the green line at the bottom.
And as you can see, my aorta dilated progressively, and I got closer and closer to the point where surgery was going to be necessary.
The surgery on offer was pretty gruesome.
Anesthetize you, open your chest, put you on an artificial heart and lung machine, drop your body temperature to about 18 centigrade, stop your heart, cut the aorta out, replace it with a plastic valve and a plastic aorta.
The thought of the surgery was not attractive.
The thought of the warfarin was really quite frightening.
So I said to myself, "I'm an engineer, I'm in R&D, this is just a plumbing problem."
The only real problem with the ascending aorta in people with Marfan syndrome is that it lacks some tensile strength.
If your high-pressure hose pipe or hydraulic line bulges a little, you just wrap some tape around it, it really is that simple.
In the middle, you can see that little structure squeezing out, that's the left ventricle, pushing blood out through the aortic valve.
Up into the ascending aorta.
And it's that part, the ascending aorta, which dilates and ultimately bursts, which of course is fatal.
We started by organizing image acquisition from magnetic resonance and CT imaging machines, from which to make a model of the patient's aorta.
This is a model of my aorta.
It's quite a difficult structure to produce.
We went through an iterative process of producing better and better models.
When we produced that model, we turned it into a solid, plastic model, as you can see, using a rapid prototyping technique, another engineering technique.
So the surgical implantation was actually the easiest part.
So it really is great.
(Laughter) And in fact, if you speak to people who are on long-term warfarin, it is a serious compromise to your quality of life, and even worse, it inevitably foreshortens your life.
This is a list of the core team, and you can see there aren't only two principal technical disciplines there, medicine and engineering, but also, there are various specialists from within those two disciplines.
Raad Mohiaddin, a medical radiologist.
Warren Thornton, who still does all our CAD models for us, had to write a bespoke piece of CAD code to produce this model from this really rather difficult input data set.
Institutional barriers were another serious headache in the project.
I'm sure it's the same in Poland.
So in the end, I went after private investors, just gave up on it.
You can find really novel solutions that have never been looked at before, very quickly and easily.
That's all I want to say, and I've got three minutes left.
If you have any questions, please come up and talk to me later on, it would be a pleasure to speak with you.
I'm going to talk to you today about hopefully converting fear into hope.
Diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart failure, lung failure -- things that we know are debilitating diseases, for which there's relatively little that can be done.
Regenerative medicine is an extraordinarily simple concept that everybody can understand.
And this is the idea that Science Magazine used on their front cover.
The idea is that instead of figuring out how to ameliorate symptoms with devices and drugs and the like -- and I'll come back to that theme a few times -- instead of doing that, we will regenerate lost function of the body by regenerating the function of organs and damaged tissue.
We've come a long way since then.
One of the challenges is that the richer we are, the longer we live.
And you can basically see that the richer a country is, the older the people are within it.
Why is this important?
If the average age in your country is 45 to 55, now the average person is looking at diabetes, early-onset diabetes, heart failure, coronary artery disease -- things that are inherently more difficult to treat, and much more expensive to treat.
And you can see that right around age 45, 40 to 45, there's a sudden spike in the cost of health care.
(Laughter) There are very few things, very few things that you can really do that will change the way that you can treat these kinds of diseases and experience what I would call healthy aging.
Think of it in terms of diabetes, for instance.
Why couldn't we just inject the pancreas with something to regenerate the pancreas early on in the disease, perhaps even before it was symptomatic?
This video, I think, gets across the concept that I'm talking about quite dramatically.
I'll actually show you some more important features about limb regeneration in a moment.
Imagine if instead of facing that, they could actually face the regeneration of that limb.
So to engage in that conversation with the body, we need to speak the body's language.
Clearly, we heal ourselves in a natural process, using cells to do most of the work.
And finally, we may be able to use smart devices that will offload the work of the body and allow it to heal.
And that idea was that the small intestine of a pig, if you threw away all the cells, and if you did that in a way that allowed it to remain biologically active, may contain all of the necessary factors and signals that would signal the body to heal itself.
(Laughter) What I'm about to show you is a diabetic ulcer.
This is the reality of diabetes.
I think a lot of times we hear about diabetics, diabetic ulcers, we just don't connect the ulcer with the eventual treatment, which is amputation, if you can't heal it.
This is a diabetic ulcer. It's tragic.
That material contained only natural signals.
Could you regenerate a limb?
This is a 78 year-old man who's lost the end of his fingertip.
You can see here a little bit of heart muscle beating in a dish.
So this is a bypass operation, just like what Al Gore had, with a difference.
In this case, at the end of the bypass operation, you're going to see the stem cells from the patient that were removed at the beginning of the procedure being injected directly into the heart of the patient.
And I'm standing up here because at one point I'm going to show you just how early this technology is.
You see the cells coming back out.
Basically, if you take an extremely sick patient and you give them a bypass, they get a little bit better.
Here's another example of stem-cell therapy that isn't quite clinical yet, but I think very soon will be.
Out comes the liposuction fluid, and in this case, the stem cells are isolated and turned into neurons.
And I think fairly soon, you will see patients being treated with their own fat-derived, or adipose-derived, stem cells.
I talked before about the use of devices to dramatically change the way we treat disease.
China just launched a national tissue-engineering center.
The first year budget was 250 million US dollars.
Thank you.
(Laughter) (Applause) I had a plan, and I never ever thought it would have anything to do with the banjo.
♫ Shady Grove, my little love ♫ ♫ Shady Grove, my darlin' ♫ ♫ Shady Grove, my little love ♫ ♫ Going back to Harlan ♫ That sound was just so beautiful, the sound of Doc's voice and the rippling groove of the banjo.
So before going to law school in China I bought a banjo, I threw it in my little red truck and I traveled down through Appalachia and I learned a bunch of old American songs, and I ended up in Kentucky at the International Bluegrass Music Association Convention.
And I was sitting in a hallway one night and a couple girls came up to me.
So I picked up my banjo and I nervously played four songs that I actually knew with them.
And after a few months I was writing songs.
And the first song I wrote was in English, and the second one was in Chinese.
(Music) [Chinese] Outside your door the world is waiting.
(Applause) It's really been eight years since that fated night in Kentucky.
And I've played thousands of shows.
And I've collaborated with so many incredible, inspirational musicians around the world.
I see the power of music to connect cultures.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And he wrote this book to explain, among other things, what it was like to be a medical intern at the Boston City Hospital in the pre-penicillin year of 1937.
We can't guarantee that everybody will live a long and healthy life.
But it's pit crews that we need, pit crews for patients.
There's evidence all around us: 40 percent of our coronary artery disease patients in our communities receive incomplete or inappropriate care.
60 percent of our asthma, stroke patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care.
As we've looked at the data about the results that have come as the complexity has increased, we found that the most expensive care is not necessarily the best care.
There's a famous thought experiment that touches exactly on this that said, what if you built a car from the very best car parts?
It's not a system.
It took him three months.
I got interested in this when the World Health Organization came to my team asking if we could help with a project to reduce deaths in surgery.
We looked at skyscraper construction, we looked at the aviation world, and we found that they have technology, they have training, and then they have one other thing: They have checklists.
And what they taught us was that designing a checklist to help people handle complexity actually involves more difficulty than I had understood.
We implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world, deliberately in places from rural Tanzania to the University of Washington in Seattle.
There's a deep resistance because using these tools forces us to confront that we're not a system, forces us to behave with a different set of values.
Just using a checklist requires you to embrace different values from the ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
This is the opposite of what we were built on: independence, self-sufficiency, autonomy.
I met an actual cowboy, by the way.
They communicate electronically constantly, and they have protocols and checklists for how they handle everything -- (Laughter) -- from bad weather to emergencies or inoculations for the cattle.
Even the cowboys are pit crews now.
Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists.
We all need to be pit crews now.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Last January, my company, Fark.com, was sued along with Yahoo, MSN, Reddit, AOL, TechCrunch and others by a company called Gooseberry Natural Resources.
The problem with these patents is that the mechanisms are obscure and the patent system is dysfunctional, and as a result, most of these lawsuits end in settlements.
And because these settlements are under a non-disclosure agreement, no one knows what the terms were.
And as a result, the patent troll can claim that they won the case.
So case closed, right?
One of the major problems with patent law is that, in the case that when you are sued by a patent troll, the burden of proof that you did not infringe on the patent is actually on the defendant, which means you have to prove that you do not infringe on the patent they're suing you on.
You need to know that the average patent troll defense costs two million dollars and takes 18 months when you win.
That is your best case outcome when you get sued by a patent troll.
Six months into the lawsuit, we finally reached the discovery phase.
Secondly, make it clear from the beginning that either you have no money at all or that you would rather spend money with your attorney fighting the troll than actually giving them the money.
Now the reason this works is because patent trolls are paid a percentage of what they're able to recover in settlements.
Now this is a tactic that patent trolls are supposed to use on people to get their way.
Well to sum up, it boils down to one thing: Don't negotiate with terrorists.
(Applause) Patent trolls have done more damage to the United States economy than any domestic or foreign terrorist organization in history every year.
And the problem with that is that there are two very large industry groups that have different outcomes in mind for the patent system.
The hi-tech industry would like stronger protections for producers.
And these goals aren't necessarily diametrically opposed, but they are at odds.
So unfortunately I'm not smart enough to have a solution for the patent troll problem.
(Laughter) Behold, patent infringement via mobile device -- defined as a computer which is not stationary.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This is Shivdutt Yadav, and he's from Uttar Pradesh, India.
This quandary led to the title of the project, which considers in many ways that we are all the living dead and that we in some ways represent ghosts of the past and the future.
So this story is the first of 18 chapters in my new body of work titled "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters."
And for this work, I traveled around the world over a four-year period researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories.
In each chapter, you can see the external forces of governance, power and territory or religion colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance.
On the left are one or more portrait panels in which I systematically order the members of a given bloodline.
In chapter two, I photograph the descendants of Arthur Ruppin.
He was sent in 1907 to Palestine by the Zionist organization to look at areas for Jewish settlement and acquire land for Jewish settlement.
Through my research at the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, I wanted to look at the early paperwork of the establishment of the Jewish state.
In this, I was interested in the consequences of geography and imagining how the world would be different if Israel were in Uganda, which is what these maps demonstrate.
These archives in Jerusalem, they maintain a card index file of the earliest immigrants and applicants for immigration to Palestine, and later Israel, from 1919 to 1965.
Chapter three: Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo treated patients outside of Kisumu, Kenya for AIDS, tuberculosis, infertility, mental illness, evil spirits.
But sometimes when his female patients can't afford his services, their families give the women to Jura in exchange for medical treatment.
As a result of these transactions, Jura has nine wives, 32 children and 63 grandchildren.
Polygamy is widely practiced in Kenya.
Instances of prominent social and political figures in polygamous relationships has led to the perception of polygamy as a symbol of wealth, status and power.
Twenty-four European rabbits were brought to Australia in 1859 by a British settler for sporting purposes, for hunting.
Since the 1950s, Australia has been introducing lethal diseases into the wild rabbit population to control growth.
So over a two-day period, six individuals from this bloodline were killed in the Srebrenica massacre.
And during this massacre, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically executed.
Her name is Zumra.
She is followed by her four children, all of whom were killed in the Srebrenica massacre.
Following those four children is Zumra's younger sister who is then followed by her children who were killed as well.
During the time I was in Bosnia, the mortal remains of Zumra's eldest son were exhumed from a mass grave.
This is video footage used at the Milosevic trial, which from top to bottom shows a Serbian scorpion unit being blessed by an Orthodox priest before rounding up the boys and men and killing them.
It also monitors the Internet and instructs local media on how to handle any potentially controversial issues, including Tibet, ethnic minorities, Human Rights, religion, democracy movements and terrorism.
These are the descendants of Hans Frank who was Hitler's personal legal advisor and governor general of occupied Poland.
Now this bloodline includes numerous empty portraits, highlighting a complex relationship to one's family history.
The reasons for these absences include people who declined participation.
There's also parents who participated who wouldn't let their children participate because they thought they were too young to decide for themselves.
It was released in Poland to create friction between Frank and Hitler, so that Hitler would imagine Frank was trying to usurp his power.
Again, talking about fate, I was interested in the stories and fate of particular works of art.
So this is the Ferraz family and the Novaes family.
This feud has been going on since 1991 in Northeast Brazil in Pernambuco, and it involved the deaths of 20 members of the families and 40 others associated with the feud, including hired hit men, innocent bystanders and friends.
Tensions between these two families date back to 1913 when there was a dispute over local political power.
So after I returned home, I received word that one member of the family had been shot 30 times in the face.
Chapter 17 is an exploration of the absence of a bloodline and the absence of a history.
Children at this Ukrainian orphanage are between the ages of six and 16.
In a 12-month period when I was at the orphanage, only one child had been adopted.
Many have to turn to criminal activity for their survival, and high rates of suicide are recorded.
Children bathe infrequently because the hot water isn't turned on until October.
This is a girls' bedroom.
There are many more chapters in this project.
And there's this relentless persistence of birth and death and an unending collection of stories in between.
And in this, I'm considering, is this actual accumulation leading to some sort of evolution, or are we on repeat over and over again?
Thank you.
(Applause)
People are living longer and societies are getting grayer.
But make no mistake, longer lives can -- and, I believe, will improve quality of life at all ages.
More years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century than all years added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined.
In the blink of an eye, we nearly doubled the length of time that we're living.
And because fertility rates fell across that very same period that life expectancy was going up, that pyramid that has always represented the distribution of age in the population, with many young ones at the bottom winnowed to a tiny peak of older people who make it and survive to old age, is being reshaped into a rectangle.
This increase in life expectancy is the remarkable product of culture -- the crucible that holds science and technology and wide-scale changes in behavior that improve health and well-being.
Now there are problems associated with aging -- diseases, poverty, loss of social status.
Aging brings some rather remarkable improvements -- increased knowledge, expertise -- and emotional aspects of life improve.
That's right, older people are happy.
They're happier than middle-aged people, and younger people, certainly.
And a recent Gallup poll asked participants how much stress and worry and anger they had experienced the previous day.
And stress, worry, anger all decrease with age.
Now social scientists call this the paradox of aging.
We've asked, well, maybe older people are just trying to put a positive spin on an otherwise depressing existence.
Years ago, my colleagues and I embarked on a study where we followed the same group of people over a 10-year period.
Originally, the sample was aged 18 to 94.
"How sad are you right now?"
"How frustrated are you right now?" -- so that we could get a sense of the kinds of emotions and feelings they were having in their day-to-day lives.
Now it's really too simplistic to say that older people are "happy."
And we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly charged emotional conflicts and debates.
Older people can view injustice with compassion, but not despair.
And all things being equal, older people direct their cognitive resources, like attention and memory, to positive information more than negative.
If we show older, middle-aged, younger people images, like the ones you see on the screen, and we later ask them to recall all the images that they can, older people, but not younger people, remember more positive images than negative images.
We've asked older and younger people to view faces in laboratory studies, some frowning, some smiling.
We've said, well, maybe older people report more positive emotions because they're cognitively impaired.
Maybe our neural centers in our brain are degraded such that we're unable to process negative emotions anymore.
And under conditions where it really matters, older people do process the negative information just as well as the positive information.
And if there's a paradox of aging, it's that recognizing that we won't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways.
(Laughter) You know, after all, if it doesn't work out, there's always tomorrow.
By 2015, there will be more people in the United States over the age of 60 than under 15.
The numbers won't determine the outcome.
If we invest in science and technology and find solutions for the real problems that older people face and we capitalize on the very real strengths of older people, then added years of life can dramatically improve quality of life at all ages.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm an archeological geneticist at the Center for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, and I study the origins and evolution of human health and disease by conducting genetic research on the skeletal and mummified remains of ancient humans.
And through this work, I hope to better understand the evolutionary vulnerabilities of our bodies, so that we can improve and better manage our health in the future.
There are different ways to approach evolutionary medicine, and one way is to extract human DNA from ancient bones.
And from these extracts, we can reconstruct the human genome at different points in time and look for changes that might be related to adaptations, risk factors and inherited diseases.
The most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome, but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation, diet, microbes and parasites and our immune response.
But of course, all of the soft tissue has decomposed, and the skeleton itself has limited health information.
Mummies are a great source of information, except that they're really geographically limited and limited in time as well.
Coprolites are fossilized human feces, and they're actually extremely interesting.
(Laughter) So to address this problem, I put together a team of international researchers in Switzerland, Denmark and the U.K.
And we even find it in neanderthals and animals.
And so what my team of researchers, what we wanted to do, is say, can we apply genetic and proteomic technology to go after DNA and proteins, and from this can we get better taxonomic resolution to really understand what's going on?
And what we found is that we can find many commensal and pathogenic bacteria that inhabited the nasal passages and mouth.
We also have found immune proteins related to infection and inflammation and proteins and DNA related to diet.
But what was surprising to us, and also quite exciting, is we also found bacteria that normally inhabit upper respiratory systems.
So it gives us virtual access to the lungs, which is where many important diseases reside.
And we also found bacteria that normally inhabit the gut.
So what started out as an idea, is now being implemented to churn out millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolutionary history of human health and disease, right down to the genetic code of individual pathogens.
And from this information we can learn about how pathogens evolve and also why they continue to make us sick.
And as a final parting thought, on behalf of future archeologists, I would like to ask you to please think twice before you go home and brush your teeth.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
A few months ago the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two teams of astronomers for a discovery that has been hailed as one of the most important astronomical observations ever.
I'm going to tell the story of the multiverse in three parts.
Okay, part one starts back in 1929 when the great astronomer Edwin Hubble realized that the distant galaxies were all rushing away from us, establishing that space itself is stretching, it's expanding.
Now let's fast-forward to the 1990s when those two teams of astronomers I mentioned at the outset were inspired by this reasoning to measure the rate at which the expansion has been slowing.
But in Einstein's theory of gravity, his general theory of relativity, gravity can also push things apart.
This number is small.
So hold the mystery of the dark energy in the back of your mind as I now go on to tell you three key things about string theory.
Well it's an approach to realize Einstein's dream of a unified theory of physics, a single overarching framework that would be able to describe all the forces at work in the universe.
But the theory says that if you could probe smaller, much smaller than we can with existing technology, you'd find something else inside these particles -- a little tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.
But string theory says that, on fantastically small scales, there are additional dimensions crumpled to a tiny size so small that we have not detected them.
So if we knew the shape of the extra dimensions, we should be able to calculate these features, calculate the amount of dark energy.
And this radical proposal has a profound impact on this mystery: the amount of dark energy revealed by the Nobel Prize-winning results.
Because you see, if there are other universes, and if those universes each have, say, a different shape for the extra dimensions, then the physical features of each universe will be different, and in particular, the amount of dark energy in each universe will be different.
So we find ourselves in a universe with the particular amount of dark energy we've measured simply because our universe has conditions hospitable to our form of life.
Those planets which are much closer to a star like the Sun would be so hot that our form of life wouldn't exist.
One key difference, of course, is we know that there are other planets out there, but so far I've only speculated on the possibility that there might be other universes.
Because such a mechanism has been found by cosmologists trying to understand the Big Bang.
And this gap was finally filled by an enhanced version of the Big Bang theory.
It's called inflationary cosmology, which identified a particular kind of fuel that would naturally generate an outward rush of space.
Each of these universes has extra dimensions.
One big remaining question, of course, is, could we ever confirm the existence of other universes?
The inflationary theory already has strong observational support.
Going further, if there are other universes, the theory predicts that every so often those universes can collide.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you, Brian. (BG: My pleasure.) (Applause)
We thought maybe the reason money doesn't make us happy is that we're spending it on the wrong things; in particular, we're always spending it on ourselves.
Compare that to this woman from Uganda: "I was walking and met a longtime friend whose son was sick with malaria.
This isn't $10,000, it's the local currency.
So in almost every country in the world where we have this data, people who give money to charity are happier people than people who don't give money to charity.
These are sales teams in Belgium.
But when you give them 15 euro to spend on their teammates, they do so much better on their teams that you actually get a huge win on investing this kind of money.
The teams that spend money on themselves have the same winning percentages as before.
So if you think money can't buy happiness, you're not spending it right.
DonorsChoose.org is a nonprofit for mainly public school teachers in low-income schools.
So you ask, just how small are atoms?
To understand this, let's ask this question: How many atoms are in a grapefruit?
Well, let's assume that the grapefruit is made up of only nitrogen atoms, which isn't at all true, but there are nitrogen atoms in a grapefruit.
And then how big would the grapefruit have to be?
You mean to say that if I filled the Earth with blueberries, I would have the same number of nitrogen atoms as a grapefruit?
That's right!
So how big is the atom?
Let's now look inside of each atom -- and thus the blueberry, right? -- What do you see there?
In the center of the atom is something called the nucleus, which contains protons and neutrons, and on the outside, you'd see electrons.
So how big is the nucleus?
If atoms are like blueberries in the Earth, how big would the nucleus be?
You might remember the old pictures of the atom from science class, where you saw this tiny dot on the page with an arrow pointing to the nucleus.
So how big is the nucleus?
So imagine a ball that is as tall as a two-story house.
So imagine a ball the size of a football stadium, and right smack dab in the center of the atom, you would find the nucleus, and you could see it!
And it would be the size of a small marble.
It contains protons, neutrons and electrons.
The protons and neutrons live inside of the nucleus, and contain almost all of the mass of the atom.
So if an atom is like a ball the size of a football stadium, with the nucleus in the center, and the electrons on the edge, what is in between the nucleus and the electrons?
Surprisingly, the answer is empty space.
(Wind noise) That's right. Empty!
Between the nucleus and the electrons, there are vast regions of empty space.
Now, technically there are some electromagnetic fields, but in terms of stuff, matter, it is empty.
Remember this vast region of empty space is inside the blueberry, which is inside the Earth, which really are the atoms in the grapefruit.
Since virtually all the mass of an atom is in the nucleus -- now, there is some amount of mass in the electrons, but most of it is in the nucleus -- how dense is the nucleus?
2.5 times 10 to the 16th pounds per cubic feet.
Now, cars on average weigh two tons.
How many cars' nuclei would you have to put into the box to have your one-foot-box have the same density of the nucleus?
The answer is much bigger.
That is almost equal to the number of people in the Earth.
That would be about the density of a nucleus.
The atom is really, really, really small.
Think atoms in a grapefruit like blueberries in the Earth.
The nucleus has a crazy-high density.
I think I'm tired.
It's a great honor to be here talking about cities, talking about the future of cities.
And it's great to be here as the mayor of Rio.
Rio's a beautiful city, a vibrant place, special place.
And I really wanted to share with you a very special moment of my life and the history of the city of Rio.
This is Juan Carlos, king of Spain.
This is going to be the third largest park in Rio by June this year.
The temperature's going to drop two, three degrees centigrade.
When you have 3.5 billion people living in cities -- by 2050, it's going to be 6 billion people.
High-capacity transportation means spending lots and lots of money.
Again, you don't have to dig deep down underground to make a station like that.
This station has the same comfort, the same features as a subway station.
But the point we want to make here tonight is, favelas are not always a problem.
Rio has 6.3 million inhabitants -- More than 20 percent, 1.4 million, live in the favelas.
All these red parts are favelas.
This is a typical view of a favela in Rio.
You see the contrast between the rich and poor.
So I want to make two points here tonight about favelas.
But what you've got to do to get that is you've got to go inside the favelas, bring in the basic services -- mainly education and health -- with high quality.
This was an old building in a favela in Rio -- [unclear favela name] -- that we just transformed into a primary school, with high quality.
We call it a family clinic.
So the first point is bring basic services inside the favelas with high quality.
Rio has the aim, by 2020, to have all its favelas completely urbanized.
It was great. It was lots of fun.
Almost every year we have these landslides, which are terrible.
It's what we call the Operations Center of Rio.
So how's the weather in Rio now?
So I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
Using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain, be faithful, and use condoms -- the ABC campaign -- they decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years.
So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue.
I think it may seem like I'm ignoring the policy stuff, which is really the most important, but I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually cannot develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works.
If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year -- a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress -- your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points.
It's a huge change in a very short period of time.
We see almost no change in sexual behavior.
So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs.
It's also important to think about what the benefit is.
But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future, even if you don't make those investments.
But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places.
And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria.
So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria.
If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up.
Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality.
There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk.
If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own, even if they know everything about the disease, they still may not change their behavior.
So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective.
The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time.
Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003.
In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population.
So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983.
To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease.
Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here -- this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt.
And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people.
But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt.
But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV.
But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past.
So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa.
UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent.
If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million.
It doesn't mean that AIDS isn't a problem. It's a gigantic problem.
And I said in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell you about exports.
So I am going to talk about exports and prices.
And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections.
But openness and inter-connectedness, it comes with a cost when we think about disease. I don't think this should be a surprise.
On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia.
In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people.
Areas with a lot of economic activity -- with a lot of roads, with a lot of urbanization -- those areas have higher prevalence than others.
More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big.
So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections.
So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy.
From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV.
Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality -- this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports -- we can think about what the right kinds of policies are.
Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty -- at least in the short run, that improving exports and improving development -- it's not necessarily the case that that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence.
It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places.
Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign.
But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period.
Coffee is Uganda's major export.
So you can see that both of these series -- the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections -- you can see they're both increasing.
So if you combine the intuition in this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign.
And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself.
I think actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin.
"I don't want to go to school today.
That's great.
And then they started crime mapping.
In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place, the murder rate fell 60 percent.
Or maybe there's some anecdotal evidence.
You could say to a principal, "You're having a problem every Thursday at three o'clock.
What's going on in your school?"
Thank you.
(Applause)
There's the tri-fold. People typically take two or three.
(Applause) Audience: Shake.
Fold.
Let me tell you a secret.
This would be one of the tragically boring board games that you can figure out.
So this one here, this is the 1980 Olympics.
He's a photographer.
And so it was just an incredibly powerful experience.
And the more I learned about Mexican culture -- my partner is Mexican — the more I learned that, you know, for all of us, food is a basic need, and it is obviously with Mexicans, too, but it's much more than that.
And so games, for a change, it changes how we see topics, it changes our perceptions about those people in topics, and it changes ourselves.
The Mall is a symbol of American democracy.
It's a place where pivotal moments in American history have taken place.
And that is that those museums are usually passive, they have passive relationships between the museum as the presenter and the audience, as the receiver of information.
When Richard Koshalek took over as director of the Hirshhorn in 2009, he was determined to take advantage of the fact that this museum was sited at the most unique place: at the seat of power in the U.S.
The question is, is it possible ultimately for art to insert itself into the dialogue of national and world affairs?
There are over 180 embassies in Washington D.C.
There are over 500 think tanks.
There should be a way of harnessing all of that intellectual and global energy into, and somehow through, the museum.
But beyond exhibiting contemporary art, the Hirshhorn will become a public forum, a place of discourse for issues around arts, culture, politics and policy.
Almost four decades later, how will this building expand for a new progressive program?
The Hirshhorn sits among the Mall's monumental institutions.
Most are neoclassical, heavy and opaque, made of stone or concrete.
(Video) So this is the big idea.
It's a giant airbag.
The membrane is translucent.
This is the view from the inside.
This is the warp and weft.
This is a point cloud.
And the very first program will be one of cultural dialogue and diplomacy organized in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations.
Form and content are together here.
Art and politics occupy an ambiguous site outside the museum walls, but inside of the museum's core, blending its air with the democratic air of the Mall.
Thank you.
(Applause)
America's public energy conversation boils down to this question: Would you rather die of A) oil wars, or B) climate change, or C) nuclear holocaust, or D) all of the above?
Could we reinvent fire?
You see, fire made us human; fossil fuels made us modern.
But now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable.
Four-fifths of the world's energy still comes from burning each year four cubic miles of the rotted remains of primeval swamp goo.
They've created our wealth.
They've enriched the lives of billions.
So we need a new fire.
And switching from the old fire to the new fire means changing two big stories about oil and electricity, each of which puts two-fifths of the fossil carbon in the air.
Less than one percent of our electricity is made from oil -- although almost half is made from coal.
Three-fourths of our electricity powers buildings.
And the rest of both runs factories.
So very efficient vehicles, buildings and factories save oil and coal, and also natural gas that can displace both of them.
But today's energy system is not just inefficient, it is also disconnected, aging, dirty and insecure.
We can eliminate our addiction to oil and coal by 2050 and use one-third less natural gas while switching to efficient use and renewable supply.
Oil costs our economy two billion dollars a day, plus another four billion dollars a day in hidden economic and military costs, raising its total cost to over a sixth of GDP.
Our mobility fuel goes three-fifths to automobiles.
And every unit of energy you save at the wheels, by taking out weight or drag, saves seven units in the tank, because you don't have to waste six units getting the energy to the wheels.
Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, epidemic obesity has made our two-ton steel cars gain weight twice as fast as we have.
But today, ultralight, ultrastrong materials, like carbon fiber composites, can make dramatic weight savings snowball and can make cars simpler and cheaper to build.
And just in the first two years the biggest of Europe's five feebate programs has tripled the speed of improving automotive efficiency.
The resulting shift to electric autos is going to be as game-changing as shifting from typewriters to the gains in computers.
Of course, computers and electronics are now America's biggest industry, while typewriter makers have vanished.
America could lead this next automotive revolution.
Currently the leader is Germany.
Last year, Volkswagen announced that by next year they'll be producing this carbon fiber plugin hybrid getting 230 miles a gallon.
Also last year, BMW announced this carbon fiber electric car, they said that its carbon fiber is paid for by needing fewer batteries.
Seven years ago, an even faster and cheaper American manufacturing technology was used to make this little carbon fiber test part, which doubles as a carbon cap.
But such manufacturing techniques can scale to automotive speed and cost with aerospace performance.
The same physics and the same business logic also apply to big vehicles.
In the five years ending with 2010, Walmart saved 60 percent of the fuel per ton-mile in its giant fleet of heavy trucks through better logistics and design.
But just the technological savings in heavy trucks can get to two-thirds.
We can use some smart IT to enhance transit and enable car sharing and ride sharing.
Those 125 to 240 mile-per-gallon-equivalent autos can use any mixture of hydrogen fuel cells, electricity and advanced biofuels.
The trucks could even use natural gas.
Our team speeds up these kinds of oil savings by what we call "institutional acupuncture."
In fact, three years ago mainstream analysts were starting to see peak oil, not in supply, but in demand.
And Deutsche Bank even said world oil use could peak around 2016.
In other words, oil is getting uncompetitive even at low prices before it becomes unavailable even at high prices.
But the electrified vehicles don't need to burden the electricity grid.
Rather, when smart autos exchange electricity and information through smart buildings with smart grids, they're adding to the grid valuable flexibility and storage that help the grid integrate varying solar and wind power.
Over the next 40 years, buildings, which use three-quarters of the electricity, can triple or quadruple their energy productivity, saving 1.4 trillion dollars, net present value, with a 33 percent internal rate of return or in English, the savings are worth four times what they cost.
And industry can accelerate too, doubling its energy productivity with a 21 percent internal rate of return.
The key is a disruptive innovation that we call integrative design that often makes very big energy savings cost less than small or no savings.
Integrative design can also increase energy savings in industry.
Dow's billion-dollar efficiency investment has already returned nine billion dollars.
For example, three-fifths of the world's electricity runs motors.
Half of that runs pumps and fans.
For example, pumps, the biggest use of motors, move liquid through pipes.
So what do such savings mean for the electricity that is three-fifths used in motors?
Typically our retrofit designs save about 30 to 60 percent of the energy and pay back in a few years, while the new facility designs save 40 to 90-odd percent with generally lower capital cost.
Now needing less electricity would ease and speed the shift to new sources of electricity, chiefly renewables.
China leads their explosive growth and their plummeting cost.
And Germany now has more solar workers than America has steel workers.
For each of the past four years half of the world's new generating capacity has been renewable, mainly lately in developing countries.
That is how, for example, four German states in 2010 were 43 to 52 percent wind powered.
Portugal was 45 percent renewable powered, Denmark 36.
But those four futures at the same cost differ profoundly in their risks, around national security, fuel, water, finance, technology, climate and health.
So our energy future is not fate, but choice, and that choice is very flexible.
In 1976, for example, government and industry insisted that the amount of energy needed to make a dollar of GDP could never go down.
Now combine the electricity and oil revolutions, both driven by modern efficiency, and you get the really big story: reinventing fire, where business enabled and sped by smart policies in mindful markets can lead the United States completely off oil and coal by 2050, saving 5 trillion dollars, growing the economy 2.6-fold, strengthening out national security, oh, and by the way, by getting rid of the oil and coal, reducing the fossil carbon emissions by 82 to 86 percent.
We humans are inventing a new fire, not dug from below, but flowing from above; not scarce, but bountiful; not local, but everywhere; not transient, but permanent; not costly, but free.
Each of you owns a piece of that $5 trillion prize.
So with the conversation just begun at ReinventingFire.com, let me invite you each to engage with us and with each other, with everyone around you, to help make the world richer, fairer, cooler and safer by together reinventing fire.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Instead of expanding circles, they're expanding hexagons.
(Laughter) Four hundred aluminum cans.
Tule is a reed that's native to California, and the best thing about working with it is that it smells just delicious.
The mechanism that drives it has nine motors and about 3,000 pulleys.
This is very early rehearsal footage, but the finished work's on tour and is actually coming through L.A. in a couple weeks.
Summer, fall, winter, spring, noon, dusk, dark, dawn.
Thank you very much. Thanks.
RM: Well some of them definitely have a direct observation -- like literally two raindrops falling, and just watching that pattern is so stunning.
I like working with my hands.
And I waited, and the next day I liked it a bit better, the next day I liked it a bit better, and now I really love it.
JC: The relationship evolves over time.
I don't know why, but I'm continually amazed to think that two and a half billion of us around the world are connected to each other through the Internet and that at any point in time more than 30 percent of the world's population can go online to learn, to create and to share.
A recent study showed that the young generation alone is spending over eight hours a day online.
And increasingly, the price we're being asked to pay for all of this connectedness is our privacy.
Today, what many of us would love to believe is that the Internet is a private place; it's not.
And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen, we are like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods.
It's a phenomenon on the Internet today called behavioral tracking, and it is very big business.
The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion and it's an experimental browser add-on that you can install in your Firefox browser that helps you see where your Web data is going and who's tracking you.
And this is my profile.
Now like most of you, I actually start my day going online and checking email.
Our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table, and I asked her, "Is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school?"
I go to work, I check email, I log onto a few more social sites, I blog, I check more news reports, I share some of those news reports, I go look at some videos, pretty typical day -- in this case, actually fairly pedantic -- and at the end of the day, as my day winds down, look at my profile.
All in all, there's over 150 sites that are now tracking my personal information, most all of them without my consent.
The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today.
Our voices matter and our actions matter even more.
You can download it, install it in Firefox, to see who is tracking you across the Web and following you through the digital woods.
Because the memory of the Internet is forever.
We are being watched.
It's now time for us to watch the watchers.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) A little bit of it, I think, is the nicotine, but there's something much bigger than that; which is, ever since, in the UK, they banned smoking in public places, I've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again.
It's really, really tiring.
Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window.
Now the problem is, when you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot.
(Laughter) If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher.
And reality isn't a particularly good guide to human happiness.
Why, for example, are pensioners much happier than the young unemployed?
Both of them, after all, are in exactly the same stage of life.
But pensioners are reportedly very, very happy, whereas the unemployed are extraordinarily unhappy and depressed.
The reason, I think, is that the pensioners believe they've chosen to be pensioners, whereas the young unemployed feel it's been thrust upon them.
In England, the upper-middle classes have actually solved this problem perfectly, because they've re-branded unemployment.
If you're an upper-middle-class English person, you call unemployment "a year off."
(Laughter) And that's because having a son who's unemployed in Manchester is really quite embarrassing.
There's an experiment I think Daniel Pink refers to, where you put two dogs in a box and the box has an electric floor.
Every now and then, an electric shock is applied to the floor, which pains the dogs.
The only difference is one of the dogs has a small button in its half of the box.
The other dog doesn't have the button.
The second dog lapses into complete depression.
The circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives.
We ask the question -- the whole debate in the Western world is about the level of taxation.
I'm probably in the wrong country to talk about willingness to pay tax.
One of my great friends, a professor called Nick Chater, who's the Professor of Decision Sciences in London, believes we should spend far less time looking into humanity's hidden depths, and spend much more time exploring the hidden shallows.
But what we don't have is a really good model of human psychology -- at least pre-Kahneman, perhaps, we didn't have a really good model of human psychology to put alongside models of engineering, of neoclassical economics.
And what that means is that, in looking at solutions, we've probably given too much priority to what I call technical engineering solutions, Newtonian solutions, and not nearly enough to the psychological ones.
You know my example of the Eurostar: six million pounds spent to reduce the journey time between Paris and London by about 40 minutes.
(Laughter) Why were we not given the chance to solve that problem psychologically?
I think it's because there's an imbalance, an asymmetry in the way we treat creative, emotionally driven psychological ideas versus the way we treat rational, numerical, spreadsheet-driven ideas.
An example of a great psychological idea: the single best improvement in passenger satisfaction on the London Underground, per pound spent, came when they didn't add any extra trains, nor change the frequency of the trains; they put dot matrix display boards on the platforms -- because the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality, its duration, but on the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait.
Waiting seven minutes for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting four minutes, knuckle biting, going, "When's this train going to damn well arrive?"
It's proven to reduce the accident rate in experiments.
Why?
This is all I'm asking for, really, in human decision making, is the consideration of these three things.
I'm merely saying that when you solve problems, you should look at all three of these equally, and you should seek as far as possible to find solutions which sit in the sweet spot in the middle.
Ayelet Fishbach has written a paper about this.
Google is as much a psychological success as it is a technological one.
Don't give them 24 white pills; give them 18 white pills and six blue ones and tell them to take the white pills first, and then take the blue ones.
Time means more to some people than others.
If you're on the way to visit your mother-in-law, you'd probably prefer -- (Laughter) you'd probably prefer to stay on the left.
So where economists make the fundamental mistake is they think that money is money.
And I think understanding that could revolutionize tax policy.
It could revolutionize the public services.
What was interesting about the Austrian School is they actually grew up alongside Freud.
I think they're right.
So if you're a shepherd or a quarryman or a farmer, you created true value.
Now, Von Mises said that modern economists make exactly the same mistake with regard to advertising and marketing.
And the idea that one of them should have priority over the other is fundamentally wrong.
Try this quick thought experiment: imagine a restaurant that serves Michelin-starred food, but where the restaurant smells of sewage and there's human feces on the floor.
That's like trying to improve the food in a restaurant that stinks.
What you need to do is, first of all, tell people that 98 percent of first-class mail gets there the next day.
But I'm British; that's the way we like it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Four years ago today, exactly, actually, I started a fashion blog called Style Rookie.
Last September of 2011, I started an online magazine for teenage girls called Rookiemag.com.
So this is a scientific diagram of my brain — (Laughter) — around the time when I was, when I started watching those TV shows.
I got about 3,000 emails.
Thank you. (Applause)
I am an immigrant from Uganda living in the United States while waiting for my asylum application to go through.
Migrants do not enjoy much freedom of movement in our world today.
But this also signifies what often is missing in the global debate over refugees, migrants and immigrants, voices of the disenfranchised.
Citizens of many host countries, even those that previously welcomed newcomers, are uneasy about the rising numbers of individuals coming into their countries.
Migrants can share perspectives, if only politicians would be willing to listen.
I fled Uganda to come to the United States in the hope of sustaining a voice for my brothers and sisters who experience a more serious plight as migrants.
My father told me he was not happy about me writing a book that risked deportation and unemployment.
So long as gold mines, oilfields and large farms in Africa continue to be owned by foreign investors and those vital resources are shipped to the West, the stream of African migrants will flow continuously.
Before border controls can be tightened and new visa restrictions imposed, countries that have long received migrants should engage in a more open discussion.
That is the only practical start for reconciling, finally, a legacy of exploitation, slavery, colonialism and imperialism, so that together, we can move forward in creating a more just global economy in the 21st century -- one that benefits all.
So I really consider myself a storyteller.
But I don't really tell stories in the usual way, in the sense that I don't usually tell my own stories.
Instead, I'm really interested in building tools that allow large numbers of other people to tell their stories, people all around the world.
I do this because I think that people actually have a lot in common.
You know, as I look around the world I see a lot of gaps, and I think we all see a lot of gaps.
And we define ourselves by our gaps.
There's language gaps, there's ethnicity and racial gaps, there's age gaps, there's gender gaps, there's sexuality gaps, there's wealth and money gaps, there's education gaps, there's also religious gaps.
You know, we have all these gaps and I think we like our gaps because they make us feel like we identify with something, some smaller community.
But I think that actually, despite our gaps, we really have a lot in common.
And I think one thing we have in common is a very deep need to express ourselves.
(Laughter) This, also, is nothing new.
Since the dawn of human history, we've tried to rectify this imbalance by making art, writing poems, singing songs, scripting editorials and sending them in to a newspaper, gossiping with friends. This is nothing new.
What's new is that in the last several years a lot of these very traditional physical human activities, these acts of self-expression, have been moving onto the Internet.
And as that's happened, people have been leaving behind footprints, footprints that tell stories of their moments of self-expression.
One project that explores these ideas, which was made about a year ago, is a piece called We Feel Fine.
Then, knowing the geographical location and the time, we can also then figure out the weather when that person wrote the sentence.
All of this information is saved in a database that collects about 20,000 feelings a day.
And I'll show you a glimpse of how this information is then visualized. So this is We Feel Fine.
The color of each particle corresponds to the type of feeling inside -- so that happy, positive feelings are brightly colored.
The diameter of each dot represents the length of the sentence inside, so that the large dots contain large sentences, and the small dots contain small sentences.
You can see some other ones are swarming around the bottom left corner of the screen around six words. Those six words represent the six movements of We Feel Fine. We're currently seeing Madness.
"I feel a bit better now."
"I feel so free; I feel so good."
This grid is then said to represent the picture of the world's feelings in the last few hours, if you will.
We see, "I feel like I have been at a computer all day."
Mobs provides different statistical breakdowns of the population of the world's feelings in the last few hours.
And we see that women are slightly more prolific talking about their emotions in the last few hours than men.
Here are gender, age, weather, location.
There's also a search capability, if you're interested in finding out about a certain population.
"I feel very lonely."
So as you can see, We Feel Fine uses a technique that I call "passive observation."
And because of that, you end up getting very honest, candid, sincere responses that are often very moving.
And this is a technique that I usually prefer in my work because people don't know they're being interviewed.
The ten themes radiate out and orbit the time capsule.
There are two modes to the time capsule.
And we also projected the contents of the time capsule as binary code using a 35-watt laser into outer space.
You can see the orange line leaving the desert floor at about a 45 degree angle there. This was amazing because the first night I looked at all this information and really started seeing the gaps that I talked about earlier -- the differences in age, gender and wealth and so on.
You know: weddings, births, funerals, the first car, the first kiss, the first camel or horse -- depending on the culture.
And it was really moving. And this picture here was taken the final night from a distant cliff about two miles away, where the contents of the capsule were being beamed into space.
And it started to make me think a lot about the night sky, and how humans have always used the night sky to project their great stories.
You know, as a child in Vermont, on a farm where I grew up, I would often look up into the dark sky and see the three star belt of Orion, the Hunter.
You know, Orion facing the roaring bull.
Perseus flying to the rescue of Andromeda.
And it caused me to wonder specifically, if we could make new constellations today, what would those look like? What would those be?
It's called Universe: Revealing Our Modern Mythology.
Now, these aren't just little points of light, little pixels.
And you might notice that as the cursor begins to touch some of these stars, that shapes begin to emerge.
We see here there's a little man walking along, or maybe a woman.
And those are the constellations of today.
The data from this is global news coverage from thousands of news sources around the world.
It's using the API of a really great company that I work with in New York, actually, called Daylife.
President Ford -- this is Gerald Ford's funeral.
We can actually click anything in Universe and have it become the center of the universe, and everything else will enter its orbit.
And the things that relate to Ford enter its orbit and swirl around it.
We can click on this and we see this iconic image of Betty Ford kissing her husband's coffin.
So, if we want to, let's check out what Bill Clinton's universe looks like.
We can pull out his secrets, and we see that it has a lot to do with candidates, Hillary, presidential, Barack Obama.
You can see that this is an important story; there are a lot of things in its orbit. If we open this up, we get different perspectives on this story.
You can click any of those to go out and read the article at the source. This one's from Al Jazeera.
We can also see the superstars. These would be the people that are kind of the looming heroes and heroines in the universe of Bill Clinton. So there's Bill Clinton, Hillary, Iraq, George Bush, Barack Obama, Scooter Libby -- these are kind of the people of Bill Clinton.
So if I put in climate change for all of 2006, we'll see what that universe looks like.
And there are also quotes that you can see, if you're interested in reading about quotes on climate change.
The superstars of climate change in 2006: United States, Britain, China. You know, these are the towering countries that kind of define this concept.
This will be online in several days, probably next Tuesday.
As you search for the things that are important to you in your world, and then see what the constellations of those might look like.
(Applause)
One day in New York, I was on the street and I saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants.
But the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena is complex and emotional and not totally understood.
In 200 B.C., a man named Sekulos wrote this song for his departed wife and inscribed it on her gravestone in the notational system of the Greeks.
Bach was like a great improviser with a mind of a chess master.
But every musician strikes a different balance between faith and reason, instinct and intelligence.
And by the 1400s, music was being written that tried to mirror God's mind as could be seen in the design of the night sky.
But what's the actual difference between these two chords?
So you can see in a system like this there was enormous subtle potential of representing human emotions.
What happens when the music stops?
To me this is the intimate, personal side of music.
And technology democratized music by making everything available.
I was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home, and I spied a very shaky old man making his way across the room on a walker.
The symphony: Isaac Stern, the concerto, I heard it."
And of course, the New World Symphony led to the YouTube Symphony and projects on the internet that reach out to musicians and audiences all over the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I love my food.
And I love information.
I was born in Calcutta -- a family where my father and his father before him were journalists, and they wrote magazines in the English language.
That was the family business.
And as a result of that, I grew up with books everywhere around the house.
By the time I was 18, I had a deep passion for books.
I was a South Indian brought up in Bengal.
Everything was okay, until I got to about the age of 26, and I went to a movie called "Short Circuit."
And apparently it's being remade right now and it's going to be coming out next year.
And I suddenly realized that for a robot both information as well as food were the same thing.
And two of the most expensive tissues in our human body are nervous tissue and digestive tissue.
And by this time I was hooked.
Fundamentally it's a consumption issue.
(Applause)
And my passion was inspired at the age of seven, when my parents first took me to Morocco, at the edge of the Sahara Desert.
What an amazing experience.
(Video) David Attenborough: Throughout Alaska and British Columbia, thousands of bear families are emerging from their winter sleep.
These mountains are dangerous places, but ultimately the fate of these bear families, and indeed that of all bears around the North Pacific, depends on the salmon.
I always get goosebumps every time I see it.
That was filmed from a helicopter using a gyro-stabilized camera.
And it's a wonderful bit of gear, because it's like having a flying tripod, crane and dolly all rolled into one.
But technology alone isn't enough.
For a filmmaker, new technology is an amazing tool, but the other thing that really, really excites me is when new species are discovered.
In 2005, a new species of bat was discovered in the cloud forests of Ecuador.
Necessity is the mother of evolution.
(Music) This two-and-a-half-inch bat has a three-and-a-half-inch tongue, the longest relative to body length of any mammal in the world.
Now people often ask me, "Where's your favorite place on the planet?"
Have a look.
Some of the world's astronomers have telescopes nearby.
(Applause)
Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home.
The light is shining down on Cookie Monster.
You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth.
It's called the United States Memory Championship.
And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize that you were a savant?"
And Ed was like, "I'm not a savant.
We've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques, techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches, that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books."
Do you know Britney Spears?"
"Because I really want to teach Britney Spears how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards on U.S. national television.
I ended up spending the better part of the next year not only training my memory, but also investigating it, trying to understand how it works, why it sometimes doesn't work, and what its potential might be.
And I met a host of really interesting people.
And he was this incredibly tragic figure, but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are.
We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, which was scintillating.
And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff.
Over the last few millenia, we've invented a series of technologies -- from the alphabet, to the scroll, to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone -- that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.
The answer was no.
He used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits in half an hour.
It came to be known as the memory palace.
And he takes the relatives by the hand, and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage.
What Simonides figured out at that moment, is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know, which is that, as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers, and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.
This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years to the earliest Latin memory treatises.
Let's say that you've been invited to TED center stage to give a speech, and you want to do it from memory, and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it, if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago.
In fact, the phrase "topic sentence" -- that comes from the Greek word "topos," which means "place."
And I went to a few more of these memory contests, and I had this notion that I might write something longer about this subculture of competitive memorizers.
I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier, and I had this notion that I might enter it, sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism.
(Applause) Now, it is nice to be able to memorize speeches and phone numbers and shopping lists, but it's actually kind of beside the point.
And you don't have to be building memory palaces or memorizing packs of playing cards to benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works.
But there actually are no shortcuts.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Back in the 1980s, actually, I gave my first talk at TED, and I brought some of the very, very first public demonstrations of virtual reality ever to the TED stage.
And at that time, we knew that we were facing a knife-edge future where the technology we needed, the technology we loved, could also be our undoing.
So the idealism of digital culture back then was all about starting with that recognition of the possible darkness and trying to imagine a way to transcend it with beauty and creativity.
I always used to end my early TED Talks with a rather horrifying line, which is, "We have a challenge.
It was a beautiful vision, and it's one I still believe in, and yet, haunting that beautiful vision was the dark side of how it could also turn out.
And such a society would be insane, could not survive, could not face its problems.
So -- (Applause) I believe that we made a very particular mistake, and it happened early on, and by understanding the mistake we made, we can undo it.
And so forth.
Now in the beginning, it was cute, like with the very earliest Google.
But there's thing called Moore's law that makes the computers more and more efficient and cheaper.
Pavlov, one of the early behaviorists, demonstrated the famous principle.
So on social networks, social punishment and social reward function as the punishment and reward.
But here's the thing: traditionally, in the academic study of the methods of behaviorism, there have been comparisons of positive and negative stimuli.
So what I mean by that is it's much easier to lose trust than to build trust.
It takes a long time to build love.
And so this is the dilemma we've gotten ourselves into.
Around this same time that companies like Google and Facebook were formulating their free idea, a lot of cyber culture also believed that in the future, televisions and movies would be created in the same way, kind of like the Wikipedia.
But then, companies like Netflix, Amazon, HBO, said, "Actually, you know, subscribe. We'll give you give you great TV."
What would that be like?
I dream of it. I believe it's possible.
And I'm certain that the companies, the Googles and the Facebooks, would actually do better in this world.
I don't believe we need to punish Silicon Valley.
They're in the same trap as their users, and you can't run a big corporation that way.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
And that's where it's actually also interesting to think about, where does 404 come from?
It's from a family of errors actually -- a whole set of relationship errors, which, when I started digging into them, it looks almost like a checklist for a sex therapist or a couples counselor.
(Laughter) Yes.
This is a global experience.
(Video) Guy: Joey!
Because finally there was a page that actually felt like what it felt like to hit a 404.
(Laughter) (Applause) So this turned into a contest.
Dailypath that offers inspiration put inspiration on their 404 page.
This is an error page, but what if this error page was also an opportunity?
Thank you.
(Applause)
So my wife smells nicer than I do, or I just stink more than she does.
And during my PhD, I wanted to know exactly what chemicals from our skin African malaria mosquitoes use to track us down at night.
And therefore we set up various experiments.
Because half the world's population runs the risk of contracting a killer disease like malaria through a simple mosquito bite.
On the left here you see the bites by the Dutch malaria mosquito on this person.
We tried, with a tiny little piece of Limburger cheese, which smells badly after feet, to attract African malaria mosquitoes.
(Applause) That's the cheese, just to show you.
And I will show you how we can use dogs in the fight against malaria.
It's to kill them when they're still in the water as larvae.
Until we realized that just like us -- we have a unique smell -- mosquito larvae also have a very unique smell.
And so we set up another crazy experiment, because we collected the smell of these larvae, put it on pieces of cloth, and then did something very remarkable.
Now, let me show you how this works.
Here in this box, I have a cage with several hundred hungry female mosquitoes ...
This was the first title I thought of for this talk, "Beethoven as Bill Gates."
We have a class of experts, professionals, who play very expensive instruments, for the most part, things like the organ, complicated instruments, and if you wanted to hear music in the 18th century, it was live.
The piano was a new technology that really starts to happen in the 18th century, and then it becomes something that you could mass-produce cheaply.
Music is a little more complicated.
It took a little longer to figure out: How do I create a cheap way to distribute sheet music?
But if you wanted to hear Mozart or Bach, you had to go to Germany and go hear them.
Beethoven is an entrepreneur, not unlike our other friend, Bill Gates.
He's an entrepreneur that figures out, "Hey, I don't have to actually go to London.
And it can be printed and mass-distributed, and I will be famous everywhere, and everybody else will play my music."
It creates a new class of musicians, of composers and performers -- there's a division of labor.
He has no way to expand his business.
By the turn of the century, it's an interesting time for music delivery; 100 years later, we get the record player, the gramophone, the player piano.
Now you could buy Rachmaninoff sheet music, but if you wanted to hear Rachmaninoff, you had to actually go to the concert hall.
Now you can buy a record of Rachmaninoff, or you can buy a player piano and a roll that fits into another kind of recording device.
And later, the radio.
All of a sudden, the competition has gone global, just like it does a hundred years later, with the iPod, the internet and digital files and Garage Band, that do all of these things all over again.
(Laughter) That's a piece of hardware.
So both Beethoven and Bill Gates are software designers.
When Beethoven started writing music, he had this instrument up on top, with five octaves.
So in 1803, a French piano maker -- alright, think about how smart this is: If you're a piano maker, into whose hands do you want to get that piano?
(Laughter) So in 1803, Érard sends Beethoven a new piano.
So what do you do?
You start playing that new Beethoven piano sonata, and what happens?
And what's interesting about this is that Beethoven was actually smarter than Bill Gates.
So when Beethoven gets his new Érard piano, he's writing his third piano concerto, he goes and he gives a concert, and he and uses all those extra notes.
So he plays the concerto on the piano. It's great.
Beethoven was a very clever entrepreneur.
So what are the effects of these disruptions in music technology?
In the 20th century, it becomes a record, something that you then take home.
Second, there's a division of labor.
It changes expectations of quality.
Once everybody's heard Count Basie and Benny Goodman, maybe you're not quite so happy with your local band as much anymore.
You have now a global market.
Now you have headphones that do the same thing.
It's a new personalized experience each time.
I can actually personalize the experience now.
The number of titles on sale in those music stores goes up.
But there's also less choice, because in a global pyramid, you can't always tell what you want.
Do you think Chopin would have been comforted by the thought, "Hey, 20 percent of the people who buy fake Chopin are more likely to go buy real Chopin"?
And the model for these disruptions is the same as we see in other kinds of businesses.
It changes the nature of the product.
And so schools have got to think about what we're selling.
But I think that the face-to-face interaction is not going to go away.
(Applause)
I'm going to talk to you about optimism -- or more precisely, the optimism bias.
It's a cognitive illusion that we've been studying in my lab for the past few years, and 80 percent of us have it.
So we underestimate our likelihood of suffering from cancer, being in a car accident.
In short, we're more optimistic than realistic, but we are oblivious to the fact.
Take marriage for example.
In the Western world, divorce rates are about 40 percent.
But when you ask newlyweds about their own likelihood of divorce, they estimate it at zero percent.
And even divorce lawyers, who should really know better, hugely underestimate their own likelihood of divorce.
In the words of Samuel Johnson, "Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience."
(Laughter) So if we're married, we're more likely to have kids.
This, by the way, is my two-year-old nephew, Guy.
(Laughter) And I'm not alone.
And this is a really important point, because we're optimistic about ourselves, we're optimistic about our kids, we're optimistic about our families, but we're not so optimistic about the guy sitting next to us, and we're somewhat pessimistic about the fate of our fellow citizens and the fate of our country.
So I'm going to give you a list of abilities and characteristics, and I want you to think for each of these abilities where you stand relative to the rest of the population.
How attractive are you?
How honest are you?
The optimism bias has been observed in many different countries -- in Western cultures, in non-Western cultures, in females and males, in kids, in the elderly.
Some people say the secret to happiness is low expectations.
So it's a very good theory, but it turns out to be wrong for three reasons.
The psychologists Margaret Marshall and John Brown studied students with high and low expectations.
"I'm a genius, therefore I got an A, therefore I'll get an A again and again in the future."
But if you get the kiss in three days, well that's three days of jittery anticipation, the thrill of the wait.
We know that, because when you ask people about their ultimate favorite day of the week, surprise, surprise, Saturday comes in at first, then Friday, then Sunday.
People prefer Friday because Friday brings with it the anticipation of the weekend ahead, all the plans that you have.
So optimists are people who expect more kisses in their future, more strolls in the park.
In fact, without the optimism bias, we would all be slightly depressed.
They're actually more realistic than healthy individuals.
But individuals with severe depression, they have a pessimistic bias.
So optimism changes subjective reality.
But it also changes objective reality.
It acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Controlled experiments have shown that optimism is not only related to success, it leads to success.
Optimism leads to success in academia and sports and politics.
And maybe the most surprising benefit of optimism is health.
So all in all, optimism has lots of benefits.
We asked people to come into our lab in order to try and figure out what was going on.
So cancer, for example, is about 30 percent.
One of these regions is called the left inferior frontal gyrus.
So if someone said, "My likelihood of suffering from cancer is 50 percent," and we said, "Hey, good news.
On the other side of the brain, the right inferior frontal gyrus was responding to bad news.
Could we alter people's optimism bias by interfering with the brain activity in these regions?
This is my collaborator Ryota Kanai.
After that everything goes back to normal, I assure you.
(Laughter) So let's see what happens.
First of all, I'm going to show you the average amount of bias that we see.
But there are, of course, pitfalls, and it would be really foolish of us to ignore them.
Take for example this email I recieved from a firefighter here in California.
So unrealistic optimism can lead to risky behavior, to financial collapse, to faulty planning.
The British government, for example, has acknowledged that the optimism bias can make individuals more likely to underestimate the costs and durations of projects.
So they have adjusted the 2012 Olympic budget for the optimism bias.
So what we would really like to do, is we would like to protect ourselves from the dangers of optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful, benefiting from the many fruits of optimism.
We're not born with an innate understanding of our biases.
But the good news is that becoming aware of the optimism bias does not shatter the illusion.
It's like visual illusions, in which understanding them does not make them go away.
Because to make any kind of progress, we need to be able to imagine a different reality, and then we need to believe that that reality is possible.
But if you are an extreme optimistic penguin who just jumps down blindly hoping for the best, you might find yourself in a bit of a mess when you hit the ground.
But if you're an optimistic penguin who believes they can fly, but then adjusts a parachute to your back just in case things don't work out exactly as you had planned, you will soar like an eagle, even if you're just a penguin.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So it turns out that mathematics is a very powerful language.
It has generated considerable insight in physics, in biology and economics, but not that much in the humanities and in history.
So my collaborator Erez and I were considering the following fact: that two kings separated by centuries will speak a very different language.
That's a powerful historical force.
So the king of England, Alfred the Great, will use a vocabulary and grammar that is quite different from the king of hip hop, Jay-Z.
So you just add "ed" to a verb at the end to signify the past.
But some verbs are irregular.
So here Steve Pinker and I were considering the magnitude of wars during the last two centuries.
For instance, committing 10,000 soldiers to the next battle sounds like a lot.
So there's about 130 million books that have been written since the dawn of time.
So I think in the next decade, the sciences and the humanities will come closer together to be able to answer deep questions about mankind.
It will be able to reveal new trends in our history, sometimes to explain them, and maybe even in the future to predict what's going to happen.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I'd like you to imagine, just for a moment, that your eyelashes grew inwards instead of outwards, so that every time you blinked, they would scrape the front of your eyeballs, damaging the corneas, so that slowly and painfully, you went blind.
Now, this little boy here, Pamelo, from Zambia, he has trachoma.
And if we don't do anything, he's going to go blind.
Trachoma is a curious disease.
It's a bacterial infection that's passed from person to person and by flies.
It particularly affects women, because they have the contact with children.
So what you'll often see in places like Ethiopia are girls who have tweezers like this around their necks, and they use them to pluck out their eyelashes.
Now, it's a very old disease.
One is crying, and you can see there are tweezers next to it.
So we sent this picture to the British Museum, and they confirmed that, yes, this is trachoma.
So, thousands of years ago, the ancient Nubians were painting pictures of trachoma on the walls of their tomb.
And the tragedy is that disease is still rampant in that area today.
I have to tell you, that's not always the case in my experience in the NGO world.
The "S" stands for "surgery."
We train nurses to do it, and they use local anesthetics.
Then "A" stands for "antibiotics."
These are donated by Pfizer, who also pay for those drugs to be transported to the port in-country.
And every one of those volunteers has a pole like this.
It's called a "dose pole."
"F" stands for "face washing."
In fact, President Carter, he talks about how trachoma was a real problem in Georgia when he was a little boy.
And in the UK, the famous eye hospital, Moorfields, was originally a trachoma hospital.
What we do is teach kids like this how important it is to wash their faces.
And finally, "E" stands for "environment," where we help the communities build latrines, and we teach them to separate their animals from their living quarters in order to reduce the fly population.
It took us three years, but we went through 29 countries, and we taught local health workers to go district by district, and they examined the eyelids of over two and a half million people.
And you may ask me, "Well, does this strategy actually work?"
Countries in yellow have the money they need, they have the resources to eliminate trachoma.
Well, we believe that we can eliminate trachoma in 12 African countries and across the Americas and all across the Pacific.
And in doing all of that, we can leverage more than two billion dollars' worth of donated drugs.
(Applause) Now, this map here shows you the impact that we'll have -- look how many countries are going green.
And there, you can see progress in Ethiopia and Nigeria.
Now, yes, there are some countries that are still red.
These are mainly countries which are in conflict -- places like Yemen, South Sudan -- where it's very difficult to work.
So, we have the team, the strategy and the map.
Wouldn't it be amazing if we could do this?
They go blind one by one."
Now, I met Twiba last year in Tanzania.
She had had trachoma for as long as she could remember.
It's no exaggeration to say that this had totally transformed her life.
And she said to me, "I have my life back."
So thank you.
(Applause)
We've got a big problem on our hands with global warming.
We are going to launch a rocket.
And on that rocket will be a satellite.
And that satellite will collect data about pollution that is warming the planet.
We will put that data in the hands of people who can make simple fixes that will change the course of global warming in our lifetime.
First, let me introduce myself, I'm Fred, I've been an environmentalist since I was a kid, when I watched the fish and the frogs in my neighborhood pond die from a chemical spill.
Later, a professor inspired me to think about environmentalism differently.
How the best solutions come from answering people's aspirations for prosperity, things like being safe and healthy and thriving in this world.
You see, there's something about climate change that we didn't grasp just a decade ago.
The world was so focused on carbon dioxide that we overlooked another important gas.
Methane pollution causes one quarter of the global warming that we're experiencing right now.
Pound for pound, its immediate impact is far greater than carbon dioxide.
One of the largest sources of methane pollution is the oil and gas industry.
But that's not obvious, because methane is invisible.
Let's take a look at this natural gas storage facility outside of Los Angeles.
Can you see the methane?
We shot this using an infrared camera, at the same spot, exposing one of the worst methane leaks in the history of the United States.
It turns out that natural gas is displacing our dependence on coal, which emits far more carbon dioxide.
It gets up into the sky and contributes to the disasters that we're now experiencing.
We used drones, planes, helicopters, even Google Street View cars.
Leading companies replaced valves and tightened loose-fitting pipes.
Colorado became the first state in the nation to limit methane pollution; California followed suit, and the public joined in.
It will launch a compact satellite, called MethaneSAT, to do what no one has been able to do until now: measure methane pollution from oil and gas facilities worldwide, with exacting precision.
We've seen that when we present companies with data, many of them will cut the pollution.
Citizens will be empowered to take action; governments will tighten the regulations.
And because all of our data will be free and public, there will be transparency -- we'll all be able to see how much progress is being made and where.
Which brings me to our goal: to cut this methane pollution by 45 percent by 2025.
(Applause) That will have the same near-term impact as shutting down 1,300 coal-fired power plants.
That's one third of all the coal-fired power plants in the world.
The fact that a single satellite can help us put the brakes on global warming is truly remarkable.
This is our chance to create change in our lifetimes, and we can do it now.
Can you see it?
Can you see how this satellite leverages the best of science and data and technology?
Can you see we're entering a whole new era of innovation that is supercharging progress?
We've set an aggressive goal of three years till liftoff, and when that satellite is ready, we'll have a launch party.
So imagine a blue-sky day, crowds of people, television cameras, kids staring up toward the sky at a thing that will change their future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I wanted to talk to you today about creative confidence.
He was making a horse out of the clay our teacher kept under the sink.
And I wonder how often that happens, you know?
And I had a major breakthrough, when I met the psychologist Albert Bandura.
I don't know if you know Albert Bandura, but if you go to Wikipedia, it says that he's the fourth most important psychologist in history -- you know, like Freud, Skinner, somebody and Bandura.
So I went to see him, because he's just worked on phobias for a long time, which I'm very interested in.
And it was really enjoyable, really interesting.
And Bandura calls that confidence "self-efficacy," the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do.
We see it at the d.school all the time.
About that time, he was at the d.school at Stanford taking classes.
(Laughter) And so, I've heard Doug tell the story many times of his personal transformation and the breakthrough design that happened from it, but I've never really seen him tell the story of the little girl without a tear in his eye.
I know a thing or two about hospitals.
A few years ago, I felt a lump on the side of my neck.
so there were lots of projects that I could work on.
I survived, just so you know.
(Laughter) (Applause) I really believe that when people gain this confidence -- and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO -- that they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives.
Thank you.
(Applause)
There are about 10,000 species of ants.
And I've been working for the past 20 years on a population of seed-eating ants in southeastern Arizona.
And these ants are called harvester ants because they eat seeds.
This is the nest of the mature colony, and there's the nest entrance.
Then, as soon as the ants -- the first group of ants -- emerge, they're larvae. Then they're pupae. Then they come out as adult ants.
This is a five-year-old colony. This is the nest entrance, here's a pencil for scale.
There's a lot of damage to the nest, and extra ants are needed to clean up that mess.
When extra food becomes available -- and this is what everybody knows about picnics -- then extra ants are allocated to collect the food.
It also looks very similar to some of the cave dwellings of the Hopi people that are in that area.
And when we dig up nests we find they're about as deep as the colony is wide, so about a meter deep for the big old nests.
There's the larvae, and they consume most of the food.
And this is true of most ants -- that the ants you see walking around don't do much eating.
And curiously, and interestingly, it looks as though at any time about half the ants in the colony are just doing nothing.
So what's happening is that the ants work inside the nest when they're younger.
They have eyes, they can distinguish between light and dark, but they mostly work by smell.
And the second result, which was surprising to a lot of people, was that ants actually switch tasks.
This process changes with colony age, and it changes like this.
So, the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony.
Instead, something about the organization must be changing as the colony gets older.
The pattern itself is the message.
This is taken through a fiber optics microscope. It's down inside the nest.
You can also see this in the ants just outside the nest entrance like these.
And the ants that are waiting just inside the nest entrance to decide whether to go out on their next trip, are contacting the ants coming in.
The first is that the experience of the ant -- of each ant -- can't be very predictable.
Because the rate at which ants come back depends on all the little things that happen to an ant as it goes out and does its task outside.
But it works pretty well.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This is a thousand-year-old drawing of the brain.
It's a diagram of the visual system.
And that's because if you take a brain out of the skull and you cut a thin slice of it, put it under even a very powerful microscope, there's nothing there.
And this all changed in the late 19th century.
Suddenly, new chemical stains for brain tissue were developed and they gave us our first glimpses at brain wiring.
Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who's widely considered the father of modern neuroscience, applied this Golgi stain, which yields data which looks like this, and really gave us the modern notion of the nerve cell, the neuron.
And if you're thinking of the brain as a computer, this is the transistor.
And very quickly Cajal realized that neurons don't operate alone, but rather make connections with others that form circuits just like in a computer.
And so coming back to the brain, this is from a genetically engineered mouse called "Brainbow."
Now sometimes neuroscientists need to identify individual molecular components of neurons, molecules, rather than the entire cell.
And researchers have used this fact in order to recognize specific molecules inside of the brain, recognize specific substructures of the cell and identify them individually.
This, for example, is an antibody staining against serotonin transporters in a slice of mouse brain.
And antibody stainings like this one can be used to understand that sort of question.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Twelve years ago, I was in the street writing my name to say, "I exist."
Then I went to taking photos of people to paste them on the street to say, "They exist."
From the suburbs of Paris to the wall of Israel and Palestine, the rooftops of Kenya to the favelas of Rio, paper and glue -- as easy as that.
I asked a question last year: Can art change the world?
Well let me tell you, in terms of changing the world there has been a lot of competition this year, because the Arab Spring is still spreading, the Eurozone has collapsed ... what else?
So there has been a lot of change.
So when I had my TED wish last year, I said, look, I'm going to switch my concept.
This is Inside Out.
These are the people I want to talk about to you today.
Two weeks after my speech, in Tunisia, hundreds of portraits were made.
Karachi, Pakistan.
And I want to thank her today.
Juarez: You've heard of the border -- one of the most dangerous borders in the world.
Monica has taken thousands of portraits with a group of photographers and covered the entire border.
Twenty percent of the posters we are receiving comes from schools.
So we went there with a truck. This is a photobooth truck.
This is the biggest global art participatory project that's going on.
So back to the question, "Can art change the world?"
Can art change people's lives?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Now, there was nothing particularly special about 2010, because, on average, 31 and a half million people are displaced by natural disasters every single year.
Now, usually when people hear statistics or stats like that, you start thinking about places like Haiti or other kind of exotic or maybe even impoverished areas, but it happens right here in the United States every single year.
Last year alone, 99 federally declared disasters were on file with FEMA, from Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to the Central Texas wildfires that just happened recently.
So obviously there's a massive housing gap, and this really upset me, because academia tells you after a major disaster, there's typically about an 18-month time frame to -- we kinda recover, start the recovery process, but what most people don't realize is that on average it takes 45 to 60 days or more for the infamous FEMA trailers to even begin to show up.
The doors can actually swap out, so you can actually put on a rigid panel with a window unit in it for climate control, or a connector module that would allow you to actually connect multiple units together, which gives you larger and kind of compartmentalized living spaces, so now this same kit of parts, this same unit can actually serve as a living room, bedroom or bathroom, or an office, a living space and secure storage.
Thank you. (Applause)
Recently I visited Beloit, Wisconsin.
And I was there to honor a great 20th century explorer, Roy Chapman Andrews.
During his time at the American Museum of Natural History, Andrews led a range of expeditions to uncharted regions, like here in the Gobi Desert.
He was later, it's said, the basis of the Indiana Jones character.
And when I was in Beloit, Wisconsin, I gave a public lecture to a group of middle school students.
And I'm here to tell you, if there's anything more intimidating than talking here at TED, it'll be trying to hold the attention of a group of a thousand 12-year-olds for a 45-minute lecture.
At the end of the lecture they asked a number of questions, but there was one that's really stuck with me since then.
There was a young girl who stood up, and she asked the question: "Where should we explore?"
I think there's a sense that many of us have that the great age of exploration on Earth is over, that for the next generation they're going to have to go to outer space or the deepest oceans in order to find something significant to explore.
It sort of made me think back to one of my favorite explorers in the history of biology.
He called it the virus -- Latin for "poison."
And obviously there's been tremendous practical applications associated with this world -- things like the eradication of smallpox, the advent of a vaccine against cervical cancer, which we now know is mostly caused by human papillomavirus.
So basically we had automobiles, but we were unaware of the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet.
We now have these amazing tools to allow us to explore the unseen world -- things like deep sequencing, which allow us to do much more than just skim the surface and look at individual genomes from a particular species, but to look at entire metagenomes, the communities of teeming microorganisms in, on and around us and to document all of the genetic information in these species.
We can apply these techniques to things from soil to skin and everything in between.
The first thing we would see is a tremendous amount of genetic information.
That perhaps will allow us to identify the cause of a cancer that afflicts us or identify the source of an outbreak that we aren't familiar with or perhaps create a new tool in molecular biology.
I'm pleased to announce that, along with colleagues at Stanford and Caltech and UCSF, we're currently starting an initiative to explore biological dark matter for the existence of new forms of life.
A little over a hundred years ago, people were unaware of viruses, the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet.
Go after the dark matter in whatever field you choose to explore.
There are unknowns all around us and they're just waiting to be discovered.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to talk about religion.
My talk will be about the impact of religions on the number of babies per woman.
This is indeed important, because everyone understands that there is some sort of limit on how many people we can be on this planet.
When I was born there was less than one billion children in the world, and today, 2000, there's almost two billion.
Do you think it will decrease to one billion?
You go to Wikipedia and the first map you find is this.
Therefore at Gapminder we made our own map, and it looks like this.
The size is the population -- big China, big India here.
This is in 1960.
And now I show the number of babies per woman here: two, four or six -- many babies, few babies.
The exception was Japan.
We get that from the census data.
There's no major difference between these religions.
There is a difference with income.
But there are also countries here like Guatemala, like Papua New Guinea, like Yemen and Afghanistan.
It's the other way around.
But 30 years from now, Afghanistan will go from 30 million to 60 million.
Let me compare Senegal, a Muslim dominated country, with a Christian dominated country, Ghana.
The average number of children in the world is like in Colombia -- it's 2.4 today.
And that's where family planning, better child survival is needed.
And here, down, there are many countries which are less than two children per woman.
And there are two billion children in the world.
There are two billion young people between 15 and 30.
The rest of you, you will grow older and you will get two billion children.
The rest will grow older and get two billion children.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So please join me for a minute of silence.
What did I need? I needed the widest shoes in the world.
Notre Dame, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the World Trade Center.
But it is too late.
(Applause) (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
But not an applause of delight like before, an applause encouragement.
And when you see mountains, remember mountains can be moved.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Let's call it Island Networks.
But then something unexpected happened.
And yet, a couple of weeks later, he was picked up and taken to prison where he was subjected to a medical exam, including a full-body search in full view of the others in the cell.
He was released, but then a day or two later, he was taken to the airport and he was deported.
What on earth did this man do to merit this treatment?
What was his terrible crime?
He was infected with HIV.
Now the kingdom is one of about 50 countries that imposes restrictions on the entry or stay of people living with HIV.
But these laws, when applied to people living with HIV, are a violation of international human rights agreements to which these countries are signatories.
So you tell me why, in our age of science, we still have laws and policies which come from an age of superstition.
You know better than anyone that HIV brings out the best and the worst in humanity.
And the laws reflect these attitudes.
I'm not just talking about laws on the books, but laws as they are enforced on the streets and laws as they are decided in the courts.
And I'm not just talking about laws as they relate to people living with HIV, but people who are at greatest risk of infection -- people such as those who inject drugs or sex workers or men who have sex with men or transgendered persons or migrants or prisoners.
And in many parts of the world that includes women and children who are especially vulnerable.
These laws treat people touched by HIV with compassion and acceptance.
These laws ensure that people living with HIV and those at greatest risk are protected from violence and discrimination and that they get access to prevention and to treatment.
Unfortunately, these good laws are counter-balanced by a mass of really bad law -- law which is grounded in moral judgement and in fear and in misinformation, laws which specifically punish people living with HIV or those at greatest risk.
These laws fly in the face of science, and they are grounded in prejudice and in ignorance and in a rewriting of tradition and a selective reading of religion.
You're a class B felon, lifetime sex offender.
You are a very, very, very bad person.
And you did a very, very, very bad thing.
Some countries have good laws, laws which could stem the tide of HIV.
(Video) Hilma: I found out when I went to the hospital for a pregnancy check-up.
The nurse announced that every pregnant woman must also be tested for HIV that day.
The nurse said to me, "Why should you people bcome pregnant when you know you are HIV positive?
I just signed.
They're the lucky ones because they're still alive.
According to those same estimates, in 2010 1.8 million people died of AIDS related causes.
But if we look a little more broadly into the statistics, we actually see some reason for hope.
Looking globally, the number of new infections of HIV is declining.
Only about half of the people who need treatment are currently receiving it.
In some parts of the world -- like here in the Middle East and North Africa -- new infections are rising and so are deaths.
And the money, the money we need for the global response to HIV, that is shrinking.
It's for this reason that the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, of which I'm a member, was established by the agencies of the United Nations -- to look at the ways that legal environments are affecting people living with HIV and those at greatest risk, and to recommend what should be done to make the law an ally, not an enemy, of the global response to HIV.
Let me give you just one example of the way a legal environment can make a positive difference.
People who inject drugs are one of those groups I mentioned.
They're at high risk of HIV through contaminated injection equipment and other risk-related behaviors.
In fact, one in every 10 new infections of HIV is among people who inject drugs.
Now drug use or possession is illegal in almost every country.
There is, however, ample evidence to show that incarcerating people increases their risk of HIV and other infections.
We know how to reduce HIV transmission and other risks in people who inject drugs.
It's called harm reduction, and it involves, among other things, providing clean needles and syringes, offering opioid substitution therapy and other evidence-based treatments to reduce drug dependence.
It involves providing information and education and condoms to reduce HIV transmission, and also providing HIV testing and counseling and treatment should people become infected.
Australia and Switzerland were two countries which introduced harm reduction very early on in their HIV epidemics, and they have a very low rate of HIV among injecting drug users.
The U.S. and Malaysia came to harm reduction a little later, and they have higher rates of HIV in these populations.
Thailand and Russia, however, have resisted harm reduction and have stringent laws which punish drug use.
At the Global Commission we have studied the evidence, and we've heard the experiences of over 700 people from 140 countries.
Where you criminalize people living with HIV or those at greatest risk, you fuel the epidemic.
To begin, countries need to review their legislation as it touches HIV and vulnerable groups.
On the back of those reviews, governments should repeal laws that punish or discriminate against people living with HIV or those at greatest risk.
Repealing a law isn't easy, and it's particularly difficult when it relates to touchy subjects like drugs and sex.
We can also train judges so that they find flexibilities in the law and so that they rule on the side of tolerance rather than prejudice.
We can retool prisons so that HIV prevention and harm reduction is available to prisoners.
Because civil society is key to raising awareness among vulnerable groups of their legal rights.
But awareness needs action.
And so we need to ensure that these people who are living with HIV or at greatest risk of HIV have access to legal services and they have equal access to the courts.
And also important is talking to communities so that we change interpretations of religious or customary law, which is too often used to justify punishment and fuel stigma.
For many of us here HIV is not an abstract threat.
The law, on the other hand, can seem remote, arcane, the stuff of specialists, but it isn't.
Because for those of us who live in democracies, or in aspiring democracies, the law begins with us.
Laws that treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk with respect start with the way that we treat them ourselves: as equals.
If we are going to stop the spread of HIV in our lifetime, then that is the change we need to spread.
Thank you.
(Applause)
It's hard to imagine or measure.
Four years ago I worked with a few people at the Brookings Institute, and I arrived at a conclusion.
(Laughter) Tomorrow is another day.
And the important thing to remember is that this simulation is a good one.
You can feel your body.
You can say, "I'd like to go over to this location," and you can move this mass of molecules through the air over to another location, at will.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) This is a fun one.
(Applause)
I know this is going to sound strange, but I think robots can inspire us to be better humans.
See, I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the home of Bethlehem Steel.
My father was an engineer, and when I was growing up, he would teach me how things worked.
Here's the go-kart that we built together.
That's me behind the wheel, with my sister and my best friend at the time.
Now, I was thrilled about this, because at school, there was a bully named Kevin, and he was picking on me, because I was the only Jewish kid in class.
So I couldn't wait to get started to work on this, so I could introduce Kevin to my robot.
And so he needed an industrial robot like this, that could basically do the heavy lifting.
So Dad continued to do this kind of work by hand.
And a few years later, he was diagnosed with cancer.
He didn't recognize that at the time, and he contracted leukemia.
And he died at the age of 45.
By 1993, I was a young professor at USC, and I was just building up my own robotics lab, and this was the year the World Wide Web came out.
We started playing with this, and that afternoon, we realized that we could use this new, universal interface to allow anyone in the world to operate the robot in our lab.
And we had put a camera in the gripper of the hand of the robot, and we wrote some special scripts and software, so that anyone in the world could come in, and by clicking on the screen, they could move the robot around and visit the garden.
Now, this was an engineering project, and we published some papers on the system design of it, but we also thought of it as an art installation.
And I'm happy to say, it remained online there, 24 hours a day, for almost nine years.
That robot was operated by more people than any other robot in history.
Now, one day, I got a call out of the blue from a student, who asked a very simple but profound question.
And the more I thought about it, I couldn't think of a good answer for how he could tell the difference.
And when I got here, I looked up Hubert Dreyfus, who's a world-renowned professor of philosophy, And I talked with him about this and he said, "This is one of the oldest and most central problems in philosophy.
It's the issue of epistemology, the study of how do we know that something is true."
We invited leading artists, engineers and philosophers to write essays about this, and the results are collected in this book from MIT Press.
So we started thinking: what if the robot could leave the garden and go out into some other interesting environment?
And the idea was that she could go into a remote and interesting environment, and then over the Internet, people could experience what she was experiencing.
So we got a chance to take the Tele-Actor to the Webby Awards in San Francisco.
And that year, Sam Donaldson was the host.
(Laughter) So he loved the concept, and when the Tele-Actor walked onstage, she walked right up to him, and she gave him a big kiss right on the lips.
He was undergoing a treatment -- chemotherapy treatments -- and there's a related treatment called brachytherapy, where tiny, radioactive seeds are placed into the body to treat cancerous tumors.
And as a result, the needles damage these organs, cause damage, which leads to trauma and side effects.
So my students and I wondered: what if we could modify the system, so that the needles could come in at different angles?
So now, we're working with doctors at UCSF and engineers at Johns Hopkins, and we're building a robot that has a number of -- it's a specialized design with different joints that can allow the needles to come in at an infinite variety of angles.
And the last project also has to do with medical robotics.
And this is something that's grown out of a system called the da Vinci surgical robot.
So the surgeon becomes fatigued over time.
And we asked a surgeon to perform a task -- with the robot.
First, we use a technique called dynamic time warping from speech recognition.
And then we apply Kalman filtering, a technique from control theory, that allows us to statistically analyze all the noise and extract the desired trajectory that underlies them.
We then execute that on the robot, we observe what happens, then we adjust the controls, using a sequence of techniques called iterative learning.
That's the inferred task trajectory, and here's the robot moving at the speed of the human.
So this project also, because of its involved practicing and learning, doing something over and over again, this project also has a lesson, which is: if you want to do something well, there's no substitute for practice, practice, practice.
So these are four of the lessons that I've learned from robots over the years.
She's eight years old.
And now I get to teach her how things work, and we get to build projects together.
And I wonder what kind of lessons she'll learn from them.
Robots are the most human of our machines.
Because I have a hunch that many of our technological innovations, the devices we dream about, can inspire us to be better humans.
And then, in 1918, coal production in Britain peaked, and has declined ever since.
In due course, Britain started using oil and gas from the North Sea, and in the year 2000, oil and gas production from the North Sea also peaked, and they're now on the decline.
These observations about the finiteness of easily accessible, local, secure fossil fuels, is a motivation for saying, "Well, what's next?
What is life after fossil fuels going to be like?
You ask a question, write down some numbers, and get an answer.
It may not be very accurate, but it may make you say, "Hmm."
That's the European average for new cars.
The length of the road doesn't matter, because the longer the road, the more biofuel plantation.
The answer is going to be yes, but it depends which country you are in.
It's as if we've all got 125 lightbulbs on all the time, 125 kilowatt-hours per day per person is the energy consumption of the UK.
And 90 percent of this energy, today, still comes from fossil fuels, and 10 percent, only, from other, greener -- possibly greener -- sources, like nuclear power and renewables.
The population density is on the horizontal axis, and we're 250 people per square kilometer.
Let's add European countries in blue, and you can see there's quite a variety.
Next, let's add Asia in red, the Middle East and North Africa in green, sub-Saharan Africa in blue, black is South America, purple is Central America, and then in pukey-yellow, we have North America, Australia and New Zealand.
Top left, we have Canada and Australia, with enormous land areas, very high per capita consumption -- 200 or 300 lightbulbs per person -- and very low population densities.
Top right: Bahrain has the same energy consumption per person, roughly, as Canada -- over 300 lightbulbs per person, but their population density is a factor of 300 times greater, 1,000 people per square kilometer.
Bottom right: Bangladesh has the same population density as Bahrain, but consumes 100 times less per person.
I've added on little blue tails behind Sudan, Libya, China, India, Bangladesh.
So, we may be off in the top right-hand corner, slightly unusual, the United Kingdom accompanied by Germany, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and a bunch of other slightly odd countries, but many other countries are coming up and to the right to join us.
So we're a picture, if you like, of what the future energy consumption might be looking like in other countries, too.
Those are lines of equal power consumption per unit area, which I measure in watts per square meter.
So, for example, the middle line there, 0.1 watts per square meter, is the energy consumption per unit area of Saudi Arabia, Norway, Mexico in purple, and Bangladesh 15 years ago.
Half of the world's population lives in countries that are already above that line.
Well, we can measure renewables in the same units and other forms of power production in the same units.
Renewables is one of the leading ideas for how we could get off our 90 percent fossil-fuel habit.
Well, we consume 1.25 watts per square meter.
What this means is, even if you covered the whole of the United Kingdom with energy crops, you couldn't match today's energy consumption.
Wind power produces a bit more -- 2.5 watts per square meter.
So that means if you wanted, literally, to produce total energy consumption in all forms, on average, from wind farms, you need wind farms half the area of the UK.
Next, let's look at solar power.
Solar panels, when you put them on a roof, deliver about 20 watts per square meter in England.
I'm not saying that's a bad idea; we just need to understand the numbers.
I'm absolutely not anti-renewables. I love renewables.
There are other options for generating power as well, which don't involve fossil fuels.
That's one gigawatt in a square kilometer, which works out to 1,000 watts per square meter.
Of course, other metrics matter, too, and nuclear power has all sorts of popularity problems.
So countries like Australia, Russia, Libya, Kazakhstan, could be our best friends for renewable production.
And a third option is nuclear power.
It's my house, with a Ferrari out front.
I've tried it. It works. Some people call it a lifestyle change.
You can also deliver heat more efficiently using heat pumps, which use a smaller bit of high-grade energy like electricity to move heat from your garden into your house.
Here's a graph I made.
I was writing a book about sustainable energy, and a friend asked me, "How much energy do you use at home?"
And so I started reading the meter every week.
We need to stop shouting and start talking.
(Applause)
I teach history at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
On February 14, 2018, my school experienced one of the worst mass school shootings in American history.
People want to know what we saw, what I felt.
I lined up the kids, I held up a sign so they could follow me through the hall, just like a fire drill.
Luckily, we were already moving in the opposite direction.
I called my mother.
I called my husband.
I sat alone in my thoughts, worried about my colleagues and students.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School lost 17 precious lives on that horrible day.
After, students asked us, the adults the hardest question: How can we stop the senseless violence?
But it was not the first time I've been humbled by a student's question.
I've been teaching in the public schools for 33 years, so I know you have to admit what you don't know before you can share what you do know.
First, listen closely to the person asking you a question.
Third, do your homework.
Fourth, humbly share your knowledge.
My students ask really thoughtful questions all the time.
So when my students asked, "How do we stop this senseless violence?"
I listened, and then I admitted, "I don't know."
And like I always do when I don't know the answer to one of my questions, I began doing my homework.
And as a history teacher, I knew I needed to start with the Second Amendment and the NRA.
Meaning, the federal government could not infringe on the rights of citizens to participate in well-regulated militias.
The Second Amendment was ratified 226 years ago.
Almost every pivotal moment in our nation's history in one way or another influenced how we as a people manufacture, debate, regulate and feel about guns.
As a matter of fact, it wasn't until 2008 that the Supreme Court ruled for the first time the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
This change over time is striking to me, because it reminds us that the interpretation of the Second Amendment and cultural attitudes about guns have changed over time.
(Applause) It's an incredibly complex and dynamic history lesson, but it's not the lesson I'm here to teach today, because we don't have time.
According to the CDC, over the last five years, on average, each day 96 people are killed by guns in the United States, and if we don't figure out how to answer my students' question soon, one of us could be next.
So, if the question is, how do we stop this senseless violence, the best way I can think to answer is to look at multiple choice.
Between 1998 and 2000, 30 counties and cities sued gun manufacturers, saying they should make their products safer and do a better job of tracking where their products are sold.
In response to this and many other lawsuits, the NRA lobbied for the passage of the PLCAA, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
The PLCAA passed with bipartisan support in 2005 and entrusts gun manufacturers to design guns safely, stores to sell those guns responsibly and someone to own and use the gun responsibly.
Let's take a look at another option, Choice B: this will end when we hold ourselves accountable and regulate the estimated 300 million guns available in America.
Yes, voting is one of the best ways to take personal responsibility for gun violence.
Making sure that our lawmakers are willing to pass commonsense gun reform is one of the most effective ways to get those 300 million guns under control.
And also, gun owners can take personal initiative.
If you own a gun, ask yourself: Do I have an extra gun I don't need?
Could it fall into the wrong hands?
Many social issues affect why people buy and use guns.
Let's make it easier, not harder, for people to access better mental health care.
What else? Sexism, racism and poverty affect gun ownership and gun-related fatalities.
On average, it's estimated that 50 women were fatally shot each month between 2010 and 2014 due to domestic violence, and women are still dying in their homes.
Let's empower women and give our young boys a chance to learn how to work out their conflicts and emotions with words, not weapons.
And the "Washington Post" reported that last year, nearly 1,000 people were fatally wounded by on-duty police officers.
Talk to Black Lives Matter and the police union about that.
It's now time to answer the question.
Maybe that's the answer here.
Or maybe "all of the above" is too easy, and this is not an easy problem.
It requires deep analytical thinking by all of us.
I don't know. Listen, I'm no gun control expert.
I teach the humanities.
To be human is to learn, and to be part of a civilization is to share your knowledge.
This kind of honest, brave and sincere engagement is what I ask of my students, what I expect of myself as a teacher and what I demand of you now.
Humbly share your knowledge with each other.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)
Everything we know about Archimedes as a mathematician we know about because of just three books, and they're called A, B and C.
And A was lost by an Italian humanist in 1564.
Because this book is actually a prayer book.
And to make his prayer book he used parchment.
And Archimedes Codex C was just one of those seven.
And with just a magnifying glass, he transcribed as much of the text as he could.
Why did he buy this book?
(Laughter) Another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax, because this was used in the liturgical services of the Greek Orthodox Church and they'd used candle wax.
And here are two different images of the Archimedes manuscript.
And the image on the right is an ultraviolet image.
The prayer book is dark in both images and it comes out dark.
The Archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another.
Now that's a before and after image, but you don't read the image on the screen like that.
You zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in, and you can just read it now.
(Applause) If you process the same two images in a different way, you can actually get rid of the prayer book text.
And that electron disappears.
So we took it to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory in California, which is a particle accelerator.
Electrons go around one way, positrons go around the other.
They meet in the middle, and they create subatomic particles like the charm quark and the tau lepton.
And this is the most powerful light source in the solar system.
This is called synchrotron radiation, and it's normally used to look at things like proteins and that sort of thing.
And the important point about this is that it's the earliest study in combinatorics in mathematics.
And combinatorics is a wonderful and interesting branch of mathematics.
Now Hyperides was an Athenian orator from the fourth century B.C.
So Athens and Thebes went out to fight Philip of Macedon.
And this is the speech that he gave when he was on trial -- and it's a great speech: "Best of all," he says, "is to win.
But if you can't win, then you should fight for a noble cause, because then you'll be remembered.
Consider the Spartans.
The one battle that the Spartans fought that everybody remembers is the the battle of Thermopylae where they were butchered to a man, but fought for the freedom of Greece."
Aristotle's "Categories" is one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy.
And we found a third century A.D. commentary on it, possibly by Galen and probably by Porphyry.
(Applause) Why did the owner of the manuscript do this?
And that's what he did.
And it's an attractive and beautiful future, if only we can make it happen.
Now the Walters Art Museum is a small museum and it has beautiful manuscripts, but the data is fantastic.
(Applause) Now, let's think about this for a minute.
They go to see the Mona Lisa.
Why do they go to see the Mona Lisa?
(Applause)
In 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein coauthored "The Bell Curve," an extremely controversial book which claims that on average, some races are smarter and more likely to succeed than others.
Murray and Herrnstein also suggest that a lack of critical intelligence explains the prominence of violent crime in poor African-American communities.
In 2012, a writer, journalist and political commentator named John Derbyshire wrote an article that was supposed to be a non-black version of the talk that many black parents feel they have to give their kids today: advice on how to stay safe.
And yet, in 2016, I invited John Derbyshire as well as Charles Murray to speak at my school, knowing full well that I would be giving them a platform and attention for ideas that I despised and rejected.
When I was 10 years old, my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, a mental illness characterized by mood swings and paranoid delusions.
But over the years, I've come to appreciate some of the important lessons my mother taught me about life.
One day, I came across the phrase "affirmative action" in a book I was reading.
My mom wanted me to understand that I should never just write off opinions that I disagreed with or disliked, because there was always something to learn from the perspectives of others, even when doing so might be difficult.
In fourth grade, she decided that I should attend a private school in order to receive the best education possible.
As a black student attending predominantly white private schools, I've encountered attitudes and behaviors that reflected racial stereotypes.
Despite this racial stereotyping and the discomfort I often felt, the learning I gained from other aspects of being at an elite private school were incredibly valuable.
I was encouraged by my teachers to explore my curiosity, to challenge myself in new ways and to deepen my understanding of subjects that fascinated me the most.
And going to college was the next step.
I was excited to take my intellectual drive and interest in the world of ideas to the next level.
I was eager to engage in lively debate with peers and professors and with outside speakers; to listen, to learn and gain a deeper understanding of myself and of others.
While I was fortunate to meet peers and professors who were interested in doing the same thing, my desire to engage with difficult ideas was also met with resistance.
Of course, no one likes being offended, and I certainly don't like hearing controversial speakers argue that feminism has become a war against men or that blacks have lower IQs than whites.
I also understand that some people have experienced traumatic experiences in their lives.
But what I wish I could tell people is that it's worth the discomfort, it's worth listening, and that we're stronger, not weaker, because of it.
When I think about my experiences with uncomfortable learning, and I reflect upon them, I've found that it's been very difficult to change the values of the intellectual community that I've been a part of.
What I've found is that, while it can be difficult to change the values of a community, we can gain a lot from individual interactions.
I knew the conversation would be difficult.
The way in which he wanted to understand the issue, the way in which he wanted to approach the issue of inequality also differed from my own.
It's my belief that to achieve progress in the face of adversity, we need a genuine commitment to gaining a deeper understanding of humanity.
Thank you.
(Applause)
She's an actress, she's in her 60s.
And a couple of days before Christmas, she was at the post office.
It was really crowded, as it is around the holidays, and she was filling out some forms and she was really focused.
And I don't know why.
(Laughter) It's OK.
And not because men are fundamentally less moral, but because this is a very big blind spot for most men.
And if you add in the history of race -- which is a whole other talk -- it gets exponentially more complicated.
Women have been trained to think that we are overreacting or that we're being too sensitive or unreasonable.
It is men's responsibility to change men's bad behavior.
And women, I encourage you to acknowledge your fury.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
I mean, how did you end up an engineer and President of SpaceX?
But I actually got into engineering not because of that book but because my mom took me to a Society of Women Engineers event, and I fell in love with the mechanical engineer that spoke.
CA: Sixteen years ago, you became employee number seven at SpaceX, and then over the next years, you somehow built a multi-billion-dollar relationship with NASA, despite the fact that SpaceX's first three launches blew up.
GS: So actually, selling rockets is all about relationships and making a connection with these customers.
But really, fundamentally, safety comes in the design of the system that you're going to fly people on, and so we've been working for years, actually, almost a decade, on this technology.
We also will be doing another demonstration later this year on if we have an issue with the rocket during flight.
GS: Yeah, so the launch escape system for Dragon is pretty unique.
So we didn't have to design around legacy components that maybe weren't the most reliable or were particularly expensive, so we really were able to let physics drive the design of these systems.
What's it been like to work so closely with Elon Musk?
So what's the conversion ratio between Elon time and real time?
CA: It feels like you play kind of a key intermediary role here.
It feels like you've found a way of saying, "Yes, Elon," and then making it happen in a way that is acceptable both to him and to your company, to your employees.
(Laughter) CA: You know, looking ahead, one huge initiative SpaceX is believed to be, rumored to be working on, is a massive network of literally thousands of low earth orbit satellites to provide high-bandwidth, low-cost internet connection to every square foot of planet earth.
This would a huge increase in the total number of satellites in orbit.
CA: So despite the remarkable success there of that Falcon Heavy rocket, you're actually not focusing on that as your future development plan.
GS: Actually, we've learned some lessons over the duration where we've been developing these launch systems.
CA: The logic is that BFR is what you need to take humanity to Mars?
GS: Yes. BFR can take the satellites that we're currently taking to orbit to many orbits.
What a beautiful rocket, and that hangar could just fit the Statue of Liberty in it, so you get a sense of size of that Falcon Heavy Rocket.
We developed the Merlin engine for the Falcon 1 launch vehicle.
We could have tossed that engine and built an entirely new engine for the Falcon 9.
It would have been called something different, because Falcon 9 is nine Merlin engines, but instead of spending a billion dollars on a brand new engine, we put nine of them together on the back end of Falcon 9.
Basically, what we're going to do is we're going to fly BFR like an aircraft and do point-to-point travel on earth, so you can take off from New York City or Vancouver and fly halfway across the globe.
You'll be on the BFR for roughly half an hour or 40 minutes, and the longest part -- yeah, it's so awesome.
And let's talk a little bit about the business.
Everyone thinks rockets are really expensive, and to a large degree they are, and how could we possibly compete with airline tickets here?
(Laughter) And meanwhile, the other use of BFR is being developed to go a little bit further than Shanghai.
CA: When do you believe SpaceX will land the first human on Mars?
CA: In real time, again, within a decade.
(Laughter) Why, though? Seriously, why?
I think we're working on one of the most important things we possibly can, and that's to find another place for humans to live and survive and thrive.
(Applause) It's the fundamental risk reduction for the human species.
Since 2001, we've interviewed hundreds of thousands of people -- young and old, men and women, educated and illiterate.
But I'm going to end by widening the lens to the entire region to look at the mundane topics of Arab views of religion and politics and how this impacts women, revealing some surprises along the way.
If an act of desperation by a Tunisian fruit vendor sparked these revolutions, it was the difference between what Arabs experienced and what they expected that provided the fuel.
To tell you what I mean, consider this trend in Egypt.
But under the surface was a very different reality.
As the country got more well-off, unemployment actually rose and people's satisfaction with things like housing and education plummeted.
But it wasn't just anger at economic injustice.
Contrary to the clash of civilizations theory, Arabs didn't despise Western liberty, they desired it.
As early as 2001, we asked Arabs, and Muslims in general around the world, what they admired most about the West.
Among the most frequent responses was liberty and justice.
Majorities as high as 90 percent and greater in Egypt, Indonesia and Iran told us in 2005 that if they were to write a new constitution for a theoretical new country that they would guarantee freedom of speech as a fundamental right, especially in Egypt.
If Egypt is to succeed at building a society based on the rule of law, it could be a model.
If, however, the core issues that propelled the revolution aren't addressed, the consequences could be catastrophic -- not just for Egypt, but for the entire region.
The military council has cracked down on civil society and protests and the country's economy continues to suffer.
Evaluating Egypt on this basis alone, however, ignores the real revolution.
I was meeting with a group of newly-elected parliamentarians from Egypt and Tunisia a couple of weeks ago.
One said to me, "Our people used to gather in cafes to watch football" -- or soccer, as we say in America -- "and now they gather to watch Parliament."
And this hope, this optimism, endured a year of turbulent transition.
One reason that there's this optimism is because, contrary to what many people have said, most Egyptians think things really have changed in many ways.
So while Egyptians were known for their single-digit turnout in elections before the revolution, the last election had around 70 percent voter turnout -- men and women.
But this conclusion would ignore a tectonic shift taking place in Egypt far from the cameras in Tahrir Square.
They were doctors and dissidents, artists and organizers.
Now what this suggests is that how women view religion's role in society is shaped more by their own country's culture and context than one monolithic view that religion is simply bad for women.
And here is where we see the greatest gender difference within a country -- on the issue of women's rights.
Now how men feel about women's rights matters to the future of this region.
Because we discovered a link between men's support for women's employment and how many women are actually employed in professional fields in that country.
So the question becomes, What drives men's support for women's rights?
What about men's views of religion and law?
[Does] a man's opinion of the role of religion in politics shape their view of women's rights?
The answer is no.
What drives men's support for women's employment is men's employment, their level of education as well as a high score on their country's U.N. Human Development Index.
What this means is that human development, not secularization, is what's key to women's empowerment in the transforming Middle East.
Thank you.
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We are today talking about moral persuasion: What is moral and immoral in trying to change people's behaviors by using technology and using design?
My values can be radically different from your values, which means that what I consider moral or immoral based on that might not necessarily be what you consider moral or immoral.
What I can do and what I would like to do with you is give you, like that initial question, a set of questions to figure out for yourselves, layer by layer, like peeling an onion, getting at the core of what you believe is moral or immoral persuasion.
Here's another example for one of these side effects.
Commendable: a site that allows parents to give their kids little badges for doing the things that parents want their kids to do, like tying their shoes.
In the words of Michel Foucault, it is a "technology of the self."
It demands that we optimize ourselves, that we control ourselves, that we self-manage continuously, because that's the only way in which such a liberal society works.
And speaking of values: I've noticed that in the discussion about moral persuasion online and when I'm talking with people, more often than not, there is a weird bias.
Because if you look at the beginning of ethics in Western culture, you see a very different idea of what ethics also could be.
Ethics was about the question of how to live life well.
And he put that in the word "arête," which we, from [Ancient Greek], translate as "virtue."
But really, it means "excellence."
It means living up to your own full potential as a human being.
And that is an idea that, I think, Paul Richard Buchanan put nicely in a recent essay, where he said, "Products are vivid arguments about how we should live our lives."
And even something as innocuous as a single-design chair, like this one by Arne Jacobsen, is a persuasive technology, because, again, it communicates an idea of the good life: a good life -- a life that you, as a designer, consent to by saying, "In a good life, goods are produced as sustainably or unsustainably as this chair.
as Michel Foucault puts it.
Just to give you a practical example of Buster Benson.
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(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause)
Well, I work at the SETI Institute.
This is the Owens Valley Radio Observatory behind the Sierra Nevadas, and in 1968, I was working there collecting data for my thesis.
The idea dates from 1960, when a young astronomer by the name of Frank Drake used this antenna in West Virginia, pointed it at a couple of nearby stars in the hopes of eavesdropping on E.T.
This is something that we're using today to search for E.T., and the electronics have gotten very much better too.
Some pundit with too much time on his hands has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately 100 trillion times better than they were in 1960, 100 trillion times better.
But something that's not appreciated by the public is, in fact, that the experiment continues to get better, and, consequently, tends to get faster.
In other words, we're looking for a needle in a haystack.
We know how big the haystack is. It's the galaxy.
Well, a million star systems, is that interesting?
But now we do. Recent results suggest that virtually every star has planets, and more than one.
Well, even taking the pessimistic estimate, that it's one in a thousand, that means that there are at least a billion cousins of the Earth just in our own galaxy.
Well, at 9:30 in the morning, with my head down on my desk because I obviously hadn't slept all night, the phone rings and it's The New York Times.
We're not a miracle, okay?
The third thing that it might tell you is somewhat vague, but I think interesting and important, and that is, if you find a signal coming from a more advanced society, because they will be, that will tell you something about our own possibilities, that we're not inevitably doomed to self-destruction.
Now, I gotta tell you, I'm always reading books about explorers. I find exploration very interesting, Arctic exploration, you know, people like Magellan, Amundsen, Shackleton, you see Franklin down there, Scott, all these guys. It's really nifty, exploration.
You know, most ants are programmed to follow one another along in a long line, but there are a couple of ants, maybe one percent of those ants, that are what they call pioneer ants, and they're the ones that wander off.
But those ants, even though most of them get wiped out, those ants are the ones that are essential to the survival of the hive. So exploration is important.
I also think that exploration is important in terms of being able to address what I think is a critical lack in our society, and that is the lack of science literacy, the lack of the ability to even understand science.
I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right?
In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up.
And I bet the answer you're going to get, is, "Well, I don't know what the Higgs boson is, and I don't know if it's important."
And yet we're spending billions of Swiss francs on this problem.
SETI, on the other hand, is really simple.
And not just us. It's also kids.
I remember when a guy came to our high school, actually, it was actually my junior high school. I was in sixth grade.
In fact, this reminds me, I don't know, a couple years ago I gave a talk at a school in Palo Alto where there were about a dozen 11-year-olds that had come to this talk.
Eleven-year-olds, they're all sitting in a little semi-circle looking up at me with big eyes, and I started, there was a white board behind me, and I started off by writing a one with 22 zeroes after it, and I said, "All right, now look, this is the number of stars in the visible universe, and this number is so big there's not even a name for it."
What they wanted was my email address so they could ask me more questions. (Laughter) Let me just say, look, my job is a privilege because we're in a special time.
(Applause)
That's me, that's a camera phone picture of me looking at a painting.
And he's so good at it, that when he was in prison, everybody in prison, the governor and whatever, wanted him to paint masterpieces to put on the walls, because they were so good.
So if you're a criminal in a hurry and you need to copy someone's card, you can just stick a piece of paper on it and rub a pencil over it just to sort of speed things up.
Why?
You know what your name is, right?
(Laughter) So if you drop your card in the street, it means a criminal can pick it up and read it.
(Laughter) And I love that picture.
For some random reason, I can't imagine, something about cheerleaders turned up in my inbox.
The teacher can't log into Facebook, because the school has blocked access to Facebook.
I wasn't actually at the G20 protest, but I had a meeting at a bank on the day of the G20 protest, and I got an email from the bank saying please don't wear a suit, because it'll inflame the protesters.
But it's not real security.
That message is meaningless if you don't know that I'm a trader at the bank.
So my suggestion-I, like James, think that there should be a resurgence of interest in R & D.
Naturally, in these circumstances, I turn to Doctor Who.
And this is Doctor Who with his psychic paper.
That's a Japanese ATM, the fingerprint template is stored inside the mobile phone.
It has to be a utility that you can use everywhere.
There are 6.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions.
My favorite statistic of all time, only 4 billion toothbrushes in the world.
Anybody should be able to use this infrastructure, you don't need permissions, licenses, whatever, anyone should be able to write some code to do this.
So the technology already exists.
Thank you very much.
All right. So, like all good stories, this starts a long, long time ago when there was basically nothing.
And within these galaxies you get these enormous dust clouds.
And so what you're watching is the birth of stars.
When enough stars come out, they create a galaxy.
(Laughter) And as you take a close-up of this galaxy, you find a relatively normal, not particularly interesting star.
And then what happens is there's enough dust left over that it doesn't ignite into a star, it becomes a planet.
And this is about a little over four billion years ago.
And soon thereafter there's enough material left over that you get a primordial soup, and that creates life.
(Laughter) The only question you might want to ask yourself is, could that be just mildly arrogant?
Second theory is: Could we upgrade?
Well Svante Paabo has the answer.
The difference between humans and Neanderthal is 0.004 percent of gene code.
(Laughter) But as you're thinking about this, one of the interesting things is how small these mutations are and where they take place.
Difference human/Neanderthal is sperm and testis, smell and skin.
So about 10,000 years ago by the Black Sea, we had one mutation in one gene which led to blue eyes.
In the 1920s, we thought there were major differences between people.
He was Darwin's cousin.
So since the 1940s, we've been saying there are no differences, we're all identical.
If that is true, it leads to some very complicated questions for the London Olympics.
Three options: Do you want the Olympics to be a showcase for really hardworking mutants?
Unless, of course, if you have a ski lift.
That turns out to be a big deal because now you can take, not just mouse cells, but you can human skin cells and turn them into human stem cells.
And then what they did in October is they took skin cells, turned them into stem cells and began to turn them into liver cells.
And maybe you can upload other people's memories as well.
Well let's take a look at something like autism incidence per thousand.
You've also got people with who are extraordinarily smart, people who can remember everything they've seen in their lives, people who've got synesthesia, people who've got schizophrenia.
I don't have a good answer.
There's beginning to be some evidence that obesity and diet have something to do with gene modifications, which may or may not have an impact on how the brain of an infant works.
But when you see an increase of that order of magnitude in a condition, either you're not measuring it right or there's something going on very quickly, and it may be evolution in real time.
And I think that's such an order of magnitude change that your grandkids or your great-grandkids may be a species very different from you.
Thank you very much.
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That is, I'm not a clinician, I'm a comparative biologist who studies anatomy.
And this is true both of my recent project on sex differences in the brain, and my more mature work on the anatomy and function of penises.
(Laughter) So today I'm going to give you an example drawn from my penis study to show you how knowledge drawn from studies of one organ system provided insights into a very different one.
But then one day I started thinking about the mammalian penis.
And moreover, it has to work.
They use a skeleton that we call a hydrostatic skeleton.
And a hydrostatic skeleton uses two elements.
When you look at a penis in cross section, it has a lot of the hallmarks of a hydrostatic skeleton.
It has a central space of spongy erectile tissue that fills with fluid -- in this case blood -- surrounded by a wall of tissue that's rich in a stiff structural protein called collagen.
I was really surprised at this.
Why was everyone surprised at this?
Now what that tells us is that wall tissues are doing so much more than just covering the vascular tissues.
It's an observation with obvious medical applications in humans as well, but it's also relevant in a broad sense, I think, to the design of prosthetics, soft robots, basically anything where changes of shape and stiffness are important.
So to sum up: Twenty years ago, I had a college adviser tell me, when I went to the college and said, "I'm kind of interested in anatomy," they said, "Anatomy's a dead science."
Thank you.
(Applause)
Now I know we learned that in math class, but now it's everywhere in the culture -- The X prize, the X-Files, Project X, TEDx.
About six years ago I decided that I would learn Arabic, which turns out to be a supremely logical language.
The Arabic texts containing this mathematical wisdom finally made their way to Europe -- which is to say Spain -- in the 11th and 12th centuries.
This is the letter sheen, and it makes the sound we think of as SH -- "sh."
And this is a word that appears throughout early mathematics, such as this 10th-century derivation of roots.
The problem for the Medieval Spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter sheen and the word shayun can't be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn't have that SH, that "sh" sound.
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I'm a medical illustrator, and I come from a slightly different point of view.
If you look at the math, E=mc squared, if you look at the cosmological constant, where there's an anthropic ideal, where you see that life had to evolve from the numbers that describe the universe -- these are things that are really difficult to understand.
It's almost like that old recipe for chicken soup where you boil the chicken until the flavor is just gone.
We don't want to do that to our students.
And I had a telephone call from Robert Lue at Harvard, in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department, a couple of years ago. He asked me if my team and I would be interested and willing to really change how medical and scientific education is done at Harvard.
And each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around, right now, inside each one of your 100 trillion cells.
(Applause)
And I'm about to show you some stop-motion footage that I made recently where you'll see bacteria accumulating minerals from their environment over the period of an hour.
So what you're seeing here is the bacteria metabolizing, and as they do so they create an electrical charge.
And these metals accumulate as minerals on the surface of the bacteria.
Removing the salts from water -- particularly seawater -- through reverse osmosis is a critical technique for countries who do not have access to clean drinking water around the globe.
This takes energy, producing clean water.
So I work in Singapore at the moment, and this is a place that's really a leading place for desalination technology.
And this is where my collaboration with bacteria comes into play.
And what you can see here is the beginning of an industry in a test tube, a mining industry that is in harmony with nature.
This is known as the Theme Building; that is its name for reasons that are still very murky.
When it was uncovered, it ushered in a new era of streamlined, archaically futuristic design called Googie, which came to be synonymous with the Jet Age, a misnomer.
(Applause) (Music) Ah yes, a table.
And on top of it, the juicy salif.
Unlike the Theme Building, this is not alien technology.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And for them, autism was devastating.
They prefer to look at people rather than at things, and even as they're looking at people, they look at people's eyes, because the eye is the window to the other person's experiences, so much so that they even prefer to look at people who are looking at them rather than people who are looking away.
And it's out of this mutually reinforcing choreography that a lot that is of importance to the emergence of mind -- the social mind, the social brain -- depends on.
And soon enough, they start to learn about the meaning of things, because when somebody is looking at something or somebody is pointing at something, they're not just getting a directional cue.
Well, this is a 15-month-old little girl, and she has autism.
Now, remember that we learn a great deal by sharing experiences.
Well, autism is the most strongly genetic condition of all developmental disorders.
And it's a brain disorder.
There are those individuals who are profoundly intellectually disabled but there are those that are gifted.
When I started in this field, we thought there were four individuals with autism per 10,000 -- a very rare condition.
There are millions of individuals with autism all around us.
There are over a hundred genes that are associated with autism.
What is important and what is not.
If we measured things that are, evolutionarily, highly conserved, and developmentally very early-emerging -- things that are online from the first weeks of life -- we could push the detection of autism all the way to those first months, and that's what we are doing now.
What we want is to make sure that those individuals with autism can be free from the devastating consequences that come with it at times, the profound intellectual disabilities, the lack of language, the profound, profound isolation.
And there are those individuals who have incredible artistic abilities.
Like most journalists, I'm an idealist.
I love unearthing good stories, especially untold stories.
What emerges is a truly sad, horrific tale of a young girl and her family trapped in poverty.
She was raped numerous times by many men.
Perhaps the addition of Ms. Goode is what made this story more complete.
The Global Media Monitoring Project has found that stories by female reporters are more likely to challenge stereotypes than those by male reporters.
Wired magazine, November 2010.
How many people knew the founders of Facebook and Google before their faces were on a magazine cover?
This is its cover from November 15, 2010.
A recent global survey found that 73 percent of the top media-management jobs are still held by men.
But this is also about something far more complex: our own unconscious biases and blind spots.
He told the former ombudsman at National Public Radio, who was doing a report on how women fare in NPR coverage, unconscious bias flows throughout most of our lives.
Now, I don't know if one of the editors was a woman, but that can make the biggest difference.
The Dallas Morning News won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for a series it did on women around the world, but one of the reporters told me she's convinced it never would have happened if they had not had a female assistant foreign editor, and they would not have gotten some of those stories without female reporters and editors on the ground, particularly one on female genital mutilation -- men would just not be allowed into those situations.
This is an important point to consider, because much of our foreign policy now revolves around countries where the treatment of women is an issue, such as Afghanistan.
It's important to keep talking about this, in light of Lara Logan.
She was the CBS News correspondent who was brutally sexually assaulted in Egypt's Tahrir Square, right after this photo was taken.
I never heard anyone say this about Anderson Cooper and his crew, who were attacked covering the same story.
One way to get more women into leadership is to have other women mentor them.
But this is not just a job for super-journalists or my organization.
You all have a stake in a strong, vibrant media.
Narrator: An event seen from one point of view gives one impression.
Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression.
Dad helped design the control panels for the IBM 360 computer.
All right, exactly 36 years ago this week, that's right, I was in a poorly designed automobile that hit a poorly designed guardrail on a poorly designed road in Pennsylvania, and plummeted down a 200-foot embankment and killed two people in the car.
So what you are looking at here has completely changed my life, I mean totally changed my life.
The difference is intent.
That's right, that's right; I'm no longer a victim.
Now it seems simple, but actually I think in our society and culture in general, we have a huge problem with intent.
In fact, the whole technology of sperm extraction for spinal cord-injured males was invented by a veterinarian.
But consider what Plato is doing here. What is he doing?
All of a sudden, human existence needed an intent.
Reality itself needed a designer.
And we can't just imitate the past. No.
Here's my favorite design moment: In the city of Kinshasa in Zaire in the 1990s, I was working for ABC News, and I was reporting on the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator, the brutal dictator in Zaire, who raped and pillaged that country.
Thirty-six years ago at nearly this moment, a 19-year-old boy awoke from a coma to ask a nurse a question, but the nurse was already there with an answer.
"Nurse! Is this the 28th or the 29th?"
So my freshman year of college I signed up for an internship in the housing unit at Greater Boston Legal Services.
Showed up the first day ready to make coffee and photocopies, but was paired with this righteous, deeply inspired attorney named Jeff Purcell, who thrust me onto the front lines from the very first day.
And over the course of nine months I had the chance to have dozens of conversations with low-income families in Boston who would come in presenting with housing issues, but always had an underlying health issue.
And at the end of my freshman year of college, I read an article about the work that Dr. Barry Zuckerman was doing as Chair of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center.
And his first hire was a legal services attorney to represent the patients.
So I called Barry, and with his blessing, in October 1995 walked into the waiting room of the pediatrics clinic at Boston Medical Center.
And the exhaustion of mothers who had taken two, three, sometimes four buses to bring their child to the doctor was just palpable.
And over the course of six months, I would corner them in the hallway and ask them a sort of naive but fundamental question: "If you had unlimited resources, what's the one thing you would give your patients?"
They said, "Every day we have patients that come into the clinic -- child has an ear infection, I prescribe antibiotics.
And I don't even ask about those issues because there's nothing I can do.
In that clinic, even today, there are two social workers for 24,000 pediatric patients, which is better than a lot of the clinics out there.
Patients then take their prescriptions to our desk in the clinic waiting room where we have a core of well-trained college student advocates who work side by side with these families to connect them out to the existing landscape of community resources.
So 18 months ago I got this email that changed my life.
In 1965 Dr. Geiger founded one of the first two community health centers in this country, in a brutally poor area in the Mississippi Delta.
And so many of his patients came in presenting with malnutrition that be began prescribing food for them.
And when the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, D.C. -- which was funding Geiger's clinic -- found out about this, they were furious.
(Laughter) So when I got this email from Dr. Geiger, I knew I was supposed to be proud to be part of this history.
But the truth is I was devastated.
How is it that if for decades we had a pretty straightforward tool for keeping patients, and especially low-income patients, healthy, that we didn't use it?
And the way I think about this is that healthcare is like any other system.
And we chose to use the prescription for that purpose.
So just a few miles from here at Children's National Medical Center, when patients come into the doctor's office, they're asked a few questions.
They're asked, "Are you running out of food at the end of the month?
And our volunteers can then work with them to connect patients to healthy food and excercise programs in their communities.
And on the other hand, it's a radical transformation of the electronic medical record from a static repository of diagnostic information to a health promotion tool.
In the private sector, when you squeeze that kind of additional value out of a fixed-cost investment, it's called a billion-dollar company.
But in my world, it's called reduced obesity and diabetes.
It's called healthcare -- a system where doctors can prescribe solutions to improve health, not just manage disease.
So every day in this country three million patients pass through about 150,000 clinic waiting rooms in this country.
So it's a brutal winter in the Northeast, your kid has asthma, your heat just got turned off, and of course you're in the waiting room of the ER, because the cold air triggered your child's asthma.
What if a small part of that next healthcare workforce were the 11 million college students in this country?
And this isn't just a sort of short-term workforce to connect patients to basic resources, it's a next generation healthcare leadership pipeline who've spent two, three, four years in the clinic waiting room talking to patients about their most basic health needs.
And they leave with the conviction, the ability and the efficacy to realize our most basic aspirations for health care.
So Mia Lozada is Chief Resident of Internal Medicine at UCSF Medical Center, but for three years as an undergraduate she was a Health Leads volunteer in the clinic waiting room at Boston Medical Center.
When I write a prescription, I think, can the family read the prescription?
Do they have transportation to the pharmacy?
Now none of these solutions -- the prescription pad, the electronic medical record, the waiting room, the army of college students -- are perfect.
And I sat down with him and I said, "Jeff, I have this idea that we could mobilize college students to address patients' most basic health needs."
But he said this, "Rebecca, when you have a vision, you have an obligation to realize that vision.
You must pursue that vision."
But the truth is I've spent every waking minute nearly since then chasing that vision.
I believe that we all have a vision for healthcare in this country.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
Evidence suggests that humans in all ages and from all cultures create their identity in some kind of narrative form.
Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable.
Cinema is arguably the 20th century's most influential art form.
And so in 2006 we set up FILMCLUB, an organization that ran weekly film screenings in schools followed by discussions.
In the first nine months we ran 25 clubs across the U.K., with kids in age groups between five and 18 watching a film uninterrupted for 90 minutes.
The film that changed my life is a 1951 film by Vittorio De Sica, "Miracle in Milan."
But for my father, the emotional and artistic importance of De Sica's vision was so great that he chose to celebrate his half-century with his three teenage children and 30 of their friends, "In order," he said, "to pass the baton of concern and hope on to the next generation."
In the last shot of "Miracle in Milan," slum-dwellers float skyward on flying brooms.
Shortly after "Mr. Smith" became a FILMCLUB classic, there was a week of all-night filibustering in the House of Lords.
After two years in hiding, my grandfather appeared in London.
As one 12-year-old said after watching "Wizard of Oz," "Every person should watch this, because unless you do you may not know that you too have a heart."
If we want different values we have to tell a different story, a story that understands that an individual narrative is an essential component of a person's identity, that a collective narrative is an essential component of a cultural identity, and without it it is impossible to imagine yourself as part of a group.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough.
So, how do you find a buried city in a vast landscape?
(Laughter) So what we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes.
And, five meters down, underneath a thick layer of mud, we found a dense layer of pottery.
These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
Oh yeah, great movie, right? -- Well, I saw Matthew Broderick on the screen, and so I thought, "Sweet! Ferris Bueller. I'll watch this!"
And there's this quote that the main character, Arnold, tells his mother as they're fighting about who he is and the life that he lives.
When I finally got to a place in my life where I came out and accepted who I was, and was really quite happy, to tell you the truth, I was happily gay and I guess that's supposed to be right because gay means happy too.
I've even heard politicians say that the gay lifestyle is a greater threat to civilization than terrorism.
I drink coffee.
This is the gay lifestyle.
(Applause) When my partner, Steve, and I first started dating, he told me this story about penguins.
And he says, "I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
So I wear this whenever I have to do something that makes me a little nervous, like, I don't know, a TEDx talk.
I wear this when I am apart from him for a long period of time.
And sometimes I just wear it just because.
How many people out there are in love? Anyone in love out there?
You might be gay.
(Applause) You may want to tell your spouse. Who, if they're in love, might be gay as well.
You too might be gay! Because I know some gay people who are also single.
(Laughter) I've paid my dues on time, (Laughter) I've marched in gay pride flags parades and the whole nine, and I've yet to see a copy of the gay agenda.
But then something wonderful happened: I was out shopping, as I tend to do, and I came across a bootleg copy of the official gay agenda.
(Music) The gay agenda, people!
The U.S. Constitution is the gay agenda.
I was blown away when I saw it. I was like, wait, this is the gay agenda?
But there it is. The gay agenda.
Specifically, this little amendment right here: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."
If I could brag for a second, I have a 15-year-old son from my marriage.
There was a time in which, I don't know, people who were black couldn't have the same rights.
People who happened to be women didn't have the same rights, couldn't vote.
There was a point in our history in which, if you were considered disabled, that an employer could just fire you, before the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Look to your right.
Thank you.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
And I loved that sense, so I started skating when I was about 10 years old, in 1977, and when I did, I picked it up pretty quickly.
So, as she mentioned, that is overstated for sure, but that's why they called me the godfather of modern street skating.
Freestyle itself -- we developed all these flat ground tricks, as you saw, but there was evolving a new kind of skateboarding, where guys were taking it to the streets, and they were using that ollie, like I showed you.
See how it's sliding on the backside?
There's something called a Primo slide.
(Laughter) And so, when it was the crazy thing.
I don't know how many of you guys have had surgery, but -- (Laughter) you are so helpless, right?
Freestyle oriented, manual down -- wheelie down.
So that's how that works to me, the creative process, the process itself, of street skating.
What they do is very similar to our creative process.
It was the red one or the blue one.
(Applause)
This is a recent cover of New York Magazine.
I call this The Giacometti Code, a TED exclusive.
(Laughter) In 1996, he shot himself in the head on December ninth -- which incidentally is Judi Dench's birthday.
He languished until the following afternoon when he finally succumbed to a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 64 -- which incidentally is how old Alberto Giacometti was when he died.
Where was Wislawa Szymborska during all this?
100 years to the day after the death of Alfred Nobel himself.
Coincidence? No, it's creepy.
(Laughter) Coincidence to me has a much simpler metric.
In fact there are people in this room who may not want me to show you this clip we're about to see.
And folks, you can buy a copy of Bill Clinton's "My Life" from the bookstore here at TED.
This is page 474 on your paperbacks if you're following along: "Though it was getting better, I still wasn't satisfied with the inaugural address.
What happened to William Jefferson Clinton?
But if he were here -- (Laughter) he might remind us, as he does in the wrap-up to his fine autobiography, that on this day Bill Clinton began a journey -- a journey that saw him go on to become the first Democrat president elected to two consecutive terms in decades.
And after that Will bounced around from one family member to another, until, by the time he was nine years old, he was essentially living on his own.
Will eventually joined a gang and committed a number of very serious crimes, including, most seriously of all, a horrible, tragic murder.
Before I do that, though, I want to spend a couple of minutes telling you how a death penalty case unfolds, and then I want to tell you two lessons that I have learned over the last 20 years as a death penalty lawyer from watching well more than a hundred cases unfold in this way.
The third chapter is an even more complicated legal proceeding known as a federal habeas corpus proceeding.
And yet, at the same time that we continue to execute about the same number of people every year, the number of people who we're sentencing to death on an annual basis has dropped rather steeply.
Death penalty opponents take great solace in the fact that death penalty support in Texas is at an all-time low.
It means that it's in the low 60 percent.
That's the first thing I've learned.
Eighty percent of the people on death row are people who had exposure to the juvenile justice system.
That's the second lesson that I've learned.
How do we do that?
When our son Lincoln was working on that math problem two weeks ago, it was a big, gnarly problem.
We have these four chapters of a death penalty story, but what happens before that story begins?
How can we intervene in the life of a murderer before he's a murderer?
What we're talking about today is also rocket science.
My client Will and 80 percent of the people on death row had five chapters in their lives that came before the four chapters of the death penalty story.
Now, during each of these five chapters: when his mother was pregnant with him; in his early childhood years; when he was in elementary school; when he was in middle school and then high school; and when he was in the juvenile justice system -- during each of those five chapters, there were a wide variety of things that society could have done.
There are other states that do that, but we don't.
There are a handful of states that do that; Texas doesn't.
There are two professors in the Northeast -- one at Yale and one at Maryland -- they set up a school that is attached to a juvenile prison.
Now, what do all of these things have in common?
Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense.
I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will.
I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that."
I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Those of you who have seen the film "Moneyball," or have read the book by Michael Lewis, will be familiar with the story of Billy Beane.
It's a condition; it has to be treated. Strike two is if you get pregnant.
You have to have a high-tech experience of pregnancy, otherwise something might go wrong.
Strike three is menopause.
Or even worse, if you are diagnosed with something eventually, and the doctor didn't order that test, you get sued.
We are all responsible.
Well, he's right, but he didn't say to me, well, you have pre-obesity or you have pre-diabetes, or anything like that. He didn't say, better start taking this Statin, you need to lower your cholesterol.
Billy Beane, by the way, learned the same thing.
As a magician, I'm always interested in performances that incorporate elements of illusion.
And one of the most remarkable was the tanagra theater, which was popular in the early part of the 20th century.
So let the story begin.
Lightning lit the sky, and a baby was born.
Let me show you.
Marco Tempest: Now Tesla's brain worked in the most extraordinary way.
Probably a form of synesthesia.
It is the magic of science.
(Applause) Tesla has over 700 patents to his name: radio, wireless telegraphy, remote control, robotics.
But the high point was the realization of a childhood dream: harnessing the raging powers of Niagara Falls, and bringing light to the city.
A world telegraphy center -- imagine news, messages, sounds, images delivered to any point in the world instantly and wirelessly.
MT: It's a great idea; it was a huge project. Expensive, too.
MT: Nikola Tesla died on the 7th of January, 1943.
His legacy is with us still.
Tesla became the man who lit the world, but this was only the beginning.
(Applause)
Good evening.
It's actually very hot.
What about Seoul? Seoul, because of broadcast rights, all the games have been in the late afternoon. Sun has already been set, so the games have been perceived as comfortable.
This is because there are more parameters influencing our thermal comfort, which is the sun, the direct sun, the diffuse sun, which is wind, strong wind, mild wind, which is air humidity, which is the radiant temperature of the surroundings where we are in.
Because of our metabolism, we as human beings, we produce heat.
But that's not all what we need to do. We need to use active systems.
You know, my grandfather died many years ago when I was little, but his love for Mae West lives on as a misspelling in the DNA of his progeny.
Now I'm in the business of creating art that will definitely even outlive me, and I think about what I want to leave behind through those paintings.
You know, sometimes forgetting is so important to remain idealistic.
You know, we carry so much baggage, from our parents, from our society, from so many people -- fears, insecurities -- and our 200-year plan really lists all our childhood problems that we have to expire.
That is a picture of my mother, and she recently got a Facebook account.
(Laughter) She gave me an indulgent smile, and as punishment, she said, "Tomorrow I'm teaching a class on Indian history, and you are sitting in it, and I'm grading you."
I was so inspired.
I went and created my own version of Indian history.
This is my version of Indian history.
You know, I used to believe that education is the most important tool to leave a meaningful legacy.
Education is great.
I'd like to make the argument that creativity is the most important tool we have.
Thank you so much.
The world needs you, badly.
Although varying among disciplines -- say, astrophysics, molecular genetics, the immunology, the microbiology, the public health, to the new area of the human body as a symbiont, to public health, environmental science.
Traditional fields of study are going to continue to grow and in so doing, inevitably they will meet and create new disciplines.
The search for knowledge is in our genes.
Our political leaders need at least a modest degree of scientific literacy, which most badly lack today -- no applause, please.
A couple of them were students in a course I was giving on evolutionary biology.
I swallowed my pride, and I learned calculus.
In science, the exact opposite is the case: March away from the sound of the guns.
So Wilson's Principle Number Three: March away from the sound of the guns.
In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity, and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution.
Scientists, pure mathematicians among them, follow one or the other of two pathways: First through early discoveries, a problem is identified and a solution is sought.
Or larger, what's the role of dark matter in the expansion of the universe?
(Applause) Oh, thank you.
Thank you very much.
In fact, I use basically the same technology as this 14th-century classroom.
We announced the class on July 29th, and within two weeks, 50,000 people had signed up for it.
And that's exactly what we were aiming for.
Now, from Khan Academy, we saw that short 10-minute videos worked much better than trying to record an hour-long lecture and put it on the small-format screen.
And we succeeded.
Or, I should say, the students succeeded.
More important is motivation and determination.
Now, the class ran 10 weeks, and in the end, about half of the 160,000 students watched at least one video each week, and over 20,000 finished all the homework, putting in 50 to 100 hours.
(Applause)
When I was in elementary school, my next door neighbor, he gave me a book for my birthday.
Now, this isn't new. Anyone who's used Google Earth has seen this before, but one thing we like to say in our group is, we do the opposite of Google Earth.
Here we have the Mars Science Laboratory on its way to Mars, just launched last weekend.
And I mention this because there's this strange public perception that NASA's dead, that the space shuttles stopped flying and all of the sudden there's no more spacecraft out there.
Well, a lot of what NASA does is robotic exploration, and we have a lot of spacecraft out there.
I'm going to double-click on Uranus, and we can see Uranus rotating on its side along with its moons.
You can see how it's tilted at about 89 degrees.
But to make it more interesting, I'm going to speed up time, and we can watch as Voyager 1 flies by Titan, which is a hazy moon of Saturn.
I'm going to go back to today, now, and I want to show you where Voyager 1 is.
Thank you. (Applause)
Over the last two decades, India has become a global hub for software development and offshoring of back office services, as we call it, and what we were interested in finding out was that because of this huge industry that has started over the last two decades in India, offshoring software development and back office services, there's been a flight of white collar jobs from the developed world to India.
Now, the Western elites, however, have said this fear is misplaced.
Could India become a source, or a global hub, of innovation, just like it's become a global hub for back office services and software development?
They said, instead, if you want to see real creativity, go to Silicon Valley, and look at companies like Google, Microsoft, Intel.
Well, interestingly, what you find there is, usually you are introduced to the head of the innovation lab or the R&D center as they may call it, and more often than not, it's an Indian. (Laughter) So I immediately said, "Well, but you could not have been educated in India, right?
When you take this broader conceptualization of innovation, what we found was, India is well represented in innovation, but the innovation that is being done in India is of a form we did not anticipate, and what we did was we called it "invisible innovation."
And specifically, there are four types of invisible innovation that are coming out of India.
Now, when you consider the fact that, historically, the R&D center of a multinational company was always in the headquarters, or in the country of origin of that multinational company, to have 750 R&D centers of multinational corporations in India is truly a remarkable figure.
What he did was he looked at those companies that had an R&D center in USA and in India, and then he looked at a patent that was filed out of the U.S. and a similar patent filed out of the same company's subsidiary in India, so he's now comparing the patents of R&D centers in the U.S. with R&D centers in India of the same company to find out what is the quality of the patents filed out of the Indian centers and how do they compare with the quality of the patents filed out of the U.S. centers?
The second kind of invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call outsourcing innovation to Indian companies, where many companies today are contracting Indian companies to do a major part of their product development work for their global products which are going to be sold to the entire world.
For example, in the pharma industry, a lot of the molecules are being developed, but you see a major part of that work is being sent to India.
But of course, when you climb onto the Boeing 787, you are not going to know that this is invisible innovation out of India.
The third kind of invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call process innovations, because of an injection of intelligence by Indian firms.
And the last kind of innovation, invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call management innovation.
So, what I'm trying to say is, what we are finding in our research is, that if products for end users is the visible tip of the innovation iceberg, India is well represented in the invisible, large, submerged portion of the innovation iceberg.
You can't be a professor without having been a student.
India has the youngest growing population in the world.
In 2003, they had 300,000 employees, or 330,000 employees, out of which, 135,000 were in America, 9,000 were in India.
In 2009, they had 400,000 employees, by which time the U.S. employees had moved to 105,000, whereas the Indian employees had gone to 100,000.
There are 433,000 people now at IBM, out of which 98,000 are remaining in the U.S., and 150,000 are in India.
So you tell me, is IBM an American company, or an Indian company? (Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. (Applause)
Allison Hunt: My three minutes hasn't started yet, has it?
Five weeks ago I had total hip replacement surgery.
But first you need to know two things about me.
I'm Canadian, and I'm the youngest of seven kids.
Now, in Canada, we have that great healthcare system.
And she referred me to an orthopedic surgeon, also free.
I'm going to replace your hip -- it's about an 18-month wait."
18 more months.
I'd already waited 10 months, and I had to wait 18 more months.
Oh yeah.
We do not think that way.
Hey, are you from Canada? "Oh, me too! Hi!"
In the window of the hospital's tiny gift shop there was a sign that said, "Volunteers Needed." Hmm.
They were desperate for volunteers because the average age of the volunteer at the hospital gift shop was 75.
Every Friday morning I was at the gift shop.
Two reasons.
And in this case, I quickly found this: The furthest point from the center of the Earth is not the tip of Mount Everest, like I might have thought, it's the tip of this mountain: Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.
The Earth spins, of course, as it travels around the sun, so the Earth bulges a little bit around the middle, like some Earthlings.
Chimborazo!
Chimborazo!
There are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet.
Something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet, including plants, are beetles.
Like my next link: The chemical language of pheromones.
There is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine that might be an aphrodisiac.
So those of you who only eat your chocolate, you might have to experiment.
I do like sympathy. I do like magic.
The link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind.
Common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands, usually the left hand.
Pan troglodytes, the name we give him, means "cave dweller."
In between those two landmarks in Ham's life, he flew into space.
A Nazi officer took over the Gagarin household, and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut.
Fifty years later, as a tribute, the International Space Station, which is still up there tonight, synced its orbit with Gagarin's orbit, at the exact same time of day, and filmed it, so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride, possibly a lonely one, the first person to ever see such a thing.
What this means is that if you could shrink the Earth to the size of a billiard ball, if you could take planet Earth, with all its mountain tops and caves and rainforests, astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees, voodoo dolls, fireflies, chocolate, sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea, you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball, it would be as smooth as a billiard ball, presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle.
Chimborazo!
(Applause)
So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave this toy car to his 8-year-old son.
Actually, I argue that there is another revolution going on, and it's the one that has to do with open-source hardware and the maker's movement, because the printer that my friend used to print the toy is actually open-source.
And also this is part of a large community where there are thousands of people around the world that are actually making these kinds of printers, and there's a lot of innovation happening because it's all open-source.
You don't need anybody's permission to create something great.
It's an open-source project.
You have to have something that actually interacts with people.
So how do I make something that even a kid can use?
I have 11-year-old kids stop me and show me stuff they built for Arduino that's really scary to see the capabilities that kids have when you give them the tools.
This is the equivalent of sketching on paper done with electronics.
You know, when I was learning about programming, I learned by looking at other people's code, or looking at other people's circuits in magazines.
And this is a good way to learn, by looking at other people's work.
Or, the software is GPL, so it's open-source as well.
Now, Arduino itself is made of a lot of different open-source components that maybe individually are hard to use for a 12-year-old kid, so Arduino wraps everything together into a mashup of open-source technologies where we try to give them the best user experience to get something done quickly.
This one is made by a company called Adafruit, which is run by this woman called Limor Fried, also known as Ladyada, who is one of the heroes of the open-source hardware movement and the maker movement.
So, this idea that you have a new, sort of turbo-charged DIY community that believes in open-source, in collaboration, collaborates online, collaborates in different spaces.
Or you have websites, like this one, like Instructables, where people actually teach each other about anything.
So let's look at some projects.
So this one is a quadcopter.
It's a small model helicopter.
In a way, it's a toy, no?
And so this one was military technology a few years ago, and now it's open-source, easy to use, you can buy it online.
It's also used, Arduino's used, in serious places like, you know, the Large Hadron Collider.
Or it can be used to make an assistive device.
This is a glove that understands the sign language and transforms the gestures you make into sounds and writes the words that you're signing on a display And again, this is made of all different parts you can find on all the websites that sell Arduino-compatible parts, and you assemble it into a project.
Or this is a project from the ITP part of NYU, where they met with this boy who has a severe disability, cannot play with the PS3, so they built this device that allows the kid to play baseball although he has limited movement capability.
He has 280,000 followers.
When the Fukushima disaster happened, a bunch of people in Japan, they realized that the information that the government was giving wasn't really open and really reliable, so they built this Geiger counter, plus Arduino, plus network interface. They made 100 of them and gave them to people around Japan, and essentially the data that they gathered gets published on this website called Cosm, another website they built, so you can actually get reliable real-time information from the field, and you can get unbiased information.
Or this machine here, it's from the DIY bio movement, and it's one of the steps that you need in order to process DNA, and again, it's completely open-source from the ground up.
And so when we had to make our own educational robot, we just went to them and said, you know, "You design it, because you know exactly what is needed to make a great robot that excites kids."
There's a giant maze, and Joey's sitting there, and the maze is moving when you tilt the tablet.
So we worked with a design studio called Habits, in Milan, to make this mirror, which is completely open-source.
This doubles also as an iPod speaker.
So the idea is that the hardware, the software, the design of the object, the fabrication, everything about this project is open-source and you can make it yourself.
There's, like, thousands of ideas that I — You know, it would take seven hours for me to do all the presentations.
It's a satellite that goes into space, which is probably the least open-source thing you can imagine, and it contains an Arduino connected to a bunch of sensors. So if you know how to use Arduino, you can actually upload your experiments into this satellite and run them.
So imagine, if you as a high school can have the satellite for a week and do satellite space experiments like that.
So, as I said, there's lots of examples, and I'm going to stop here. And I just want to thank the Arduino community for being the best, and just every day making lots of projects.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) And thanks to the community.
Why is this happening?
The technology revolution is opening the world.
The Internet is becoming a giant global computer, and every time you go on it, you upload a video, you do a Google search, you remix something, you're programming this big global computer that we all share.
Now a new generation is opening up the world as well.
I call them the Net Generation.
I'm a digital immigrant.
I had to learn the language.
I mean, think about Wall Street.
So this technology push, a demographic kick from a new generation and a demand pull from a new economic global environment is causing the world to open up.
Now, I think, in fact, we're at a turning point in human history, where we can finally now rebuild many of the institutions of the Industrial Age around a new set of principles.
The first is collaboration.
His name is Rob McEwen.
And he says, "Well I used to be a banker and now I'm a gold miner."
He viewed talent differently.
The winner was a computer graphics company that built a three dimensional model of the mine where you can helicopter underground and see where the gold is.
Now secondly, openness is about transparency.
You need to have integrity as part of your bones and your DNA as an organization, because if you don't, you'll be unable to build trust, and trust is a sine qua non of this new network world.
Now, the third meaning and corresponding principle of openness is about sharing.
Now this is different than transparency.
Transparency is about the communication of information.
And there are all kinds of famous stories about this.
IBM gave away 400 million dollars of software to the Linux movement, and that gave them a multi-billion dollar payoff.
Now, conventional wisdom says, "Well, hey, our intellectual property belongs to us, and if someone tries to infringe it, we're going to get out our lawyers and we're going to sue them."
I'll give you an example.
Now, the fourth meaning of openness, and corresponding principle, is about empowerment.
The open world is bringing freedom.
Social media didn't create the revolution; it was created by a new generation of young people who wanted jobs and hope and who didn't want to be treated as subjects anymore.
You know, during the Tunisian revolution, snipers associated with the regime were killing unarmed students in the street.
So the students would take their mobile devices, take a picture, triangulate the location, send that picture to friendly military units, who'd come in and take out the snipers.
For these kids, it was a military tool to defend unarmed people from murderers.
It was a tool of self-defense.
You know, as we speak today, young people are being killed in Syria, and up until three months ago, if you were injured on the street, an ambulance would pick you up, take you to the hospital, you'd go in, say, with a broken leg, and you'd come out with a bullet in your head.
So this is a time of great change.
Up until two years ago, all revolutions in human history had a leadership, and when the old regime fell, the leadership and the organization would take power.
If you go back a few hundred years, all around the world it was a very closed society.
It was agrarian, and the means of production and political system was called feudalism, and knowledge was concentrated in the church and the nobility.
There was no concept of progress.
But then Johannes Gutenberg came along with his great invention, and, over time, the society opened up.
Martin Luther called the printing press "God's highest act of grace."
The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge.
The Internet gives us access, not just to information and knowledge, but to the intelligence contained in the crania of other people on a global basis.
To me, this is not an information age, it's an age of networked intelligence.
And there's leadership, but there's no one leader.
Now, is this some kind of fanciful analogy, or could we actually learn something from this?
This is a huge collaboration.
And there's a real sense of interdependence, that the individual birds somehow understand that their interests are in the interest of the collective.
Could we go beyond just sharing information and knowledge?
Could we start to share our intelligence?
Could we create some kind of collective intelligence that goes beyond an individual or a group or a team to create, perhaps, some kind of consciousness on a global basis?
(Applause)
I've spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals.
Now I'm going to quote from some of my writings: "I opened the door to my studio apartment.
'Hi,' I said, and then I returned to the couch, where I sat in silence for several moments.
'Thank you for coming, Steve.
Crumbling world, word, voice.
(Applause) Thank you.
Let's start with the definition of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is a brain disease.
For example, when I'm psychotic I often have the delusion that I've killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts.
Imagine having a nightmare while you're awake.
This person is likely to have some form of schizophrenia.
So the following episode happened the seventh week of my first semester of my first year at Yale Law School.
'This is the real me,' I announced, waving my arms above my head.
And then, late on a Friday night, on the roof of the Yale Law School, I began to sing, and not quietly either.
I don't believe in joints, but they do hold your body together.'" -- It's an example of loose associations. -- "Eventually I made my way back to my dorm room, and once there, I couldn't settle down.
Sitting on my bed, I rocked back and forth, moaning in fear and isolation."
A sound came out of my mouth that I'd never heard before: half groan, half scream, barely human and pure terror.
(Laughter) During the next year, I would spend five months in a psychiatric hospital.
Every week in the United States, it's been estimated that one to three people die in restraints.
In fact, until very recently, and I'm sure some people still hold it as a view, that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe.
Eventually, I came to Los Angeles to teach at the University of Southern California Law School.
I felt that if I could manage without medication, I could prove that, after all, I wasn't really mentally ill, it was some terrible mistake.
Kaplan would later describe me as 'writhing in agony.' Even in this state, what he accurately described as acutely and forwardly psychotic, I refused to take more medication.
Once in his office, I sat on his couch, folded over, and began muttering.
I could no longer deny the truth, and I could not change it.
There are people with schizophrenia, and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker.
We need to invest more resources into research and treatment of mental illness.
American prisons and jails are filled with people who suffer from severe mental illness, and many of them are there because they never received adequate treatment.
What those of us who suffer with mental illness want is what everybody wants: in the words of Sigmund Freud, "to work and to love."
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. You're very kind. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
The phenomenon you saw here for a brief moment is called quantum levitation and quantum locking.
Superconductivity is a quantum state of matter, and it occurs only below a certain critical temperature.
However, only recently, due to several technological advancements, we are now able to demonstrate to you quantum levitation and quantum locking.
So, a superconductor is defined by two properties.
That sounds complicated, right?
But what is electrical resistance?
So, electricity is the flow of electrons inside a material.
And these electrons, while flowing, they collide with the atoms, and in these collisions they lose a certain amount of energy.
However, inside a superconductor there are no collisions, so there is no energy dissipation.
But not here, because it is a quantum effect.
But that's not all, because superconductors don't like magnetic fields.
Why? Because it is a quantum phenomenon. It's quantum physics.
And it turns out that they behave like quantum particles.
So, this is why we call this effect quantum levitation and quantum locking.
But what happens to the superconductor when we put it inside a magnetic field?
And when I place it on top of a regular magnet, it just stays locked in midair.
(Applause) Now, this is not just levitation. It's not just repulsion.
So, this is quantum locking -- actually locking -- three-dimensional locking of the superconductor.
You won't be surprised to hear that if I take this circular magnet, in which the magnetic field is the same all around, the superconductor will be able to freely rotate around the axis of the magnet.
So, we have quantum locking and we can levitate it on top of this magnet.
And, yeah, the amazing part is that this superconductor that you see here is only half a micron thick. It's extremely thin.
And this extremely thin layer is able to levitate more than 70,000 times its own weight.
(Applause) You see, it's quantum locking, not levitation.
Now, while I'll let it circulate for a little more, let me tell you a little bit about superconductors.
Now -- (Laughter) -- So we now know that we are able to transfer enormous amount of currents inside superconductors, so we can use them to produce strong magnetic fields, such as needed in MRI machines, particle accelerators and so on.
But we can also store energy using superconductors, because we have no dissipation.
Imagine you could back up a single power station with a single superconducting cable.
But what is the future of quantum levitation and quantum locking?
Well, let me answer this simple question by giving you an example.
This two-millimeter-thin superconducting layer could hold 1,000 kilograms, a small car, in my hand.
Amazing. Thank you.
(Applause)
I study the future of crime and terrorism, and frankly, I'm afraid.
I've been a street police officer, an undercover investigator, a counter-terrorism strategist, and I've worked in more than 70 countries around the world.
In the hands of the TED community, these are awesome tools which will bring about great change for our world, but in the hands of suicide bombers, the future can look quite different.
I started observing technology and how criminals were using it as a young patrol officer.
Twenty years later, criminals are still using mobile phones, but they're also building their own mobile phone networks, like this one, which has been deployed in all 31 states of Mexico by the narcos.
Think about the infrastructure to build it.
And then think about this: Why can't I get a cell phone signal in San Francisco? (Laughter) How is this possible? (Laughter) It makes no sense. (Applause) We consistently underestimate what criminals and terrorists can do.
Technology has made our world increasingly open, and for the most part, that's great, but all of this openness may have unintended consequences.
The men that carried that attack out were armed with AK-47s, explosives and hand grenades.
They threw these hand grenades at innocent people as they sat eating in cafes and waited to catch trains on their way home from work.
Guns and bombs are nothing new.
What was different this time is the way that the terrorists used modern information communications technologies to locate additional victims and slaughter them.
They also monitored the Internet and social media to monitor the progress of their attacks and how many people they had killed.
At one point during the 60-hour siege, the terrorists were going room to room trying to find additional victims.
They came upon a suite on the top floor of the hotel, and they kicked down the door and they found a man hiding by his bed.
He was the second-wealthiest businessman in India, and after discovering this information, the terrorist war room gave the order to the terrorists on the ground in Mumbai.
("Kill him.") We all worry about our privacy settings on Facebook, but the fact of the matter is, our openness can be used against us.
This is the world that we live in.
In the end, 300 people were gravely wounded and over 172 men, women and children lost their lives that day.
In fact, many of you will remember the recent Sony PlayStation hack.
There are other avenues of technology that criminals can exploit.
Many of you will remember this super cute video from the last TED, but not all quadcopter swarms are so nice and cute.
Little robots are cute when they play music to you.
Of course, criminals and terrorists weren't the first to give guns to robots. We know where that started.
Every time a new technology is being introduced, criminals are there to exploit it.
The UK I know has some very strict firearms laws.
As we move forward, we'll see new technologies also, like the Internet of Things.
Every day we're connecting more and more of our lives to the Internet, which means that the Internet of Things will soon be the Internet of Things To Be Hacked.
All of the physical objects in our space are being transformed into information technologies, and that has a radical implication for our security, because more connections to more devices means more vulnerabilities.
Criminals understand this.
This is the future that awaits us.
That's troubling, since the human body itself is now becoming an information technology.
As we've seen here, we're transforming ourselves into cyborgs.
Every year, thousands of cochlear implants, diabetic pumps, pacemakers and defibrillators are being implanted in people.
In the United States, there are 60,000 people who have a pacemaker that connects to the Internet.
We're going down to the cellular level these days.
Up until this point, all the technologies I've been talking about have been silicon-based, ones and zeroes, but there's another operating system out there: the original operating system, DNA.
And to hackers, DNA is just another operating system waiting to be hacked.
There are people already working on hacking the software of life, and while most of them are doing this to great good and to help us all, some won't be.
Well, with synthetic biology you can do some pretty neat things.
So how we use yeast in the future is going to be really interesting.
In fact, we may have some really interesting bread and beer as we go into this next century.
The cost of sequencing the human genome is dropping precipitously.
It took us 30 years to get from the introduction of the personal computer to the level of cybercrime we have today, but looking at how biology is proceeding so rapidly, and knowing criminals and terrorists as I do, we may get there a lot faster with biocrime in the future.
Personalized cancer treatments are the flip side of personalized bioweapons, which means you can attack any one individual, including all the people in this picture.
I don't have all the answers, but I know a few things.
So how might we prepare for some of these specific threats, like attacking a president or a prime minister?
We've already seen examples of this working well.
The tools to change the world are in everybody's hands.
This was a technology I would frequently deploy as a police officer.
We've seen paradigm shifts in crime and terrorism.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
My dad has Alzheimer's disease.
My dad was my hero and my mentor for most of my life, and I've spent the last decade watching him disappear.
My dad's not alone. There's about 35 million people globally living with some kind of dementia, and by 2030 they're expecting that to double to 70 million.
It's confusing to watch television, and often very frightening.
I want to be as happy as I can for as long as I can.
A lot of people don't know that Alzheimer's actually has physical symptoms, as well as cognitive symptoms. You lose your sense of balance, you get muscle tremors, and that tends to lead people to being less and less mobile.
Finally, the third thing. I'm trying to become a better person.
I don't want to get Alzheimer's disease.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In the ocean, what is the common point between oil, plastic and radioactivity?
Well, the three big problems have in common that they are man-made problems but they are controlled by natural forces.
And I had a chance to go in the Gulf of Mexico and meet some fishermen and see the terrible conditions in which they were working.
I was working on a very interesting technology at MIT, but it was a very long-term view of how to develop technology, and it was going to be a very expensive technology, and also it would be patented.
So I quit my dream job, and I moved to New Orleans, and I kept on studying how the oil spill was happening.
So the very simple idea was to use the ancient technique of sailing and tacking of the wind to capture or intercept the oil that is drifting down the wind.
What's happening is that, because the boat changes shape, the position of the front sail and the main sail are different to the wind.
So what we are doing is an accelerated evolution of sailing technology.
A fish will move because -- by changing like this, but our boat is propelled by the wind still, and the hull controls the trajectory.
What we really want is that this innovation happens continuously. The inventor and engineers and also the manufacturers and everybody works at the same time, but this would be sterile if this was happening in a parallel and uncrossed process.
You want everybody, like we're doing now, to work at the same time, and that can only happen if these people all together decide to share the information, and that's exactly what open hardware is about.
So what is open hardware?
And I started this project alone in a garage in New Orleans, but quickly after I wanted to publish and share this information, so I made a Kickstarter, which is a crowd-fundraising platform, and in about one month we fundraised 30,000 dollars.
We were peer-learning, we were engineering, we were making things, prototyping, but most importantly we were trying our prototypes in the water as often as possible, to fail as quickly as possible, to learn from.
This is a proud member of Protei from Korea, and on the right side, this is a multiple-masts design proposed by a team in Mexico.
This idea really appealed to Gabriella Levine in New York, and so she decided to prototype this idea that she saw, and she documented every step of the process, and she published it on Instructables, which is a website for sharing inventions.
They also made it into an Instructable, and in less than one week, they had almost 10,000 views, and they got many new friends.
And what puts us together is that we have a common, at least, global understanding of what the word "business" is, or what it should be.
What we're trying to do, or what we believe, because this is how we believe the world really works, is that without the environment you have nothing.
You are laying down in a flexible torpedo, sailing at high speed, controlling the shape of the hull with your legs and controlling the sail with your arms.
Our hope is that we can use open hardware technology to better understand and protect our oceans.
Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
(Laughter) Usman, the official story is that you learned to play the guitar by watching Jimmy Page on YouTube.
And he's a wonderful musician, so it's cool.
(Applause) (Laughter) (Music) (Applause)
I'm a gamer, so I like to have goals.
So here's my special mission for this talk: I'm going to try to increase the life span of every single person in this room by seven and a half minutes.
Literally, you will live seven and a half minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk.
I'll explain it all later, just pay attention to the number at the bottom: +7.68245837 minutes.
For example, in my first TED Talk, I did propose that we should spend 21 billion hours a week, as a planet, playing video games.
Now, 21 billion hours, it's a lot of time.
For example, true story: Just a few weeks ago, this cab driver, upon finding out that a friend and I were in town for a game developers' conference, turned around and said -- and I quote -- "I hate games. Waste of life.
I want games to be a force for good in the world.
When we're on our deathbeds, will we regret the time we spent playing games?
Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out there is actually some scientific research on this question.
Number two: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Number three: I wish I had let myself be happier.
And number five: I wish I'd lived a life true to my dreams, instead of what others expected of me.
A recent study from Brigham Young University School of Family Life reported that parents who spend more time playing video games with their kids have much stronger real-life relationships with them.
"I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends."
Hundreds of millions of people use social games like FarmVille or Words With Friends to stay in daily contact with real-life friends and family.
A recent study from the University of Michigan showed that these games are incredibly powerful relationship-management tools.
"I wish I'd let myself be happier."
Well, here I can't help but think of the groundbreaking clinical trials recently conducted at East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression.
You can see that in this alter ego portrait by Robbie Cooper of a gamer with his avatar.
And Stanford University has been doing research for five years now to document how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making us more courageous, more ambitious, more committed to our goals.
"I wish I'd led a life true to my dreams, and not what others expected of me."
But recently I did spend three months in bed, wanting to die.
It started two years ago, when I hit my head and got a concussion.
The concussion didn't heal properly, and after 30 days, I was left with symptoms like nonstop headaches, nausea, vertigo, memory loss, mental fog.
For me that meant no reading, no writing, no video games, no work or email, no running, no alcohol, no caffeine.
It happens to one in three, and it happened to me.
My brain started telling me, "Jane, you want to die."
Now, why a game?
I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game -- and this is in the scientific literature -- we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we're more likely to reach out to others for help.
I wanted to bring these gamer traits to my real-life challenge, so I created a role-playing recovery game called Jane the Concussion Slayer.
That lasted for more than a year, and it was the hardest year of my life by far.
I put up some blog posts and videos online, explaining how to play.
And that's what was happening to us.
The game was helping us experience what scientists call post-traumatic growth, which is not something we usually hear about.
We usually hear about post-traumatic stress disorder.
"I feel closer to my friends and family."
"I'm better able to focus on my goals and dreams."
But how does it work?
There are four kinds of strength, or resilience, that contribute to post-traumatic growth, and there are scientifically validated activities that you can do every day to build up these four kinds of resilience, and you don't need a trauma to do it.
We know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still.
Every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the health of your heart, and your lungs and brains.
Bonus physical resilience. Well done, everyone.
We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle.
If you're outside, find a window and look in.
If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of an hour, a day, a week, you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing.
And this is called the three-to-one positive emotion ratio.
All right, everybody, that is +1 social resilience, which means you actually get more strength from your friends, your neighbors, your family, your community.
Now, a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude.
Touch is even better.
Here's one more secret for you: Shaking someone's hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream, now that's the trust hormone.
(Laughter) Well, you have successfully completed your four quests, let's see if I've successfully completed my mission to give you seven and a half minutes of bonus life.
It turns out that people who regularly boost these four types of resilience -- physical, mental, emotional and social -- live 10 years longer than everyone else.
If you are regularly achieving the three-to-one positive emotion ratio, if you are never sitting still for more than an hour at a time, if you are reaching out to one person you care about every single day, if you are tackling tiny goals to boost your willpower, you will live 10 years longer than everyone else, and here's where that math I showed you earlier comes in.
So, the average life expectancy in the U.S. and the U.K. is 78.1 years, but we know from more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies that you can add 10 years of life by boosting your four types of resilience.
Thank you.
(Applause)
That night, I was taken into the emergency room and diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic in full-blown ketoacidosis.
You see, diabetes is an autoimmune disease where your body fights itself, and at the time people thought that somehow maybe exposure to a pathogen had triggered my immune system to fight the pathogen and then kill the cells that make insulin.
And this is what I thought for a long period of time, and that's in fact what medicine and people have focused on quite a bit, the microbes that do bad things.
(Laughter) So, unfortunately or not surprisingly, most of the microbes they sell at the National Academy building are pathogens.
And if you look at them in the microscope, you can see that we actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells.
There's more mass in the microbes than the mass of our brain.
And so we just heard about the DNA sequencing.
It turns out that one of the best ways to look at microbes and to understand them is to look at their DNA.
And that's what I've been doing for 20 years, using DNA sequencing, collecting samples from various places, including the human body, reading the DNA sequence and then using that DNA sequencing to tell us about the microbes that are in a particular place.
And what's amazing, when you use this technology, for example, looking at humans, we're not just covered in a sea of microbes.
It turns out that people now think that one of the triggers for type 1 diabetes is not fighting a pathogen, but is in fact trying to -- miscommunicating with the microbes that live in and on you.
My first personal experience with studying the microbes on the human body actually came from a talk that I gave, right around the corner from here at Georgetown.
I gave a talk, and a family friend who happened to be the Dean of Georgetown Medical School was at the talk, and came up to me afterwards saying, they were doing a study of ileal transplants in people.
And they wanted to look at the microbes after the transplants.
And so I started a collaboration with this person, Michael Zasloff and Thomas Fishbein, to look at the microbes that colonized these ilea after they were transplanted into a recipient.
They did this because this was common practice in medicine, even though it was obvious that this was not a good idea.
And fortunately, in the course of this project, the transplant surgeons and the other people decided, forget common practice. We have to switch.
So they actually switched to leaving some of the microbial community in the ileum. They leave the microbes with the donor, and theoretically that might help the people who are receiving this ileal transplant.
In the last few years there's been a great expansion in using DNA technology to study the microbes in and on people.
There's something called the Human Microbiome Project that's going on in the United States, and MetaHIT going on in Europe, and a lot of other projects.
And a variety of other studies have shown that the microbial community that lives in and on us helps in development of the immune system, helps in fighting off pathogens, helps in our metabolism, and determining our metabolic rate, probably determines our odor, and may even shape our behavior in a variety of ways.
And one area that I think is very interesting, which many of you may have now that we've thrown microbes into the crowd, is something that I would call "germophobia."
And killing pathogens is a good thing if you're sick, but we should understand that when we pump chemicals and antibiotics into our world, that we're also killing the cloud of microbes that live in and on us.
And excessive use of antibiotics, in particular in children, has been shown to be associated with, again, risk factors for obesity, for autoimmune diseases, for a variety of problems that are probably due to disruption of the microbial community.
I'm sure many people here have heard about probiotics.
Probiotics are one thing that you can try and do to restore the microbial community that is in and on you.
There's a project going on at UC Davis where people are using probiotics to try and treat, prevent, necrotizing enterocolitis in premature infants.
And it may be that probiotics can help prevent the development of this horrible necrotizing enterocolitis in these premature infants.
But probiotics are sort of a very, very simple solution.
So what can we do to restore our microbial community when we have thousands and thousands of species on us?
Well, one thing that animals seem to do is, they eat poo -- coprophagia.
And it turns out that many veterinarians, old school veterinarians in particular, have been doing something called "poo tea," not booty, but poo tea, to treat colic and other ailments in horses and cows and things like that, where you make tea from the poo from a healthy individual animal and you feed it to a sick animal.
Transplants of the feces, of the microbes from the feces, from a healthy donor has actually been shown to cure systemic C. dif infections in some people.
We should view it as a functioning organ, part of ourselves.
And we can now start to compare the community of microbes and their genes and see if there are differences.
We even went to the International Society of Endocrinology meeting as family in Quebec.
(Laughter) But the reason I'm telling you this is that the medical community, my father as an example, sometimes doesn't see what's right in front of their eyes.
And what we need now is to start thinking about this microbial community in the context of everything in human medicine.
It doesn't mean that it affects every part of us, but it might.
What we need is a full field guide to the microbes that live in and on people, so that we can understand what they're doing to our lives.
Thank you.
(Applause)
My passions are music, technology and making things.
So let's change the frequency of the sound, and watch what happens to the fire.
Thank you. (Applause) I also have with me a flame table.
Ooh. (Laughter) Okay. Now, while the table comes up to pressure, let me note here that the sound is not traveling in perfect lines. It's actually traveling in all directions, and the Rubens' tube's a little like bisecting those waves with a line, and the flame table's a little like bisecting those waves with a plane, and it can show a little more subtle complexity, which is why I like to use it to watch Geoff Farina play guitar.
The songs are a little similar, but mostly I'm just interested in the idea that someday maybe we'll buy a song because we like the way it looks.
I'm a big fan of Stephen Hawking, and I wanted to use all eight hours of his Cambridge lecture series to create an homage.
This is Stephen Hawking's universe.
So I made a more interactive version, and the way I did that is I used their position in time in the lecture to place these stars into 3D space, and with some custom software and a Kinect, I can walk right into the lecture.
Now, we've all seen a lot of TEDTalks online, so let's watch one now with the sound turned off and the closed captioning turned on.
Thank you. (Applause)
(Laughter) Now, in my lab at Stanford, we've been working on autonomous cars too, but with a slightly different spin on things. You see, we've been developing robotic race cars, cars that can actually push themselves to the very limits of physical performance.
There's another reason as well.
One of the things that we've developed in the lab -- we've developed several vehicles -- is what we believe is the world's first autonomously drifting car.
(Laughter) But this is P1. It's an entirely student-built electric vehicle, which through using its rear-wheel drive and front-wheel steer-by-wire can drift around corners.
We've also worked with Volkswagen Oracle, on Shelley, an autonomous race car that has raced at 150 miles an hour through the Bonneville Salt Flats, gone around Thunderhill Raceway Park in the sun, the wind and the rain, and navigated the 153 turns and 12.4 miles of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb route in Colorado with nobody at the wheel.
Now, this is Dr. Lene Harbott applying electrodes to the head of John Morton.
For instance, the resting brain tends to generate a lot of alpha waves.
Now, we can measure this, and we can look at the relative power between the theta waves and the alpha waves.
Now, the Corkscrew is a chicane, followed by a quick right-handed turn as the road drops three stories.
All right, so thanks to the Revs Program at Stanford, we were able to take John there and put him behind the wheel of a 1960 Porsche Abarth Carrera.
Now, this has given us tremendous insight and inspiration for our own autonomous vehicles.
What is the ideal balance of human and machine?
And as we think about that, let's take inspiration from the absolutely amazing capabilities of the human body and the human mind.
Thank you.
(Applause)
On that morning, U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of the Global Positioning System.
Instantaneously, every civilian GPS receiver around the globe went from errors the size of a football field to errors the size of a small room.
Paper maps are becoming obsolete.
But you and I and other innovators, we can see the potential in this next leap in accuracy.
Imagine, for example, an augmented reality app that overlays a virtual world to millimeter-level precision on top of the physical world.
Do you remember the movie "The Da Vinci Code?"
Imagine what we could do with a world full of GPS dots.
(Laughter) Those of you who have made the switch to Gmail, remember how refreshing it was to go from organizing all of your email to simply searching it.
I was in my office some months back and got a telephone call.
The woman on the other end of the line, we'll call her Carol, was panicked.
"Okay, what about the FBI?"
It's an open-source GPS jammer, developed by Limor Fried, a graduate student at MIT, and Limor calls it "a tool for reclaiming our personal space."
They get drowned out by the bubble.
Imagine, for example, you're the captain of a cruise ship trying to make your way through a thick fog and some passenger in the back turns on a Wave Bubble.
All of a sudden your GPS readout goes blank, and now it's just you and the fog and whatever you can pull off the radar system if you remember how to work it.
Our modern society has a special relationship with GPS.
But as it turns out, for purposes of protecting your privacy at the expense of general GPS reliability, there's something even more potent and more subversive than a Wave Bubble, and that is a GPS spoofer.
The idea behind the GPS spoofer is simple.
But if you send in a fake GPS signal, another peak pops up, and if you can get these two peaks perfectly aligned, the tracking points can't tell the difference, and they get hijacked by the stronger counterfeit signal, with the authentic peak getting forced off.
At this point, the game is over.
The fake signals now completely control this GPS receiver.
So is this really possible?
Can someone really manipulate the timing and positioning of a GPS receiver just like that, with a spoofer?
They're wide open, vulnerable to a kind of spoofing attack.
Even so, up until very recently, nobody worried about GPS spoofers.
People figured that it would be too complex or too expensive for some hacker to build one.
At first, the spoofer was just a jumble of cables and computers, though we eventually got it packaged into a small box.
Now, the Dr. Frankenstein moment, when the spoofer finally came alive and I glimpsed its awful potential, came late one night when I tested the spoofer against my iPhone.
It was a sense, almost, of betrayal, when this little blue dot started at my house, and went running off toward the north leaving me behind. I wasn't moving.
Imagine, for example, you're being tracked.
Well, you can play the tracker for a fool, pretending to be at work when you're really on vacation.
Within the next few years, many of you will be the proud owner of a GPS dot.
Or will you be able to resist the temptation to turn on a GPS spoofer or a Wave Bubble to protect your own privacy?
Thanks. (Applause)
I love to collect things.
Ever since I was a kid, I've had massive collections of random stuff, everything from bizarre hot sauces from all around the world to insects that I've captured and put in jars.
So I like this about interactive video sculpture, that you can actually interact with it, that all of you can actually touch an artwork and be part of the artwork yourselves, and hopefully, one day, I'll have each and every one of you trapped in one of my jars. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)
And it's partly because I came to this field from a different background, chemist and a bacterial geneticist.
So, have a guess of how many cells he has in his body.
Now look at that. There is that beautiful feather in the embryo.
So, here is a lovely human breast.
You take these cells, you put them in a dish, and within three days, they look like that.
For example, here is a lovely yellow droplet of milk on the left, there is nothing on the right.
In different contexts, cells do different things.
So I said, extracellular matrix, which is this stuff called ECM, signals and actually tells the cells what to do.
We inject them into the mouse, the ones on the right, and none of them would make tumors.
So, it's a new way of thinking about cancer, it's a hopeful way of thinking about cancer.
And I always say to the students and post-docs I lecture to, don't be arrogant, because arrogance kills curiosity.
So she, being an imager and a physicist, did this incredible thing.
This is a single human breast cell in three dimensions.
And unfortunately or fortunately, chemistry won.
But here is a poem from Yeats. I'll just read you the last two lines.
And here is Merce Cunningham, I was fortunate to dance with him when I was younger, and here he is a dancer, and while he is dancing, he is both the dancer and the dance.
So it's like form and function.
On the right, there is a coral.
Now if you take the mammary gland and spread it and take the fat away, on a dish it looks like that.
(Applause)
Well, first of all, let me thank Emeka -- as a matter of fact, TED Global -- for putting this conference together.
This conference is going to rank as the most important in the beginning of the 21st century.
I would also like to pay homage and honor to the TED Fellows June Arunga, James Shikwati, Andrew, and the other TED Fellows.
I call them the Cheetah Generation.
That's the Cheetah Generation, and Africa's salvation rests on the backs of these Cheetahs.
(Laughter) The Hippo Generation are the ruling elites.
Now, there are a lot of Africans who are very angry, angry at the condition of Africa.
But the mineral wealth of Africa is not being utilized to lift its people out of poverty.
That's what makes a lot of Africans very angry.
There's another enduring tragedy, and that tragedy is that there are so many people, so many governments, so many organizations who want to help the people in Africa.
Helping Africa is noble.
Did you know that 40 percent of the wealth created in Africa is not invested here in Africa?
That's far more than the 50 billion Tony Blair wants to raise for Africa.
Now, back in the 1960s Africa not only fed itself, it also exported food.
(Laughter) I belong to an Internet discussion forum, an African Internet discussion forum, and I asked them, I said, "Since 1960, we've had exactly 204 African heads of state, since 1960."
Everybody mentioned Nelson Mandela, of course.
Kwame Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kenyatta -- somebody mentioned Idi Amin.
(Applause) Now, this leadership is a far cry from the traditional leaders that Africans have known for centuries.
The second false premise that we make when we're trying to help Africa is that sometimes we think that there is something called a government in Africa that cares about its people, serves the interests of the people, and represents the people.
There is one particular quote -- a Lesotho chief once said that "Here in Lesotho, we've got two problems: rats and the government."
In fact, what we call our governments are vampire states.
Vampires because they suck the economic vitality out of their people.
Government is the problem in Africa.
A vampire state is the government -- (Applause) -- which has been hijacked by a phalanx of bandits and crooks who use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves, their cronies, and tribesmen and exclude everybody else.
The richest people in Africa are heads-of-state and ministers, and quite often the chief bandit is the head-of-state himself.
That's not wealth creation. It's wealth redistribution.
The third fundamental issue that we have to recognize is that if we want to help the African people, we must know where the African people are.
An African economy can be broken up into three sectors.
In many African countries the modern sector is lost.
That is the source of many of Africa's problems where the struggles for political power emanate and then spill over onto the informal and the traditional sector, claiming innocent lives.
Now the modern sector, of course, is where a lot of the development aid and resources went into.
Now, traditional sector is where Africa produces its agriculture, which is one of the reasons why Africa can't feed itself, and that's why it must import food.
All right, you cannot develop Africa by ignoring the informal and the traditional sectors.
Traditionally, Africans hate governments. They hate tyranny.
In Ashanti tradition, for example, the chief cannot make any decision without the concurrence of the council of elders.
If not, the people will abandon the chief, go somewhere else and set up a new settlement.
In the economic system in traditional Africa, the means of production is privately owned.
You see, in the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual.
So, in a nutshell, what we had in traditional Africa was a free-market system.
There were markets in Africa before the colonialists stepped foot on the continent.
Timbuktu was one great big market town.
Even if you go to West Africa, you notice that market activity in West Africa has always been dominated by women.
The socialism that they practiced was a peculiar form of Swiss-bank socialism, which allowed the heads of states and the ministers to rape and plunder Africa's treasuries for deposit in Switzerland.
That is not the kind of system Africans had known for centuries.
A bigger boat will mean more fish will be caught and landed.
And then it will have what economists call external effects on a local economy.
80 percent of Africans still rely on traditional medicine.
The modern healthcare sector has totally collapsed.
We also need to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora, not only to go into the traditional sectors, but to go into agriculture and also to instigate change from within.
We were able to mobilize Ghanaians in the Diaspora to instigate change in Ghana and bring about democracy in Ghana.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Well, we're approaching 2015, so we'd better assess, how are we doing on these goals?
What does the world want to do together?
But there's still a lot of unfinished business.
Still, 7.6 million children die every year of preventable, treatable diseases, and 178 million kids are malnourished to the point of stunting, a horrible term which means physical and cognitive lifelong impairment.
Should those be in the new package of goals?
Now here, we see the role for an unprecedented coalition of social media giants and upstarts, telecoms companies, reality TV show formats, gaming companies, telecoms, all of them together in kind of their "We Are The World" moment.
If we have this collected data, and this connected crowd, based upon our experience of campaigning and getting world leaders to commit, I think world leaders will commit to most of the crowdsourced recommendations.
There's Open Data Kenya, which geocodes and crowdsources information about where projects are, are they delivering results.
And Ushahidi, which means "witness" in Swahili, which geocodes and crowdsources information in complex emergencies to help target responses.
Long-term trends suggest that this century is going to be a tough place to live, with population increases, consumption patterns increasing, and conflict over scarce natural resources.
And look at the state of global politics today.
Look at the Rio Earth Summit that happened just last week, or the Mexican G20, also last week.
Now sure, progress in China and India and poverty reduction there was key to that, but recently also in Africa, poverty rates are being reduced.
I wish the 250,000 people who really did march outside this very building knew these results.
(Applause)
In 2003, I started a project with computer scientist Adam Montandon, and the result, with further collaborations with Peter Kese from Slovenia and Matias Lizana from Barcelona, is this electronic eye.
It's a color sensor that detects the color frequency in front of me — (Frequency sounds) — and sends this frequency to a chip installed at the back of my head, and I hear the color in front of me through the bone, through bone conduction.
I started to have favorite colors, and I started to dream in colors.
So, when I started to dream in color is when I felt that the software and my brain had united, because in my dreams, it was my brain creating electronic sounds. It wasn't the software, so that's when I started to feel like a cyborg.
This is my passport from 2004.
It's full of different melodies. (Laughter) Yeah.
(Musical chords) Yeah, Nicole Kidman sounds good. (Laughter) Some people, I would never relate, but they sound similar.
They have similar sound of eyes.
(Music) Very yellow and very colorful, because there's many different frequencies.
And most people change their preference when I tell them that the one on the left is Hitler and the one on the right is Martin Luther King.
So I got to a point when I was able to perceive 360 colors, just like human vision.
There's many, many more colors around us that we cannot perceive, but that electronic eyes can perceive.
That's why, two years ago, I created the Cyborg Foundation, which is a foundation that tries to help people become a cyborg, tries to encourage people to extend their senses by using technology as part of the body.
I think this will be a big, big change that we will see during this century.
I'm gonna talk a little bit about open-source security, because we've got to get better at security in this 21st century.
Let me start by saying, let's look back to the 20th century, and kind of get a sense of how that style of security worked for us.
This is Verdun, a battlefield in France just north of the NATO headquarters in Belgium.
At Verdun, in 1916, over a 300-day period, 700,000 people were killed, so about 2,000 a day.
If you roll it forward -- 20th-century security -- into the Second World War, you see the Battle of Stalingrad, 300 days, 2 million people killed.
We go into the Cold War, and we continue to try and build walls.
This is a famous bridge in Europe.
It's in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
It's the bridge over the Drina River, the subject of a novel by Ivo Andrić, and it talks about how, in that very troubled part of Europe and the Balkans, over time there's been enormous building of walls.
I would argue, again, open-source security is about connecting the international, the interagency, the private-public, and lashing it together with strategic communication, largely in social networks.
What's wrong with this picture?
Piracy is a very active threat today around the world. This is in the Indian Ocean.
Piracy is also very active in the Strait of Malacca.
Here are photographs of two young men.
They conducted a credit card fraud that netted them over 10 billion dollars.
This is part of cybercrime which is a $2-trillion-a-year discontinuity in the global economy.
The bad news is, this is a semi-submersible run by drug cartels.
We caught it with that low-tech raft — (Laughter) — and it was carrying six tons of cocaine.
This is a field of poppies in Afghanistan.
Eighty to 90 percent of the world's poppy, opium and heroin, comes out of Afghanistan.
We also see there, of course, terrorism.
But my thesis is, open-source security is about international, interagency, private-public connection pulled together by this idea of strategic communication on the Internet.
This is Afghanistan. These are Afghan soldiers.
You should say, "That's odd. I thought I read that this demographic, young men and women in their 20s and 30s, is largely illiterate in Afghanistan."
The answer is, we are teaching them to read in literacy courses by NATO in partnership with private sector entities, in partnership with development agencies.
We've taught well over 200,000 Afghan Security Forces to read and write at a basic level.
When you can read and write in Afghanistan, you will typically put a pen in your pocket.
At the ceremonies, when these young men and women graduate, they take that pen with great pride, and put it in their pocket.
There's a sister ship called the Mercy.
Other organizations send volunteers.
Here you see baseball players.
Can you pick out the two US Army soldiers in this photograph?
Another aspect of this partnership is in disaster relief.
This is a US Air Force helicopter participating after the tsunami in 2004 which killed 250,000 people.
In each of these major disasters — the tsunami in 2004, 250,000 dead, the Kashmiri earthquake in Pakistan, 2005, 85,000 dead, the Haitian earthquake, about 300,000 dead, more recently the awful earthquake-tsunami combination which struck Japan and its nuclear industry — in all of these instances, we see partnerships between international actors, interagency, private-public working with security forces to respond to this kind of natural disaster.
So these are examples of this idea of open-source security.
I gave a talk like this in London a while back about this point. I said, as I say to all of you, I'm on Facebook. Friend me.
Got a little laugh from the audience.
This is a photograph of a brave British soldier.
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
Stage IIB.
Should it be a mastectomy? Should it be a lumpectomy?
Should it be a more aggressive form of treatment, given that it was stage IIB?
Or are there contexts where we're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive?
For example, a trusted financial advisor, could be a trusted doctor, etc.
You are going to solve a series of puzzles, and I'm going to show you examples of these puzzles momentarily.
So if you think about it, this is an extreme-case scenario, because in the real world, whenever you are taking passenger's seat, very often the driver is going to be someone you trust, an expert, etc.
Now you're going to have 30 minutes to solve 15 puzzles.
And therefore, there are times when you're facing the INCA, when the feedback is going to be immediate, negative, concrete and you have the sense of agency, where you're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive.
We let the doctors make all the decisions and take the driver's seat.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Throughout the United States, there is growing social awareness that sexual violence and harassment are far too common occurrences within our various institutions -- occurrences often without any accountability.
Service members have demanded Congress reform the military, and workers ranging from Hollywood stars to janitorial staff have called out sexual harassment in the workplace.
As it stands, the US Constitution denies fundamental protections to victims of gender violence such as sexual assault, intimate partner violence and stalking.
Specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits state governments from abusing its citizens, does not require state governments to intervene when private parties abuse its citizens.
That means that when a woman calls the police from her home, afraid that an intruder may attack her, she is not entitled to the state's protection.
The resulting constitutional flaw directly contradicts international law, which requires nation-states to intervene and protect citizens against gender violence by private parties as a human right.
Instead of requiring intervention, our Constitution leaves discretion -- discretion that states have used to discriminate systemically to deny countless victims any remedy.
Rather, they are witnesses; their bodies, evidence.
The prosecution does not represent the interests of a victim.
Despite this constitutional flaw, some victims of gender violence have found protections under federal Civil Rights statutes, such as Title IX.
Rather, it prohibits all forms of sex discrimination, including sexual violence and harassment within educational programs that accept federal funding.
While initially targeting sex discrimination within admissions, Title IX has actually evolved over time to require educational institutions to intervene and address gender violence when committed by certain parties, such as when teachers, students or campus visitors commit sexual assault or harassment.
And through campus-level proceedings, Title IX goes so far as to give victims equitable rights during the campus process, which means that victims can represent their own interests during proceedings, rather than relying on educational institutions to do so.
So while Civil Rights protects some victims, we should want to protect all victims.
Rather than going institution by institution, fighting for reform on campus, in the military, in the workplace, it's time to go to the Constitution and pass the Equal Rights Amendment.
Originally proposed in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment would guarantee gender equality under the law, and much like Title IX on campus, that constitutional amendment could require states to intervene and address gender violence as a prohibitive form of sex discrimination.
I'm here to say, "It's time."
It's time for accountability to become the norm after gender violence.
It's time to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, so that our legal system can become a system of justice, and #MeToo can finally become "no more."
Thank you.
(Applause)
Well, traditionally that was seen as science fiction, but now we've moved to a world where actually this has become possible.
And what's great about this is the technology's actually allowing the phone to start to see and understand much like how the human brain does.
So what I have here is a wireless router.
(Music) (Dinosaur roaring) (Applause) So then, after the fun, comes the more emotional side of what we do, because effectively, this technology allows you to see the world through someone's eyes, and for that person to be able to take a moment in time and effectively store it and tag it to something physical that exists in the real world.
(Laughter) MM: (Laughs) So, it's not magic.
It's completely free to download this application.
(Applause)
More importantly, he makes his money by selling these mobile recharge coupons, you know, for the prepaid subscriptions.
It's this entire ecosystem of low-cost parts and supplies that are produced all over the world, literally, and then redistributed to basically service this industry, and you can even buy salvaged parts.
So, what we call this is a silicon cottage industry.
So one of the first things we did is this thing called a multimedia platform. We call it a lunch box.
So the thing that we got was a little mobile phone with a little pico projector that comes for about 60 dollars.
It's about this little device called a medi-meter.
So the real key question was, how do we empower this woman?
So what we did was that we converted this device into a medical device.
(Beeps) Oh Bruno, you can go home, actually.
(Applause) So, very briefly, I'll just explain to you how this is done, because that's the more interesting part.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
It was a machine that was designed long before anyone thought about computers.
The first computer was really designed in the 1830s and 1840s, not the 1930s and 1940s.
It was designed, and parts of it were prototyped, and the bits of it that were built are here in South Kensington.
That machine was built by this guy, Charles Babbage.
I really miss that era, you know, where you could go around for a soiree and see a mechanical computer get demonstrated to you. (Laughter) But Babbage, Babbage himself was born at the end of the 18th century, and was a fairly famous mathematician.
He held the post that Newton held at Cambridge, and that was recently held by Stephen Hawking.
And I'm going to take you through the architecture of the machine — that's why it's computer architecture — and tell you about this machine, which is a computer.
It's a decimal machine. Everything's done in decimal.
Of course, it's this big.
This is a picture of a prototype for part of the CPU which is in the Science Museum.
The CPU could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic -- so addition, multiplication, subtraction, division -- which already is a bit of a feat in metal, but it could also do something that a computer does and a calculator doesn't: this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision.
And there's not just one of these, there's many of them.
Now, the reason they used punch cards was that Jacquard, in France, had created the Jacquard loom, which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards, so he was just repurposing the technology of the day, and like everything else he did, he's using the technology of his era, so 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, cogs, steam, mechanical devices. Ironically, born the same year as Charles Babbage was Michael Faraday, who would completely revolutionize everything with the dynamo, transformers, all these sorts of things.
It's completely mechanical, again, a printer.
Along comes this woman, Ada Lovelace.
This lady is the daughter of the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Lord Byron, and her mother, being a bit worried that she might have inherited some of Lord Byron's madness and badness, thought, "I know the solution: Mathematics is the solution.
And we owe to her an enormous amount because we know a lot about the machine that Babbage was intending to build because of her.
Now, some people call her the first programmer.
This is a program written in a particular style.
It's not, historically, totally accurate that she's the first programmer, and actually, she did something more amazing.
Babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics.
He was building a machine to do mathematics, and Lovelace said, "You could do more than mathematics on this machine." And just as you do, everyone in this room already's got a computer on them right now, because they've got a phone.
Whether it's video or text or music or voice, it's all numbers, it's all, underlying it, mathematical functions happening, and Lovelace said, "Just because you're doing mathematical functions and symbols doesn't mean these things can't represent other things in the real world, such as music."
So this is what I call Lovelace's Leap.
When you say she's a programmer, she did do some, but the real thing is to have said the future is going to be much, much more than this.
Now, a hundred years later, this guy comes along, Alan Turing, and in 1936, and invents the computer all over again.
Now, of course, Babbage's machine was entirely mechanical.
Turing's machine was entirely theoretical.
Both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective, but Turing told us something very important.
He laid down the mathematical foundations for computer science, and said, "It doesn't matter how you make a computer."
This is called the Church–Turing thesis.
It used punch cards, which were being fed in, and it ran about 10,000 times slower the first ZX81.
The project has a number of parts to it.
The third part is a computer simulation of that machine, and the last part is to physically build it at the Science Museum.
Babbage himself wrote, he said, as soon as the analytical engine exists, it will surely guide the future course of science.
So, give me five years.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Hi. This is my mobile phone.
A mobile phone can change your life, and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom.
With a mobile phone, you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt.
And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud and become famous.
But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone, and how it changed my life.
These are 35,830 lines of information.
Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email?
And all over Europe, people stood up and said, "We don't want this."
We want self-determination in the digital age, and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies have to store all this information about us.
They were lawyers, journalists, priests, they all said: "We don't want this."
And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people went out on the streets of Berlin and said, "Freedom, not fear."
Stasi was the secret police in East Germany.
Every time I use my mobile phone?
But Deutsche Telekom said, no, we will not give you this information.
So at the end, I had a settlement with them.
Because in the mean time, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of this E.U. directive into German law was unconstitutional.
At first I saw it, and I said, okay, it's a huge file. Okay.
But then after a while I realized, this is my life.
This is six months of my life, into this file.
This is a visualization of six months of my life.
You can zoom in and zoom out, you can wind back and fast forward.
All this is possible with this information.
And then there are some friends calling me, and they call each other.
This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran.
And this information is stored for at least six months in Europe, up to two years.
And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest, and if the Stasi would have known who are the leaders behind it, this may never have happened.
The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there.
Because today, state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us, online and offline.
But self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction.
So, when you go home, tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century, and it's not outdated.
And if you don't believe me, ask your phone company what information they store about you.
So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone, let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As an architect, I often ask myself, what is the origin of the forms that we design?
Nature has been called the greatest architect of forms.
Now, we can take this form and use the same process to generate three-dimensional structures, but rather than folding things by hand, we'll bring the structure into the computer, and code it as an algorithm.
So let's bring this process to architecture.
How? And at what scale?
They've been used throughout history to express ideals about beauty, about technology.
Through a lot of experimentation, these cylinders eventually evolved into this.
The closer one gets, the more new features one discovers.
So this leads to a new role for the architect.
One needs a new method to explore all of the possibilities that are out there.
The physical model, on the other hand, is 2,700 layers, one millimeter thick, it weighs 700 kilos, it's made of sheet that can cover this entire auditorium.
Machines are getting faster, it's getting less expensive, and there's some promising technological developments just on the horizon.
These are images from the Gwangju Biennale.
I've shown one simple process that was inspired by nature; there's countless other ones.
Thank you. (Applause)
62 percent of our population is below the age of 24.
And it brings us to the debate that has been going on here: aid versus private sector, aid versus trade, etc.
(Applause) It is all the resources that were taken from Africa, including human, that built these countries today!
At a certain point in time, in 1969, things were really bad.
My sister fell very ill with malaria.
She was three years old and I was 15.
And then my sister woke up.
Will we make the same mistake that we made before?
Ten years from now we will have the same story, and we will be repeating the same things.
Second thing, for the private sector, people are afraid to take risks on the continent.
Thank you. (Applause)
Doc Edgerton inspired us with awe and curiosity with this photo of a bullet piercing through an apple, and exposure just a millionth of a second.
But now, 50 years later, we can go a million times faster and see the world not at a million or a billion, but one trillion frames per second.
I present to you a new type of photography, femto-photography, a new imaging technique so fast that it can create slow motion videos of light in motion.
And with that, we can create cameras that can look around corners, beyond line of sight, or see inside our body without an x-ray, and really challenge what we mean by a camera.
And that packet of photons, that bullet, will travel at the speed of light, and again, a million times faster than an ordinary bullet.
Now, if you take that bullet and take this packet of photons and fire into this bottle, how will those photons shatter into this bottle?
How does light look in slow motion?
So the pulse enters the bottle, our bullet, with a packet of photons that start traveling through and that start scattering inside.
You can watch the ripples, again, washing over the table, the tomato and the wall in the back.
It's like throwing a stone in a pond of water.
Because the tomato is actually ripe, and the light is bouncing around inside the tomato, and it comes out after several trillionths of a second.
And we can take all that raw data and treat it in very interesting ways.
Some other heroes can become invisible.
(Music) And because we have a camera that can run so fast -- our femto-camera -- it has some unique abilities.
It has very good time resolution, and it can look at the world at the speed of light.
And this way, we know the distances, of course to the door, but also to the hidden objects, but we don't know which point corresponds to which distance.
(Music) (Applause) Now, we have some ways to go before we take this outside the lab on the road, but in the future, we could create cars that avoid collisions with what's around the bend.
But of course, because of tissue and blood, this is quite challenging, so this is really a call for scientists to start thinking about femto-photography as really a new imaging modality to solve the next generation of health-imaging problems.
Now, like Doc Edgerton, a scientist himself, science became art -- an art of ultra-fast photography.
It turns out, because we're recording nearly at the speed of light, we have strange effects, and Einstein would have loved to see this picture.
So whether it's for photography around corners, or creating the next generation of health imaging, or creating new visualizations, since our invention, we have open-sourced all the data and details on our website, and our hope is that the DIY, the creative and the research communities will show us that we should stop obsessing about the megapixels in cameras -- (Laughter) and start focusing on the next dimension in imaging.
(Applause)
The first one needs little introduction -- "Girl with a Pearl Earring" by Johannes Vermeer, 17th-century Dutch painter.
In fact, we don't know who any of the models in any of Vermeer's paintings are, and we know very little about Vermeer himself.
How does Vermeer know her?
So, she's in the house.
Amongst them a yellow coat with white fur, a yellow and black bodice, and you see these clothes on lots of other paintings, different women in the paintings, Vermeer's paintings.
The light comes in from the left, his face is bathed in this glowing light. It's right in the center of the painting, and you look at it, and I found that when I was looking at it, I was standing there going, "Look at me. Please look at me."
He never used my nickname again.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm a digital creator, I make things specifically for the internet.
Then, later, as transphobic bathroom bill started gaining media attention around the United States, I hosted and produced an interview series called "Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People" where I did exactly that.
(Laughter) And then -- Sure, I'll take applause.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Laughter) My work -- Thanks.
(Laughter) Mom, hi.
(Laughter) So, "beta," for those of you unfamiliar, is shorthand online lingo for "beta male."
(Laughter) Now, "snowflake" is a put-down for people who are sensitive and believe themselves to be unique, and I'm a millennial and an only child, so, duh!
It's a slur, short for "cuckold," for men who have been cheated on by their wives.
But friends, I am so gay, that if I had a wife, I would encourage her to cheat on me.
(Laughter) Thank you.
Thank you, Marcos.
Now, I do need to point out, Donovan is not wrong, OK?
Thank you, Donovan.
Right?
I could see pictures they were tagged in, posts they'd written, memes they'd shared, and somehow, seeing that it was a human on the other side of the screen made me feel a little better.
The first person I spoke to was Josh.
But I didn't want to.
(Audio) Dylan Marron: Josh, you said you're about to graduate high school, right?
I mean, I also just want to let you know, Josh, I was bullied in high school, too.
But did our conversation humanize us to each other more than profile pictures and posts ever could?
Matthew: But it was hard.
DM: So I've collected these conversations and many others for my podcast "Conversations with People Who Hate Me."
Now in every one of my calls, I always ask my guests to tell me about themselves.
Empathizing with someone who, for example, believes that being gay is a sin doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to drop everything, pack my bags and grab my one-way ticket to hell, right?
And some have politely declined, others have read my message and ignored it, some have blocked me automatically when I sent the invitation and one guy actually agreed to do it and then, five minutes into the call, hung up on me.
Thank you so much.
(Applause) (Cheering) (Applause)
This man is wearing what we call a bee beard. (Laughter) A beard full of bees.
Here you can see some pictures of what are called green roofs, or urban agriculture.
Let me give you a brief rundown on how pollination works.
We have tar paper on the rooftops that bounces heat back into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change, no doubt.
What about in 100 years, if we have green rooftops everywhere, and gardening, and we create our own crops right in the cities? We save on the costs of transportation, we save on a healthier diet, and we also educate and create new jobs locally.
We need bees for the future of our cities and urban living.
Now this has been a huge problem for many years, basically since the late 1980s, when the varroa mite came and brought many different viruses, bacteria and fungal diseases with it.
The bees like it in the city. (Laughter) Furthermore, they also produce more honey.
The urban honey is delicious.
And looking back historically at the timeline of honeybee health, we can go back to the year 950 and see that there was also a great mortality of bees in Ireland.
A lot of linden trees live along the railroad tracks.
Perhaps there are fewer pesticides in the cities than there are in [rural] areas.
What you can see up here is a map of the world, and we're tracking the spread of this varroa mite.
Think of the kids today. Their childhood's a bit different.
They don't experience this.
So my research focuses on ways to make bees healthier.
We're looking at ways to make bees healthier through vaccines, through yogurt, like probiotics, and other types of therapies in ways that can be fed orally to bees, and this process is so easy, even a 7-year-old can do it.
You can hide a hive inside your home.
These are three hives on the rooftop of the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, and they're beautiful here. I mean, we matched the new color of the inside of their rooms to do some type of a stained wood with blue for their sheets, and these bees are terrific, and they also will use herbs that are growing in the garden.
The bees fly right into the outfield of Fenway Park.
We have also some images of honey from Brooklyn.
Now, this was a mystery in the New York Times where the honey was very red, and the New York State forensics department came in and they actually did some science to match the red dye with that found in a maraschino cherry factory down the street. (Laughter) So you can tailor your honey to taste however you want by planting bee-friendly flowers.
Paris has been a terrific model for urban beekeeping.
What can you do to save the bees or to help them or to think of sustainable cities in the future?
Try to understand that bees are very important.
You could even get your own hive if you want.
Thank you. (Applause)
In the past several days, I heard people talking about China.
And also, I talked to friends about China and Chinese Internet.
I'll give an example. China is a BRIC country.
BRIC country means Brazil, Russia, India and China.
This emerging economy really is helping the revival of the world economy.
So basically, China is a SICK BRIC country.
So, if you are a fan of the Game of Thrones, you definitely know how important a big wall is for an old kingdom.
But we also use a very simple metaphor, the cat and the mouse game, to describe in the past 15 years the continuing fight between Chinese censorship, government censorship, the cat, and the Chinese Internet users. That means us, the mouse.
In China, we have 500 million Internet users.
You have Google, we have Baidu.
(Laughter) So, that's the kind of the thing I call smart censorship.
For example, Mubarak, he shut down the Internet.
He wanted to prevent the Netizens [from criticizing] him.
But also, Ben Ali, Tunisian president, didn't follow the second rule.
Because we have 300 million microbloggers in China.
So when these 300 million people, microbloggers, even they block the tweet in our censored platform.
But in English it's 20 words or a sentence with a short link.
(Laughter) But in Chinese language, it's really about 140 characters, means a paragraph, a story.
For example, this is Hamlet, of Shakespeare.
It's the same content. One, you can see exactly one Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets.
Chinese is always cheating, right?
So because of this, the Chinese really regard this microblogging as a media, not only a headline to media.
"Weibo" is the Chinese translation for "microblog".
So these innovations and clones, as the Weibo and microblogging, when it came to China in 2009, it immediately became a media platform itself.
But also, Chinese social media is really changing Chinese mindsets and Chinese life.
But when more and more people go to Beijing, they also cause the risk of a revolution.
But now we have Weibo, so I call it the Weibo petition.
One of them is Yao Chen, she is the most popular microblogger in China, who has about 21 million followers.
They're almost like a national TV station.
So this Weibo social media, even in the censorship, still gave the Chinese a real chance for 300 million people every day chatting together, talking together.
But also, the cat, the censorship, is not sleeping.
So the crackdown is very serious.
The server is in Beijing.
It's never happened before.
But also, the Bo Xilai case recently, very big news, he's a princeling.
It was made famous by Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, because he mobilized millions of Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution to destroy every local government.
But it didn't change the Chinese political system, and also the Chinese central government utilized this centralized server structure to strengthen its power to counter the local government and the different factions.
There is not only in China, but also in the United States there are some very small, cute but bad cats.
So my conclusion is very simple.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
So I showed him this, and this is actual footage that he was on. This is Apollo 15. This was his mission.
So let me show you the scene, and then I basically used the trick that was identified by Sergei Eisenstein, which is, if you have a camera that's moving with a moving object, what is not moving appears to be moving, and what is moving appears to be stopped, so what you're actually seeing now is the train is not moving at all, and what is actually moving is the floor.
(Music) That's Hugo. (Music) And we felt that if we could basically move the camera with him, we would feel what it feels like to be this boy who is basically the master of his universe, and his universe is, you know, behind the scenes in the bowels of this particular train station that only he can actually navigate through and do it this way, and we had to make it feel that this is his normal, everyday sort of life, so the idea of doing it as one shot was very important, and of course, in shooting in 3D, which is basically it's a huge camera that's hanging off of a giant stick, so to recreate a steadycam shot was the task, and make it feel kind of like what the reaction you got when you saw the "Goodfellas" shot.
This is going to be a piece called "Aphasia," and it's for hand gestures synchronized to sound, and this invites yet another role, and final one I'll share with you, which is that of the choreographer.
And the score for the piece looks like this, and it instructs me, the performer, to make various hand gestures at very specific times synchronized with an audio tape, and that audio tape is made up exclusively of vocal samples.
And with that, I thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
Creativity for me is something that's absolutely critical, and I think it's something that you can teach.
And that was the very first time that I found an opportunity to feel that I was able to express my own voice, and that's what's fueled me, then, to become a choreographer.
I feel like I've got something to say and something to share.
So for me, choreography is very much a process of physical thinking. It's very much in mind, as well as in body, and it's a collaborative process.
They're using the information that they receive to generate the beginnings of a phrase.
Just grab this arm.
Yeah, down to the floor. Can you go underneath?
Can you rotate?
Imagine that there's a circle in front of you, yeah?
Throw it into the audience again.
Every day, we read of shootings, inequality, pollution, dictatorship, war and the spread of nuclear weapons.
These are some of the reasons that 2016 was called the "Worst. Year. Ever."
But is this a sensible way to understand the human condition in the 21st century?
Last year, the world had 12 ongoing wars, 60 autocracies, 10 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 10,000 nuclear weapons.
But 30 years ago, there were 23 wars, 85 autocracies, 37 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 60,000 nuclear weapons.
True, last year was a terrible year for terrorism in Western Europe, with 238 deaths, but 1988 was worse with 440 deaths.
Was 1988 a particularly bad year?
To do so is to court a certain amount of derision, because I have found that intellectuals hate progress.
(Laughter) (Applause) And intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress.
(Laughter) Now, it's not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you.
Well, Professor Pangloss, as it happens, was a pessimist.
It's a testable hypothesis.
For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30.
250 years ago, in the richest countries of the world, a third of the children did not live to see their fifth birthday, before the risk was brought down a hundredfold.
200 years ago, 90 percent of the world's population subsisted in extreme poverty.
For most of human history, the powerful states and empires were pretty much always at war with each other, and peace was a mere interlude between wars.
The last great power war pitted the United States against China 65 years ago.
Today, more than 90 percent of the world's population under the age of 25 can read and write.
In the 19th century, Westerners worked more than 60 hours per week.
Thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity in the developed world and the widespread adoption of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves and microwaves, the amount of our lives that we forfeit to housework has fallen from 60 hours a week to fewer than 15 hours a week.
Do all of these gains in health, wealth, safety, knowledge and leisure make us any happier?
The answer is yes.
In 86 percent of the world's countries, happiness has increased in recent decades.
Well, I hope to have convinced you that progress is not a matter of faith or optimism, but is a fact of human history, indeed the greatest fact in human history.
Part of the answer comes from our cognitive psychology.
And since the world will end soon -- if climate change doesn't kill us all, then runaway artificial intelligence will -- a natural response is to enjoy life while we can, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Well, if there is such a thing as progress, what causes it?
Is progress inevitable? Of course not.
Progress does not mean that everything becomes better for everyone everywhere all the time.
The unsolved problems facing the world today are gargantuan, including the risks of climate change and nuclear war, but we must see them as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting, and aggressively pursue solutions like Deep Decarbonization for climate change and Global Zero for nuclear war.
Finally, does the Enlightenment go against human nature?
My acquaintance with the statistics of human progress, starting with violence but now encompassing every other aspect of our well-being, has fortified my belief that in understanding our tribulations and woes, human nature is the problem, but human nature, channeled by Enlightenment norms and institutions, is also the solution.
Some intellectuals have responded with fury to my book "Enlightenment Now," saying first how dare he claim that intellectuals hate progress, and second, how dare he claim that there has been progress.
Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry, teaching kids to read?
Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism and the narrative arts.
And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of reason, intellectual curiosity, open debate, skepticism of authority and dogma and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality.
We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences.
This heroic story is not just another myth.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Since 1992, Dr. Max Bothwell, a Government of Canada scientist, has been studying a type of algae that grows on rocks.
But scientists also call it Didymosphenia geminata and for decades, this algae has been sliming up riverbeds around the world.
The problem with this algae is that it is a threat to salmon, to trout and the river ecosystems it invades.
The problem was, Dr. Bothwell wasn't allowed to speak to the reporter, because the government of the day wouldn't let him.
But who the heck would want to stifle climate change information, right?
Yes, you can laugh.
I saw it firsthand when I was a university professor.
But it's not just climate change information that's being stifled.
So many other scientific issues are obscured by alternate facts, fake news and other forms of suppression.
Because after all, science is humanity's best effort at uncovering the truth about our world, about our very existence.
Every new fact that is uncovered adds to the growing body of our collective knowledge.
Scientists must be free to explore unconventional or controversial topics.
They must be free to challenge the thinking of the day and they must be free to present uncomfortable or inconvenient truths, because that's how scientists push boundaries and pushing boundaries is, after all, what science is all about.
And here's another point: scientists must be free to fail, because even a failed hypothesis teaches us something.
It's the early 1900s and Claire and Vera are roommates in southern Ontario.
In the morning, Claire calls up to Vera and says she's going out to breakfast.
Vera was dead.
When it comes to Spanish flu, those stories are common, of lightning speed deaths.
Well, I was a professor in my mid-20s when I first heard those shocking facts and the scientist in me wanted to know why and how.
My curiosity would lead me to a frozen land and to lead an expedition to uncover the cause of the 1918 Spanish flu.
I wanted to test our current drugs against one of history's deadliest diseases.
And so I led a team, a research team, of 17 men from Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States to the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic Ocean.
We exhumed six bodies who had died of Spanish flu and were buried in the permafrost and we hoped the frozen ground would preserve the body and the virus.
Truth is, we didn't find the virus, but we did develop new techniques to safely exhume bodies that might contain virus.
We did develop new techniques to safely remove tissue that might contain virus.
And we developed new safety protocols to protect our research team and the nearby community.
In science, attempts fail, results prove inconclusive and theories don't pan out.
In science, research builds upon the work and knowledge of others, or by seeing further, by standing on the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Newton.
The point is, scientists must be free to choose what they want to explore, what they are passionate about and they must be free to report their findings.
You heard me say that respect for science started to improve in Canada in 2015.
What lessons might we have to share?
How could politicians twist scientific fact for partisan gain?
(Applause) I thought I would use my new platform to talk about the importance of science.
It quickly became a fight for the freedom of science.
I could be a voice for those who were being silenced.
But I quickly learned that scientists were nervous, even afraid to talk to me.
One government scientist, a friend of mine, we'll call him McPherson, was concerned about the impact government policies were having on his research and the state of science deteriorating in Canada.
He wanted me to phone his wife's cell phone so that call couldn't be traced.
So I did what I could at the time.
And then the 2015 election rolled around and our party won.
(Applause) And he asked if I would serve as his Minister of Science.
I will never forget that day in December 2015 when I proudly stood in Parliament and proclaimed, "The war on science is now over."
But we want our government scientists to talk to the media, talk to the public.
After all, Canada is seen as a beacon for science internationally.
And we want to send a message that you do not mess with something so fundamental, so precious, as science.
So, for Dr. Bothwell, for Claire and Vera, for McPherson and all those other voices, if you see that science is being stifled, suppressed or attacked, speak up.
If you see that scientists are being silenced, speak up.
We must hold our leaders to account.
Whether that is by exercising our right to vote, whether it is by penning an op-ed in a newspaper or by starting a conversation on social media, it is our collective voice that will ensure the freedom of science.
And after all, science is for everyone, and it will lead to a better, brighter, bolder future for us all.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good morning, everyone.
I'm sure today you'll hear a lot of stories and, by listening to other people's stories, I think we can learn about the world, about other people and get a better understanding.
So I want to talk about three stories that I've done as a photographer, and how they've inspired me, and how, in my life, I've become a part of the stories that I document myself.
So 10 years ago, I set out to travel the world, to go and photograph other people in their situations and to record their stories, to bring them back, so that other people might understand.
But this didn't happen overnight.
When I worked as a music photographer and a fashion photographer, I always had this nagging feeling that there was something missing, that I wasn't quite using my skills productively.
As a care worker, I started looking after a young guy called Nick.
Nick has autism, very severe autism.
So this is Nick.
And as I started doing that, I realized that I could tell somebody's story through my photographs.
And I'm glad to say now, eight years later, I actually spoke to Nick last night, and he wanted to let me know that he was feeling a lot better, and he doesn't do the self-harming anymore.
Another story that inspired me was in Odessa, in Ukraine.
I became part of the story.
And then I became aware that my body was, in many ways, a living example of what war does to somebody.
Everybody here has an ability to use something to make a difference to the world.
We can all sit in front of the TV and go, "I don't know what to do about it," and forget about it.
So really, that's all I wanted to talk about today.
But if we share those and we talk about stories, then we can inspire each other to get through our own bad experiences.
And I hope in some small way, the stories I've been able to tell you will help you get through things.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I remember one morning when I was in the third grade, my mom sent me to school with a Ghanaian staple dish called "fufu."
(Laughter) Fufu is this white ball of starch made of cassava, and it's served with light soup, which is a dark orange color, and contains chicken and/or beef.
It's a savory, flavorful dish that my mom thought would keep me warm on a cold day.
(Laughter) "What's that?" one of them asked.
"It's fufu," I responded.
(Laughter) "Ew, that smells funny. What's a fufu?" they asked.
Their reaction made me lose my appetite.
And this is one of the first times I began to notice the distinction between what was unique to my family and what was common for everyone else, what was Ghanaian and what was African and what was American.
I'm a first-generation American.
In fact, my father, Gabriel, came to the US almost 50 years ago.
I consider myself an American and an African and a Ghanaian.
And there's millions of people around the world who are juggling these different classifications.
They might be Jamaican-Canadians or Korean-Americans or Nigerian-Brits.
But what makes our stories and experiences different is that we were born and raised in a country different than our parents, and this can cause us to be misunderstood when being viewed through a narrow lens.
I grew up in New York, which is home to the largest number of immigrants anywhere in the United States.
But all throughout my childhood, there were these moments that formed my understanding of the different worlds I belonged to.
When I was in the fifth grade, a student asked me if my family was refugees.
I didn't know what that word meant.
He explained to me that his parents told him that refugees are people from Africa who come to the US to escape death, starvation and disease.
(Laughter) These questions became more complex as I got older.
Junior high school was the first time I went to school with a large number of black American students, and many of them couldn't understand why I sounded differently than they did or why my parents seemed different than theirs.
"Are you even black?" a student asked.
I mean, I thought I was black.
He explained to me that, when he was in Ghana, everyone was black, so he never thought about it.
These misconceptions and complex cultural issues are not just the inquiries of children.
Adults don't know who immigrants are.
If we look at current trends, if I asked you: What's the fastest-growing immigrant demographic in the United States, who would you think it was?
A lot of people presume it to be Asians, but it's actually African immigrants.
Even in matters of policy, did you know that three out of the eight countries in the so-called "travel ban" are African countries?
Even if we look at something like workplace diversity and inclusion, if I asked you what gender-ethnicity combination is least likely to be promoted to senior managerial positions, who would you think it was?
The answer is not Africans this time.
It's Asian women who are least likely to be promoted.
Capturing these stories and issues is part of my work as a digital storyteller that uses tech to make it easier for people to find these stories.
Actors Issa Rae and Idris Elba are Enodi.
Colin Powell, former Attorney General Eric Holder, former President of the United States, Barack Obama, are all the children of African or Caribbean immigrants.
But how much do you know about us?
We're so intertwined in the lives and culture of people in North America and Europe, that you might be surprised how critical we are to your histories and future.
So, engage us in conversation; discover who immigrants actually are, and see us apart from characterizations or limited media narratives or even who we might appear to be.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And I really don't like that kind of description, because I am actually partly responsible for the term "alpha male" because I wrote this book "Chimpanzee Politics," which was recommended by Newt Gingrich to freshmen congressmen.
I don't know what good it did, but he recommended that book to them, and after that the term "alpha male" became very popular.
It's used in a very superficial way that doesn't relate to what a real alpha male is.
It goes back to the '40s and '50s, research on wolves, and basically the definition is very simple.
The highest ranking male is the alpha male.
The highest ranking female is the alpha female.
Every primate group has one alpha male, one alpha female, not more than that, there's only one.
So first, the body language.
What you see here is two male chimpanzees who are the same size, but one is walking upright, has his hair up, has a big rock in his hand, and he's the alpha male.
(Laughter) Humans do this all the time.
And they become extremely influential, and you may actually have old males who are more influential than the alpha male himself.
So you can imagine that that old male has an enormous amount of power, because he has made the alpha male alpha male.
The male on the right is individually the strongest male.
And so the coalition formation that goes on in chimpanzee society makes it much more complex than you think.
The smallest male, if he has the right friends and keeps them happy, or he has female support, he can be the alpha male.
Now let me first show you how the unity is shown in chimpanzees.
You also see the big canine teeth that they have.
Now, how do you become an alpha male?
And so the male chimpanzees -- and we evolutionary biologists, of course, we have an explanation for this, is that sex leads to reproduction, and reproductive success is the measure of evolution.
And so that's a very stressful situation, and we actually have data on this.
And here, for me, it gets really interesting, and it deviates very much from your typical image of the alpha male.
The alpha male has two sorts of obligations.
This is a male who stops a fight between two females.
Now, I do an enormous amount of research on empathy, and I don't have time to go into it, but empathy is nowadays a topic that we study in rodents and dogs and elephants and primates, all sorts of animals.
This is a picture of Mama, the alpha female in the Arnhem zoo where I used to work, who is now all over the internet, I think a hundred million clicks at the moment, for a video of her dying at the age of 59, which happened last year.
Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male.
An alpha male has all sorts of qualities, and I have seen bully alpha males in chimpanzees, they do occur, but most of the ones that we have have leadership capacities and are integrated in their community, and, like Amos at the end, they are loved and respected, and so it's a very different situation than you may think.
(Applause)
CA: So, we've got a picture, I think? Where is this?
CA: OK. Now, you're 19 now?
WK: Yeah. I'm 19 years now.
CA: Five years ago you had an idea. What was that?
WK: I wanted to make a windmill.
CA: A windmill?
WK: Yeah.
WK: Yeah.
WK: In fact, a design of the windmill that was in the book, it has got four -- ah -- three blades, and mine has got four blades.
WK: Yeah.
WK: Yeah.
CA: And what did you make the windmill out of?
WK: Yeah. The windmill.
WK: 12 watts.
WK: Four bulbs and two radios.
CA: Wow.
(Applause) CA: Next slide -- so who's that?
WK: Yeah.
WK: Yeah.
CA: How big?
WK: Yeah.
CA: Wow. And so you're talking to people here at TED to get people who might be able to help in some way to realize this dream?
CA: Wow. William, it's a real honor to have you at the TED conference.
Thank you so much for coming.
WK: Thank you.
(Applause)
I am not a farmer.
But again, I am not a farmer. I'm a teacher.
And that's my first student to open up, the first in his family to have a bank account.
This immigrant student is the first one in his family to use an ATM.
Okay? And then celebrities started.
A year ago today, I was invited to the New York Academy of Medicine.
The greenest class in New York City.
But more importantly is my kids learned to get, they learned to give.
The rest are scheduled to graduate this June.
Let's talk about mint. Where is my mint?
I grow seven kinds of mint in my class.
So here in New York, I urge you, my fellow Americans, to help us make America great again.
Big kids love strawberries and bananas.
But most importantly, just love them.
(Applause)
Unfortunately, most of the people in the world are not so lucky.
In some parts of the world, for example, South Africa, education is just not readily accessible.
In South Africa, the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority.
She was a mother who gave her life trying to get her son a chance at a better life.
There has been much discussed in the last few years about the rising cost of health care.
Finally, even for those who do manage to get the higher education, the doors of opportunity might not open.
Only a little over half of recent college graduates in the United States who get a higher education actually are working in jobs that require that education.
He said the big breakthroughs are what happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.
So, having seen the impact of this, Andrew and I decided that we needed to really try and scale this up, to bring the best quality education to as many people as we could.
So we formed Coursera, whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free.
Or Jenny, who is a single mother of two and wants to hone her skills so that she can go back and complete her master's degree.
I'm really glad to say -- recently, we've been in correspondence with Ryan -- that this story had a happy ending.
Baby Shannon -- you can see her on the left -- is doing much better now, and Ryan got a job by taking some of our courses.
These are the spikes showing that procrastination is global phenomenon.
(Laughter) At the end of the course, the students got a certificate.
So, for example, some students might benefit from a little bit of preparatory material that other students might already have.
What's even more surprising is that self-grades, where the students grade their own work critically -- so long as you incentivize them properly so they can't give themselves a perfect score -- are actually even better correlated with the teacher grades.
And so this is an effective strategy that can be used for grading at scale, and is also a useful learning strategy for the students, because they actually learn from the experience.
(Laughter) And you can see from the student testimonials that students actually find that because of this large online community, they got to interact with each other in many ways that were deeper than they did in the context of the physical classroom.
Others were virtual study groups, sometimes along language lines or along cultural lines, and on the bottom left there, you see our multicultural universal study group where people explicitly wanted to connect with people from other cultures.
Because the data that we can collect here is unique.
So you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode, a transformation that, for example, has revolutionized biology.
You can use these data to understand fundamental questions like, what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not?
So here's an example of that, also from Andrew's Machine Learning class.
Personalization is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities here as well, because it provides us with the potential of solving a 30-year-old problem.
Educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, in 1984, posed what's called the 2 sigma problem, which he observed by studying three populations.
Mastery is easy to achieve using a computer, because a computer doesn't get tired of showing you the same video five times.
So the goal here is to try and push, and see how far we can get towards the green curve.
Well, Mark Twain certainly thought so.
(Laughter) I beg to differ with Mark Twain, though.
So how do we do that?
So there's been many studies, including this one, that show that if you use active learning, interacting with your students in the classroom, performance improves on every single metric -- on attendance, on engagement and on learning as measured by a standardized test.
You can see, for example, that the achievement score almost doubles in this particular experiment.
First it would establish education as a fundamental human right, where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities.
It's a shame that for so many people, learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
On March 11, 2011, I watched from home, as the rest of the world did, as the tragic events unfolded in Japan.
It's a small fishing town in Iwate Prefecture, about 50,000 people, one of the first that was hit by the wave.
As you can imagine, the town had been devastated.
At the end of my first week there, I found myself helping out in an evacuation center in the town.
The lady who brought us these photos was lucky, as far as the photos go.
The day I gave her the photos also happened to be her youngest son's 14th birthday.
After six months in Japan, 1,100 volunteers had passed through All Hands, hundreds of whom had helped us hand-clean over 135,000 photographs, the large majority — (Applause) — a large majority of which did actually find their home again, importantly.
One in particular, a photo of women of all ages, from grandmother to little girl, gathered around a baby, struck a chord, because a similar photo from my family, my grandmother and mother, myself, and newborn daughter, hangs on our wall.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married, after she had kids, and even after she got divorced and was a single parent, she continued her medical work.
And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science, the emerging field of epidemiology, the study of patterns in disease.
Most disease is correlated with poverty, but in the case of childhood cancers, the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families.
And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back, one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of.
And it flew in the face of doctors' idea of themselves, which was as people who helped patients, they didn't harm them.
A child a week was dying, but nothing changed.
So, how did she know that she was right?
Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking.
So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse.
Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients.
Alice and George were very good at conflict.
That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them.
That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy.
But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face, many of the biggest disasters that we've experienced, mostly haven't come from individuals, they've come from organizations, some of them bigger than countries, many of them capable of affecting hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives.
So how do organizations think?
And it means that people like many of us, who have run organizations, and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can, mostly fail to get the best out of them.
Because it does take skill and practice, too.
So, recently, I worked with an executive named Joe, and Joe worked for a medical device company.
But he kept worrying about it, and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved.
In the end, Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns.
And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation.
So, how do we have these conversations more easily and more often?
I think it's a fantastic system, but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people, and way too late in life.
Openness isn't the end.
It's the beginning.
(Applause)
So, dancing is one of the most human of activities.
However, there are 6.3 million people worldwide who have the disease, and they have to live with incurable weakness, tremor, rigidity and the other symptoms that go along with the disease, so what we need are objective tools to detect the disease before it's too late.
But frustratingly, with Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, there are no biomarkers, so there's no simple blood test that you can do, and the best that we have is like this 20-minute neurologist test.
But what if patients could do this test at home?
So, taking the first steps towards this today, we're launching the Parkinson's Voice Initiative.
2004. Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, takes the Beatles' "White Album," combines it with Jay-Z's "The Black Album" to create "The Grey Album."
It's how you remix. You take existing songs, you chop them up, you transform the pieces, you combine them back together again, and you've got a new song, but that new song is clearly comprised of old songs.
All right, let's head back to 1964, and let's hear where some of Dylan's early songs came from.
Last one, this is "Who's Going To Buy You Ribbons," another traditional folk tune.
Alongside that is "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."
(Laughter) (Applause) And that's, that's what Guthrie did right here, and I'm sure you all recognize the results.
Guthrie adapted it into "This Land Is Your Land."
So, Bob Dylan, like all folk singers, he copied melodies, he transformed them, he combined them with new lyrics which were frequently their own concoction of previous stuff.
That's multi-touch, controlling a device by touching its display.
Would a young and inexperienced Apple have survived the legal assault from a much larger and more mature company like Xerox?
He said, "Good artists copy. Great artists steal."
That is the last four years of lawsuits in the realm of smartphones.
He records a song called "Blind Willie McTell," named after the blues singer, and the song is a voyage through the past, through a much darker time, but a simpler one, a time when musicians like Willie McTell had few illusions about what they did.
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
Two years ago, I was invited as an artist to participate in an exhibition commemorating 100 years of Islamic art in Europe.
Now, as an artist, a woman, an Arab, or a human being living in the world in 2010, I only had one thing to say: I wanted to say no.
And in Arabic, to say "no," we say "no, and a thousand times no."
So I decided to look for a thousand different noes.
Now, in January, 2011, the revolution started, and life stopped for 18 days, and on the 12th of February, we naively celebrated on the streets of Cairo, believing that the revolution had succeeded.
Nine months later I found myself spraying messages in Tahrir Square. The reason for this act was this image that I saw in my newsfeed.
So I took one "no" off a tombstone from the Islamic Museum in Cairo, and I added a message to it: "no to military rule."
No to stripping the people, and the blue bra is to remind us of our shame as a nation when we allow a veiled woman to be stripped and beaten on the street, and the footprint reads, "Long live a peaceful revolution," because we will never retaliate with violence.
Now, speaking of walls, I want to share with you the story of one wall in Cairo.
After acts of violence, another artist came, painted blood, protesters being run over by the tank, demonstrators, and a message that read, "Starting tomorrow, I wear the new face, the face of every martyr. I exist."
Another artist comes, paints the head of the military as a monster eating a maiden in a river of blood in front of the tank.
And there's been lots of other examples, like the corn that was in front of the police station, and the old people's home that we've planted it with food that they can pick and grow.
This is about sharing and investing in kindness.
So we got some land that was donated by a local garden center.
And we're just volunteers and it's only an experiment.
This is a movement for everyone.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause)
Welcome to Africa! Or rather, I should say, welcome home.
Looking at fossils dating back several millions of years -- it all points to evidence that life for the human species as we know it began right here.
We are on an amazing journey the next four days.
What's the worst thing you've ever heard about Africa?
Famine.
Corruption.
Genocide.
AIDS.
Slavery.
And there we worked with leading CEOs on African issues, and African companies on turnarounds, making the companies not just the best in Africa but the best globally.
And she said, "I want to write a case, Euvin -- a case on a public-sector leader that has lessons for the corporate world."
Because Nelson Mandela, as he took over power as the first democratically-elected president of South Africa, faced a situation of a country that could have slid into the abyss of chaos.
Now the case, "Nelson Mandela: Change Leader," became part of the research base for a chapter in Rosabeth's new book called "Confidence."
And "Confidence" became a New York Times bestseller and topped Business Week's hardcover bestseller list.
And why I tell you this story is because later, when I was interviewed on SABC Africa, on a pan-African broadcast, they asked, "What is your key lesson, or the key thing you enjoy the most?" -- because it was a huge privilege to be part of such a project.
So I want to share with you a personal story about a turnaround or a transformation.
And that has to do with me because in 1994, I packed a few things into a backpack and headed off for a year of travel in the middle of my university career.
This was 300 BC.
So Africa had long been seen as a place to go to for answers.
The first thing that I saw was North America at night -- glowing, in all its glory. A warm feeling. Light.
And then I saw it -- Africa. Quite literally the "Dark Continent."
Because whilst Africa may be dark -- other than the few specks that exist north and in the south and other areas -- it's aglow with the light in the hearts of the millions of people that are there.
Entrepreneurs, dynamic people, people with hope.
It was George Kimble, the geographer, who said that, "The only thing dark about Africa is our ignorance of it."
Africa is the second-largest continent, a landmass second from Asia.
It also is the second most populated continent, with 900 million people.
Africa is home to over 1,000 languages -- 2,000 is another estimate that's out there -- with over 2,000 languages and dialects.
As an investment banker, I'm in the cross-flow of information and the changes that are taking place in capital markets.
And let's start at the high level, on the macro-factors.
Egypt: from the 16 percent to about 8.4 percent.
And the first myth to dispel is that Africa is not a country.
You can make money, you can lose money in Africa.
I was recently elected, as Emeka mentioned, as the President of the South African Chamber of Commerce in America.
Other headlines that have recently reached South Africa were Bain Capital and KKR, the big boys of private equity.
Headline in South Africa: "They have landed." Quite ominous.
But looking at Goldman Sachs' work -- we had the famous BRIC Report.
It's an investment opportunity. Think about that.
Is anyone -- our banks, our investors -- seriously thinking about going to Nigeria?
It's just a sign of things to come.
Looking at the oil industry, Africa provides 18 percent of the U.S.'s oil supply, with the Middle East just 16 percent.
Because it's not about oil, it's not about commodities.
For Africa to truly be sustainable, we have to move beyond to other industries.
Close to the Mediterranean, near Alexandria -- textiles, petrochemicals.
It's being managed by a Singaporean-based management company.
Let's look at agriculture. Let's look at forestry.
Uganda: the New Forest Company, replanting and redeveloping their forests. Why is that important?
Let's go back to Nigeria.
But what's going on there? Only 10 percent of the country is banked.
The largest population in Africa is in Nigeria.
135 million-plus people. Think about that.
There are only 700 ATMs in the country. Opportunity.
Now let's look at the continent as a whole.
People look at the roads, for example, and they'd say, "Angola: 90 percent of roads are untarred. Ah, problem!"
It's more expensive to transport goods. Prices of goods go up, inflation is affected.
Nigeria: 70 percent of roads are untarred. Zambia: 80 percent.
In general, more than 50 percent of roads are untarred.
So what are the signs that things are fundamentally changing?
Let's look at some 2006 numbers. Kenya: over 60 percent. Nigeria: over 40 percent.
But in any investment decision, the key question is, "What is my alternative investment?"
Because in Africa today, we are competing globally for capital.
What Africa is providing is a diversification play, and also opportunities for yield pickup for the investor that's aware of what he or she is doing.
Now, when looking at Africa vis-a-vis other things, and countries in Africa vis-a-vis other things, comparisons become important.
Take Nigeria again: double B-minus -- in the league of Ukraine and Turkey. Immediately we have a comparison.
The backbone of making investment decisions for global holders of capital.
Some other figures. South Africa: triple B-plus. Botswana: A-plus.
It's the 24-hour rolling African news channel.
In 1899, Joseph Conrad released "The Heart of Darkness," a tale of grim horror along the Congo River.
If one looks carefully, on the Congo River is one of those bright lights. And that's the very Congo river generating light -- the old heart of darkness now generating light with hydro-electric power.
(Applause)
The air is thick with heat and dust, and it's hard to breathe.
I hear voices talking, but mostly the shaft is this cacophony of men coughing, and stone being broken with primitive tools.
For the last 28 years, I've been documenting indigenous cultures in more than 70 countries on six continents, and in 2009 I had the great honor of being the sole exhibitor at the Vancouver Peace Summit.
Amongst all the astonishing people I met there, I met a supporter of Free the Slaves, an NGO dedicated to eradicating modern day slavery.
Thus began my journey into modern day slavery.
A conservative estimate tells us there are more than 27 million people enslaved in the world today.
That's double the amount of people taken from Africa during the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade.
A hundred and fifty years ago, an agricultural slave cost about three times the annual salary of an American worker.
Yet today, entire families can be enslaved for generations over a debt as small as $18.
Astonishingly, slavery generates profits of more than $13 billion worldwide each year.
Today's slavery is about commerce, so the goods that enslaved people produce have value, but the people producing them are disposable.
Slavery exists everywhere, nearly, in the world, and yet it is illegal everywhere in the world.
Deadened by monotony and exhaustion, they work silently, doing this task over and over for 16 or 17 hours a day.
So pervasive was the heat and the dust that my camera became too hot to even touch and ceased working.
And he very clearly explained to me that emotional displays are very dangerous in a place like this, not just for me, but for them.
In the Himalayas, I found children carrying stone for miles down mountainous terrain to trucks waiting at roads below.
Some don't even know they're enslaved, people working 16, 17 hours a day without any pay, because this has been the case all their lives.
When these villagers claimed their freedom, the slaveholders burned down all of their houses.
In Kathmandu, I was escorted by women who had previously been sex slaves themselves.
It was more like a restaurant.
Cabin restaurants, as they're known in the trade, are venues for forced prostitution.
Recently, the New York Times reported that between 100,000 and 300,000 American children are sold into sex slavery every year.
It's all around us. We just don't see it.
I visited villages in India where entire families were enslaved in the silk trade.
This is a family portrait.
The dyed black hands are the father, while the blue and red hands are his sons.
They mix dye in these big barrels, and they submerge the silk into the liquid up to their elbows, but the dye is toxic.
"We have no freedom," they said.
It's estimated that more than 4,000 children are enslaved on Lake Volta, the largest man-made lake in the world.
Children are taken from their families and trafficked and vanished, and they're forced to work endless hours on these boats on the lake, even though they do not know how to swim.
This young child is eight years old.
Many of them drown.
Kofi was rescued from a fishing village.
I met him at a shelter where Free the Slaves rehabilitates victims of slavery.
Here he's seen taking a bath at the well, pouring big buckets of water over his head, and the wonderful news is, as you and I are sitting here talking today, Kofi has been reunited with his family, and what's even better, his family has been given tools to make a living and to keep their children safe.
Kofi is the embodiment of possibility.
At the end of the road, he urged us out of the car, and told the driver to quickly leave.
Mercury is used in the extraction process.
These miners are enslaved in a mine shaft in another part of Ghana.
I remember looking into their tired, bloodshot eyes, for many of them had been underground for 72 hours.
When I was working in the field, I brought lots of candles with me, and with the help of my interpreter, I imparted to the people I was photographing that I wanted to illuminate their stories and their plight, so when it was safe for them, and safe for me, I made these images.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
In half a century of trying to help prevent wars, there's one question that never leaves me: How do we deal with extreme violence without using force in return?
And I rushed upstairs and started packing my suitcase.
And my mother came up and said, "What on Earth are you doing?"
And I said, "I'm going to Budapest."
And I started to cry.
I wanted to understand how violence, how oppression, works.
They realized that using force against force doesn't work.
But she told the students to sit down.
The only thing to do is to get up, make a cup of tea and sit down with the fear like a child beside you.
The fear is the child.
And you make a plan.
(Laughter) So I did the thing.
(Applause) So that's fear. What about anger?
Wherever there is injustice there's anger.
But anger is like gasoline, and if you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno.
And I learned this in my work with nuclear weapon policy-makers.
In order to develop a dialogue for change we have to deal with our anger.
They are human beings just like us.
And they're doing what they think is best.
So that's the third one, anger.
This century there's a shift.
It's like mushrooms coming through concrete.
And they have to risk their lives almost every day to do this.
So the training of the troops has to change.
Have you asked yourselves why and how so many dictatorships have collapsed over the last 30 years?
Now I don't just believe in non-violence.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And then it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it's 886 pages long.
And it lists currently 374 mental disorders.
(Laughter) I've got parent-child relational problems, which I blame my parents for.
I'm kidding.
And I think it's actually quite rare to have both malingering and generalized anxiety disorder, because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious.
And I said, "Who's Tony?"
And I said to Brian, "Well, what did Tony do?"
It looks like a giant Hampton Inn.
(Laughter) And then Brian said, "Here's Tony."
And he wasn't wearing sweatpants, he was wearing a pinstripe suit.
Tony said that it's a lot harder to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.
It's just impossible."
When Tony said that to me, I thought to myself, "Am I sitting like a journalist?
He said, "You know, I've got the Stockwell Strangler on one side of me, and I've got the 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips' rapist on the other side of me.
However, we have assessed him, and we've determined that what he is is a psychopath."
He was a psychopath.
So I did.
So, here's the statistics: One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath.
Fifteen of you are psychopaths.
Although that figure rises to four percent of CEOs and business leaders, so I think there's a very good chance there's about 30 or 40 psychopaths in this room.
In fact, capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.
It's like a form of psychopathy that's come down to affect us all.
It was like Narnia.
Childhood bipolar -- children as young as four are being labeled bipolar because they have temper tantrums, which scores them high on the bipolar checklist.
When I got back to London, Tony phoned me.
Everyone's a bit psychopathic."
He said, "I'm going to go to Belgium.
(Laughter) Anyway, that was two years ago, and that's where my book ended.
Nothing bad happened.
Thank you.
(Applause)
After an EF3 tornado ripped straight through our town and took parts of our roof off, I decided to stay in Massachusetts, instead of pursuing the master's program I had moved my boxes home that afternoon for.
This experience changed our lives, and now we're trying to change the experience.
I'm a PhD student at MIT, and I happen to study atmospheric science.
There were a couple large, sweaty men with chainsaws standing in the center of the church, but nobody knew where to send them because no one knew the extent of the damage yet.
In a political campaign, you start with no interest and no capacity to turn that into action.
There's a gap here.
We've been able to see the same transformation in Texas and in Alabama.
(Applause)
Listen to the sounds of why hearing matters to the Alaskan Native people.
Hearing loss makes it hard to fish on the open water, hunt caribou and harvest berries, activities central to Alaskan Native culture.
Hearing loss isn't unique to rural Alaska.
It's global.
The Global Burden of Disease Project estimates there are 1.1 billion people living with hearing loss worldwide.
Over 80 percent are in low- and middle-income countries, and many have no access to hearing care.
The impact on people's lives is tremendous.
Anuk is a three-year-old boy I treated in Alaska.
Ear infections started when he was barely four months old.
The World Health Organization estimates that half of all global hearing loss can be prevented.
This solution comes from my collaboration with a tribal health organization called the Norton Sound Health Corporation.
Hearing loss evaluation traditionally requires testing by an audiologist in a soundproof room, with a lot of permanent equipment.
In a state where 75 percent of communities aren't connected to a hospital by road, an expensive flight is required.
To overcome these barriers, Alaska has developed a state-of-the-art telemedicine system that connects over 250 village health clinics with specialists who triage all types of health concerns.
Telemedicine has saved over 18 million in travel costs in this single region over the past 15 years.
Our team is launching a randomized trial in 15 communities along the Bering Sea to study how well this intervention works.
Our goal is to prevent childhood hearing loss across the state of Alaska.
The impact is global.
Mobile telemedicine can revolutionize access to care.
In Malawi, for example, there are only two ear surgeons and 11 audiologists for a population of 17 million.
This technology could empower teachers and community health workers to provide access to care to children in places like Malawi.
Scaling up globally could change children's lives who have never had access to hearing care before, using just the power of a cell phone.
It's time to change the course of preventable hearing loss.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I want to talk to you today about something the open-source programming world can teach democracy, but before that, a little preamble.
This is Martha Payne. Martha's a 9-year-old Scot who lives in the Council of Argyll and Bute.
Thank you for reading. Goodbye."
When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry.
World peace. (Laughter) The telephone?
That's what happens when the media's space expands.
And so they invented the scientific journal as a way of synchronizing the argument across the community of natural scientists.
The scientific revolution wasn't created by the printing press.
It was created by scientists, but it couldn't have been created if they didn't have a printing press as a tool.
Programming is a three-way relationship between a programmer, some source code, and the computer it's meant to run on, but computers are such famously inflexible interpreters of instructions that it's extraordinarily difficult to write out a set of instructions that the computer knows how to execute, and that's if one person is writing it.
Once you get more than one person writing it, it's very easy for any two programmers to overwrite each other's work if they're working on the same file, or to send incompatible instructions that simply causes the computer to choke, and this problem grows larger the more programmers are involved.
To a first approximation, the problem of managing a large software project is the problem of keeping this social chaos at bay.
This is feudalism: one owner, many workers.
The corporation owns the software.
This is Linus Torvalds.
This is a tremendously complicated process.
And then, 15 years after looking at Linux and figuring out how the community worked, he said, "I think I know how to write a version control system for free people."
And he called it "Git." Git is distributed version control.
It has two big differences with traditional version control systems.
And when people draw diagrams of Git workflow, they use drawings that look like this.
This is a screenshot from GitHub, the premier Git hosting service, and every time a programmer uses Git to make any important change at all, creating a new file, modifying an existing one, merging two files, Git creates this kind of signature.
Every Git system generates this number the same way, which means this is a signature tied directly and unforgeably to a particular change.
This has the following effect: A programmer in Edinburgh and a programmer in Entebbe can both get the same -- a copy of the same piece of software.
This is cooperation without coordination.
This is the big change.
So there are two good reasons to think that this kind of technique can be applied to democracies in general and in particular to the law.
When you make the claim, in fact, that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often get this reaction.
This is a graph of the U.S. Tax Code, and the dependencies of one law on other laws for the overall effect.
But there's also the fact that law is another place where there are many opinions in circulation, but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy, and when you go onto GitHub, and you look around, there are millions and millions of projects, almost all of which are source code, but if you look around the edges, you can see people experimenting with the political ramifications of a system like that.
And it includes this very evocative screenshot.
No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets, even though those are the things done with our consent and with our money.
Now, I would love to tell you that the fact that the open-source programmers have worked out a collaborative method that is large scale, distributed, cheap, and in sync with the ideals of democracy, I would love to tell you that because those tools are in place, the innovation is inevitable. But it's not.
Part of the problem, of course, is just a lack of information.
The bigger problem, of course, is power.
The people experimenting with participation don't have legislative power, and the people who have legislative power are not experimenting with participation.
They are experimenting with openness.
T.S. Eliot once said, "One of the most momentous things that can happen to a culture is that they acquire a new form of prose."
A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes, in the last decade, in fact.
Thank you for listening. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
And one of the things that I want to question is this very popular hope these days that transparency and openness can restore the trust in democratic institutions.
(Laughter) Basically you believe in complexity, but not in ambiguity.
As you have been told, I'm Bulgarian.
(Laughter) The Economist magazine recently wrote an article covering one of the recent studies on happiness, and the title was "The Happy, the Unhappy and the Bulgarians."
And this is a rainy election day in a small country -- that can be my country, but could be also your country.
And this time even a greater number, 83 percent of the people, voted with blank ballots.
On one level nobody's questioning that democracy is the best form of government.
For the last 30 years, political scientists have observed that there is a constant decline in electoral turnout, and the people who are least interested to vote are the people whom you expect are going to gain most out of voting.
Because especially now with the economic crisis, you can see that the trust in politics, that the trust in democratic institutions, was really destroyed.
Only 18 percent of Italians and 15 percent of Greeks believe that their vote matters.
And the first was the cultural and social revolution of 1968 and 1970s, which put the individual at the center of politics.
But after that you have the market revolution of the 1980s.
Because first you have the 1960s and 1970s, cultural and social revolution, which in a certain way destroyed the idea of a collective purpose.
And you have the market revolution of the 1980s and the huge increase of inequality in societies.
The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming.
When the Soviet Union was still there, the rich and the powerful, they needed the people, because they feared them.
And it's becoming more and more difficult to understand the people who are not like you.
I know that many people here have been splendidly speaking about the digital world and the possibility for cooperation, but [have you] seen what the digital world has done to American politics these days?
This is also partly a result of the Internet revolution.
Before, revolutions used to have ideological names.
You have Facebook revolutions, Twitter revolutions.
And when we're now trying to see how we can change the situation, when basically we're trying to see what can be done about democracy, we should keep this ambiguity in mind.
These days it's very popular to believe that this push for transparency, this kind of a combination between active citizens, new technologies and much more transparency-friendly legislation can restore trust in politics.
This is why you have checks and balances.
It's not going to be the Big Brother watching you, it's going to be we being the Big Brother watching the political class.
But is this the idea of a free society?
So I had the opportunity to talk to the prime minister, why he made this decision.
And this is Goethe, who is neither Bulgarian nor a political scientist, some centuries ago he said, "There is a big shadow where there is much light."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I want to talk to you about how to build and rebuild trust, because it's my belief that trust is the foundation for everything we do, and that if we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress.
But what if trust is broken?
If I was giving this talk six months ago, I would have been wearing an Uber T-shirt.
But when I got to Uber, I made a really big mistake.
I publicly committed to wearing an Uber T-shirt every day until every other employee was wearing an Uber T-shirt.
(Laughter) It was 250 days of wearing an Uber T-shirt.
The component parts of trust are super well understood.
We are all so busy with so many demands on our time, it's easy to crowd out the time and space that empathy requires.
Now if the quality of your logic is at risk, I can't really help you with that.
Super fortunately, there's a very easy fix to this.
(Applause) You just gave me goosebumps.
So in many ways, the prescription is clear.
I'm a woman of super strong opinions, with really deep convictions, direct speech.
I have a magnificent wife, and together, we have such crazy ambition.
I prefer men's clothes and comfortable shoes.
So here's my advice.
So let's go back to Uber. What happened at Uber?
In the meetings at Uber, it was not uncommon for people to be texting one another ...
(Laughter) I had never seen anything like it.
(Laughter) It may have done many things, but it did not create a safe, empathetic environment.
And that forced people to look up, to look at the people in front of them, to listen to them, to immerse themselves in their perspectives and to collaborate in unprecedented ways.
But when we figure out this, when we figure out how to celebrate difference and how to let people bring the best version of themselves forward, well holy cow, is that the world I want my sons to grow up in.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
One of my favorite words in the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary is "snollygoster," just because it sounds so good.
But it's very important that words are at the center of politics, and all politicians know they have to try and control language.
It wasn't until, for example, 1771 that the British Parliament allowed newspapers to report the exact words that were said in the debating chamber.
And it was only a few years later that we have the first recorded use of the phrase "as bold as brass."
And they had to face the question of what to call George Washington, their leader.
And this was debated in Congress for ages and ages.
And the reason for the delay and the boredom was that the House of Representatives were against the Senate.
And that's why the Senate objected to it.
Instead, they agreed to use the title "President" for now.
And so the Senate won in the end.
But now, do you know how many nations have a president?
And so, in the end, the Senate won and the House of Representatives lost ...
Politicians try to pick and use words to shape and control reality, but in fact, reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.
Thank you very much.
So in the world of product design, the beautiful baby's like the concept car.
So why is it that this year's new cars look pretty much exactly like last year's new cars?
(Laughter) What went wrong between the design studio and the factory?
So here's a problem: four million babies around the world, mostly in developing countries, die every year before their first birthday, even before their first month of life.
So this is a newborn intensive care unit in Kathmandu, Nepal.
The problem is, without technicians, without spare parts, donations like this very quickly turn into junk.
Keeping a baby warm for a week -- that's not rocket science.
We conducted months of user research overseas, trying to think like designers, human-centered design -- "Let's figure out what people want."
We made dozens of prototypes to get to this.
So the idea here is, unlike the concept car, we want to marry something beautiful with something that actually works.
Here's the bad news: the only baby ever actually put inside the NeoNurture incubator was this kid during a Time magazine photo shoot.
This is a Bangladeshi hospital director outside his facility.
Similarly, here's a multinational medical-device manufacturer.
So it turns out that design for outcomes in one aspect really means thinking about design for manufacture and distribution.
So we started by finding a manufacturer, an organization called MTTS in Vietnam, that manufactures newborn-care technologies for Southeast Asia.
Jaundice affects two-thirds of newborns around the world.
There's one way to treat jaundice, and that's what's called an exchange transfusion.
So as you can imagine, that's expensive and a little bit dangerous.
Here's a neonatal intensive care unit, where moms come in to visit their babies.
From a phototherapy standpoint, maybe not the best behavior.
We have to think like existentialists: it's not the painting we would have painted, it's the painting that we actually painted.
It sounds crazy, it sounds dumb, but there are actually hospitals who would rather have no equipment than something that looks cheap and crummy.
From the very beginning, we started by talking to manufacturers.
Our goal is to make a state-of-the-art product that our partner MTTS can actually manufacture.
So that's the design for manufacture question.
(Laughter) You think it's funny.
I had a laptop in the Peace Corps, and the screen had all these dead pixels on it.
(Laughter) So with Firefly, what we did is -- the problem is electronics get hot, and you have to put in vents or fans to keep them cool -- in most products.
I have to pay attention to how people are actually going to use a device.
I have to accept that there are no dumb users, only dumb products."
We have to ask ourselves hard questions.
I've since learned that if you really want to make a difference in the world, you have to design outcomes.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I was having lunch with him just a few minutes ago, and a Nigerian journalist comes -- and this will only make sense if you've ever watched a James Bond movie -- and a Nigerian journalist comes up to him and goes, "Aha, we meet again, Mr. Bond!"
It's really amazing.
And I was watching Jane [Goodall] yesterday, and I thought it was really great, and I was watching those incredible slides of the chimpanzees, and I thought, "Wow. What if a chimpanzee could talk, you know? What would it say?"
And what's become increasingly clear to me is that we're talking about news stories about Africa; we're not really talking about African narratives.
And it's important to make a distinction, because if the news is anything to go by, 40 percent of Americans can't -- either can't afford health insurance or have the most inadequate health insurance, and have a president who, despite the protest of millions of his citizens -- even his own Congress -- continues to prosecute a senseless war.
And talking about war, my girlfriend has this great t-shirt that says, "Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity."
It's amazing, isn't it?
The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news.
He says, "When the Sumerian tablets were first translated, they were thought to be business records.
This is important.
The first Igbo Bible was translated from English in about the 1800s by Bishop Crowther, who was a Yoruba.
And it's important to know Igbo is a tonal language, and so they'll say the word "igwe" and "igwe": same spelling, one means "sky" or "heaven," and one means "bicycle" or "iron."
So "God is in heaven surrounded by His angels" was translated as -- [Igbo].
And for some reason, in Cameroon, when they tried to translate the Bible into Cameroonian patois, they chose the Igbo version.
This is good, because language complicates things.
You know, we often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true.
Nigeria got its independence in 1960.
The first time the possibility for independence was discussed was in 1922, following the Aba women's market riots.
In 1967, in the middle of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, Dr. Njoku-Obi invented the Cholera vaccine.
So, you know, the thing is to remember that because otherwise, 10 years from now, we'll be back here trying to tell this story again.
Let me tell you a Nigerian joke.
So there's Tom, Dick and Harry and they're working construction.
And Tom opens up his lunch box and there's rice in it, and he goes on this rant about, "Twenty years, my wife has been packing rice for lunch.
But Harry's wife is confused, because she said, "You know, Harry had been packing his own lunch for 20 years."
(Laughter) This seemingly innocent joke, when I heard it as a child in Nigeria, was told about Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, with the Hausa being Harry.
My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the '50s.
It makes sense now when I think about it, because if you'd known my father, you would've wanted to poison him too.
(Laughter) So I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years.
And I was growing up in school and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels.
A Pakistani Muslim teaching Jewish Holocaust history to young Igbo children.
And it should come as no surprise that my first novel at 16 was about Neo-Nazis taking over Nigeria to institute the Fourth Reich.
(Laughter) But I mean, I grew up with this incredible privilege, and not just me -- millions of Nigerians grew up with books and libraries.
In fact, we were talking last night about how all of the steamy novels of Harold Robbins had done more for sex education of horny teenage boys in Africa than any sex education programs ever had.
We are squandering the most valuable resource we have on this continent: the valuable resource of the imagination.
And Fraser's on his knees, arms tied behind his back, and he's crying.
Idris pauses, then he moves again, and Fraser says, "Please!
And it's not the look of horror and terror on Fraser's face that stops Idris or us; it's the look in Fraser's eyes.
African narratives in the West, they proliferate.
I really don't care anymore.
I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves -- how as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.
I am trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of ethical questioning.
As a young middle-class Nigerian activist, I launched myself along with a whole generation of us into the campaign to stop the government.
And I watched them being locked up in prison and tear gassed.
I justified it, and I said, "This is the cost of revolution.
As I was telling Rachel from Google Earth, that I had challenged my students in America -- I said, "You don't know anything about Africa, you're all idiots."
So I went to Google Earth and learned about Africa.
And I think if we can just admit that we're all trying to approximate the truth of our own communities, it will make for a much more nuanced and a much more interesting conversation.
"Here," Jimmy said.
(Laughter) He also says that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential, pure identity: religious, ethnic, historical, ideological.
"Gazelle, I killed you for your skin's exquisite touch, for how easy it is to be nailed to a board weathered raw as white butcher paper.
Rise and walk away like a panther."
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to tell you about why I became a sculptor, and you may think that sculptors, well, they deal with meta, they deal with objects, they deal with bodies, but I think, really, what I care about most is making space, and that's what I've called this talk: Making Space.
Space that exists within us, and without us.
Here we are, in a space, the subjective, collective space of the darkness of the body.
That's the space that I think sculpture -- which is a bit of a paradox, sculpture that is about making material propositions -- but I think that's the space that sculpture can connect us with.
So, imagine we're in the middle of America.
I was young. I'd just finished art school.
This was a wonderful place, because it was a place where you could imagine that you were the first person to be there.
I picked up a hand-sized stone, threw it as far as I was able, it was about 22 meters.
(Laughter) But the fact is, this is evidence of a living body on other bodies, rocks that have been the subject of geological formation, erosion, the action of time on objects.
This is a work called "Learning To See."
It's called "Learning To See" because it's about an object that hopefully works reflexively and talks about that vision or connection with the darkness of the body that I see as a space of potential.
Can we do it another way, using the language of particles around a nucleus, and talk about the body as an energy center?
Is there another way?
And is art about trying to imagine what lies beyond the horizon?
You can see this work. It's on the mouth of the Mersey, just outside Liverpool.
This is a work called "Room for the Great Australian Desert."
There's a hole at the anus, penis level.
But this is a space that is actually filled with people, disembodied voices, and out of that ambient environment, when people come close to your own body zone, very close, they appear to you as representations.
If art has any purpose, it is to open our eyes to that fact."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Hello.
It took me 14 hours and 227 googly eyes to make this shirt.
I call it "The Toothbrush Helmet."
(Laughter) (Robot arm buzzing) (Laughter) (Applause) So my toothbrush helmet is recommended by zero out of 10 dentists, and it definitely did not revolutionize the world of dentistry, but it did completely change my life.
Because I finished making this toothbrush helmet three years ago and after I finished making it, I went into my living room and I put up a camera, and I filmed a seven-second clip of it working.
Here's an email I sent to my brother around that time.
I don't want people to think that I'm stupid.
(Laughter) One of those things was puberty.
But moreover, I got interested in building robots, and I wanted to teach myself about hardware.
But building things with hardware, especially if you're teaching yourself, is something that's really difficult to do.
And that was my biggest fear at the time.
And even though I didn't realize it at the time, building stupid things was actually quite smart, because as I kept on learning about hardware, for the first time in my life, I did not have to deal with my performance anxiety.
So as an inventor, I'm interested in things that people struggle with.
So before I came here, I sat down and I thought of some of the potential problems I might have in giving this talk.
It's this expression of joy and humility that often gets lost in engineering, and for me it was a way to learn about hardware without having my performance anxiety get in the way.
To me that's the true beauty of making useless things, because it's this acknowledgment that you don't always know what the best answer is.
And maybe a toothbrush helmet isn't the answer, but at least you're asking the question.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Sydney. I had been waiting my whole life to get to Sydney.
For the performance, the audience walked around the neighborhood from house to house, and the residents, who were the performers, they came out of their houses, and they performed these autobiographical dances on their lawns, on their driveways. (Laughter) The show is a collaboration with a U.K.-based performance company called Lone Twin.
This Australian-Indian girl, she came out and started to dance on her front lawn, and her father peered out the window to see what all the noise and commotion was about, and he soon joined her.
The Sydney Festival which produced "Minto: Live" I think represents a new kind of 21st-century arts festival.
Modern arts festivals were born in the rubble of World War II.
In 1947, the Edinburgh Festival was born and Avignon was born and hundreds of others would follow in their wake.
So, the new festival, it asks the audience to play an essential role in shaping the performance.
LIFT has always been a pioneer in the use of venues.
They understand that theater and performance can happen anywhere.
Back to Back is an Australian company of people with intellectual disabilities. I saw their amazing show in New York at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal at rush hour.
For a few days, they transformed a massive city into a community where endless possibility reigned.
The Guardian wrote, "If art is about transformation, then there can be no more transformative experience.
What 'The Sultan's Elephant' represents is no less than an artistic occupation of the city and a reclamation of the streets for the people."
Festivals promote diversity, they bring neighbors into dialogue, they increase creativity, they offer opportunities for civic pride, they improve our general psychological well-being.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk.
How can we share more memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape?
Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans.
I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade.
In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much.
And I thought about death a lot.
So anyone walking by can pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their life, and share their personal aspirations in public space.
"Before I die, I want to sing for millions."
"Before I die, I want to plant a tree."
"Before I die, I want to be someone's cavalry."
"Before I die, I want to be completely myself."
So, my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and beyond.
Two of the most valuable things we have are time, and our relationships with other people.
Death is something that we're often discouraged to talk about, or even think about, but I've realized that preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
Every summer when I was growing up, I would fly from my home in Canada to visit my grandparents, who lived in Mumbai, India.
Now, Canadian summers are pretty mild at best -- about 22 degrees Celsius or 72 degrees Fahrenheit is a typical summer's day, and not too hot.
Mumbai, on the other hand, is a hot and humid place well into the 30s Celsius or 90s Fahrenheit.
To make things worse, my grandparents didn't have an air conditioner.
But this is changing, and fast.
Cooling systems today collectively account for 17 percent of the electricity we use worldwide.
This includes everything from the air conditioners I so desperately wanted during my summer vacations, to the refrigeration systems that keep our food safe and cold for us in our supermarkets, to the industrial scale systems that keep our data centers operational.
However, one of the most alarming things about climate change is that the warmer our planet gets, the more we're going to need cooling systems -- systems that are themselves large emitters of greenhouse gas emissions.
This then has the potential to cause a feedback loop, where cooling systems alone could become one of our biggest sources of greenhouse gases later this century.
In the worst case, we might need more than 10 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year, just for cooling, by the year 2100.
A 10 or 20 percent improvement in the efficiency of every cooling system could actually have an enormous impact on our greenhouse gas emissions, both today and later this century.
I'm a scientist who thinks a lot about light and heat.
In particular, how new materials allow us to alter the flow of these basic elements of nature in ways we might have once thought impossible.
So, while I always understood the value of cooling during my summer vacations, I actually wound up working on this problem because of an intellectual puzzle that I came across about six years ago.
How were ancient peoples able to make ice in desert climates?
There are ruins of dozens of such structures throughout Iran, with evidence of similar such buildings throughout the rest of the Middle East and all the way to China.
Even though the air temperature might be above freezing, say five degrees Celsius or 41 degrees Fahrenheit, the water would freeze.
The ice generated would then be collected in the early morning hours and stored for use in the building you see on the right, all the way through the summer months.
You've actually likely seen something very similar at play if you've ever noticed frost form on the ground on a clear night, even when the air temperature is well above freezing.
But wait.
How did the water freeze if the air temperature is above freezing?
Think about a pie cooling on a window sill.
This is a concept known as thermal radiation.
In fact, we're all sending out our heat as infrared light right now, to each other and our surroundings.
The atmosphere and the molecules in it absorb some of that heat and send it back.
That's actually the greenhouse effect that's responsible for climate change.
Our atmosphere doesn't absorb all of that heat.
At certain wavelengths, in particular between eight and 13 microns, our atmosphere has what's known as a transmission window.
The cold of this upper atmosphere and all the way out to outer space, which can be as cold as minus 270 degrees Celsius, or minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit.
This is an effect known as night-sky cooling or radiative cooling.
And I was amazed by its apparent simplicity as a cooling method, yet really puzzled.
Why?
My colleagues and I spend a lot of our time thinking about how we can structure materials at very small length scales such that they can do new and useful things with light -- length scales smaller than the wavelength of light itself.
To do this, I designed a multilayer optical material shown here in a microscope image.
The second thing it does is it avoids getting heated up by the sun.
I left the device out for a little while, and I walked up to it after a few minutes, and within seconds, I knew it was working.
I'm showing you data here from our very first experiment, where that material stayed more than five degrees Celsius, or nine degrees Fahrenheit, colder than the air temperature, even though the sun was shining directly on it.
That brings me to the next big question.
How do you actually save energy with this idea?
Well, we believe the most direct way to save energy with this technology is as an efficiency boost for today's air-conditioning and refrigeration systems.
These panels have a similar shape to solar water heaters, except they do the opposite -- they cool the water, passively, using our specialized material.
These panels can then be integrated with a component almost every cooling system has, called a condenser, to improve the system's underlying efficiency.
Over the next year or two, I'm super excited to see this go to its first commercial-scale pilots in both the air conditioning and refrigeration space.
In the future, we might be able to integrate these kinds of panels with higher efficiency building cooling systems to reduce their energy usage by two-thirds.
And eventually, we might actually be able to build a cooling system that requires no electricity input at all.
As a first step towards that, my colleagues at Stanford and I have shown that you could actually maintain something more than 42 degrees Celsius below the air temperature with better engineering.
Thank you.
(Applause) So just imagine that -- something that is below freezing on a hot summer's day.
So, while I'm very excited about all we can do for cooling, and I think there's a lot yet to be done, as a scientist, I'm also drawn to a more profound opportunity that I believe this work highlights.
We can use the cold darkness of space to improve the efficiency of every energy-related process here on earth.
In 2015, we showed that with deliberate kinds of microstructures on top of a solar cell, we could take better advantage of this cooling effect to maintain a solar cell passively at a lower temperature.
That difference, at least conceptually, could be used to drive something called a heat engine to generate electricity.
Could we then make a nighttime power-generation device that generates useful amounts of electricity when solar cells don't work?
Could we generate light from darkness?
Central to this ability is being able to manage the thermal radiation that's all around us.
We're constantly bathed in infrared light; if we could bend it to our will, we could profoundly change the flows of heat and energy that permeate around us every single day.
This ability, coupled with the cold darkness of space, points us to a future where we, as a civilization, might be able to more intelligently manage our thermal energy footprint at the very largest scales.
So, the next time you're walking around outside, yes, do marvel at how the sun is essential to life on earth itself, but don't forget that the rest of the sky has something to offer us as well.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Ever since I was a young girl, I was always fascinated -- (Laughter) Oh!
(Laughter) If that's possible to imagine.
So this, very early on, led me to the fields of mathematics and chemistry.
So, inspired by Marie Curie and my local science museum, I decided to start asking these questions myself and engage in my own independent research, whether it be out of my garage or my bedroom.
I started reading journal papers, started doing science competitions, started participating in science fairs, doing anything I could to get the knowledge that I so desperately wanted.
So while I was studying anatomy for a competition, I came across the topic of something called chronic wounds.
And one thing that stood out to me was a statistic that said that the number of people in the United States with chronic wounds exceeds the number of people with breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer and leukemia, combined.
So what is a chronic wound?
(Laughter) And why haven't I heard about a 5K walk for chronic wounds, why haven't I even heard about a chronic wound in general?
(Laughter) So after I got past those preliminary questions, and one that I will clarify for you, a chronic wound is essentially when someone gets a normal wound, except it fails to heal normally because the patient has some kind of preexisting condition, which in most cases is diabetes.
In the year 2010 alone, 50 billion dollars were spent worldwide to treat chronic wounds.
In addition, it's estimated that about two percent of the population will get a chronic wound at some point in their lifetime.
It also had to be mass-manufacturable, because I wanted it to be made anywhere, for anyone.
So what exactly is this?
So I had gone on to testing my sensors and as all scientists have stumbles along their work, I also had a couple of problems in my first generation of sensors.
So I started constructing my sensors and testing them more rigorously, using money that I had gotten from previous science fair awards.
So I interfaced it with a Bluetooth chip, which you can see here by the app screenshots on the right.
And what this does is that anyone can monitor the progress of their wound, and it can be transmitted over a wireless connection to the doctor, the patient or whoever needs it.
[Continued Testing and Refinement] So in conclusion, my design was successful -- however, science never ends.
However, what I learned was what's more important than the actual thing I designed is an attitude that I had taken on while doing this.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Have you ever watched a baby learning to crawl?
Yes, it's a little flippant word hiding a profound shift in mindset, but I believe this is the shift we need to make if we, humanity, are going to thrive here together this century.
It was invented in the 1930s, but it very soon became the overriding goal of policymaking, so much so that even today, in the richest of countries, governments think that the solution to their economic problems lies in more growth.
"The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto."
And Rostow tells us that all economies need to pass through five stages of growth: first, traditional society, where a nation's output is limited by its technology, its institutions and mindset; but then the preconditions for takeoff, where we get the beginnings of a banking industry, the mechanization of work and the belief that growth is necessary for something beyond itself, like national dignity or a better life for the children; then takeoff, where compound interest is built into the economy's institutions and growth becomes the normal condition; fourth is the drive to maturity where you can have any industry you want, no matter your natural resource base; and the fifth and final stage, the age of high-mass consumption where people can buy all the consumer goods they want, like bicycles and sewing machines -- this was 1960, remember.
Well, you can hear the implicit airplane metaphor in this story, but this plane is like no other, because it can never be allowed to land.
What to do when the increase in real income itself loses its charm?"
Global GDP is 10 times bigger than it was in 1950 and that increase has brought prosperity to billions of people, but the global economy has also become incredibly divisive, with the vast share of returns to wealth now accruing to a fraction of the global one percent.
I think it's time to choose a higher ambition, a far bigger one, because humanity's 21st century challenge is clear: to meet the needs of all people within the means of this extraordinary, unique, living planet so that we and the rest of nature can thrive.
So can we find this dynamic balance in the 21st century?
And this kind of regenerative design is popping up everywhere.
Over a hundred cities worldwide, from Quito to Oslo, from Harare to Hobart, already generate more than 70 percent of their electricity from sun, wind and waves.
Cities like London, Glasgow, Amsterdam are pioneering circular city design, finding ways to turn the waste from one urban process into food for the next.
And from Tigray, Ethiopia to Queensland, Australia, farmers and foresters are regenerating once-barren landscapes so that it teems with life again.
This century, we can design our technologies and institutions to distribute wealth, knowledge and empowerment to many.
200 years of corporate control of intellectual property is being upended by the bottom-up, open-source, peer-to-peer knowledge commons.
You see, regenerative and distributive design create extraordinary opportunities for the 21st-century economy.
Yes, we need to dematerialize our economies, but this dependency on unending growth cannot be decoupled from resource use on anything like the scale required to bring us safely back within planetary boundaries.
Yes, look to nature and growth is a wonderful, healthy source of life.
Their economies are growing at seven percent a year.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Hi. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the people who make the things we use every day: our shoes, our handbags, our computers and cell phones.
Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes, or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your iPad.
In fact, China makes goods for markets all over the world, including its own, thanks to a combination of factors: its low costs, its large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands.
Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods.
Chen Ying: "When I went home for the new year, everyone said I had changed. They asked me, what did you do that you have changed so much?
Only much later did I realize that she had been saying "QC," or quality control.
Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism, the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor.
How long should I stay in this factory?
How much money can I save?
Min's sister said to her parents, "In America, this bag sells for 320 dollars."
I looked in the zippered pocket of one, and I found a printed card in English, which read, "An American classic.
Six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 Signature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair.
Later, she married a fellow migrant worker, moved with him to his village, gave birth to two daughters, and saved enough money to buy a secondhand Buick for herself and an apartment for her parents.
Across China, there are 150 million workers like her, one third of them women, who have left their villages to work in the factories, the hotels, the restaurants and the construction sites of the big cities.
Together, they make up the largest migration in history, and it is globalization, this chain that begins in a Chinese farming village and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet and Coach handbags on our arms that has changed the way these millions of people work and marry and live and think.
When I first went to Dongguan, I worried that it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
And in the same community, this is business synergy.
And this is a global business.
This is a shopping mall.
This is Oshodi Market in Lagos.
It's traditionally called the informal economy, the underground economy, the black market.
There's a word in French that is débrouillardise, that means to be self-reliant, and the former French colonies have turned that into System D for the economy of self-reliance, or the DIY economy.
This is the pickle economy.
It's worth 1.5 trillion dollars every year, and that's a vast amount of money, right?
That's three times the Gross Domestic Product of Switzerland.
1.8 billion people around the world work in the economy that is unregulated and informal.
That's a huge number, and what does that mean?
And given that projections are that the bulk of economic growth over the next 15 years will come from emerging economies in the developing world, it could easily overtake the United States and become the largest economy in the world.
And it's not just in Africa.
One in seven Africans is a Nigerian, and so everyone wants in to the mobile phone market in Nigeria. And when MTN came in, they wanted to sell the mobile service like I get in the United States or like people get here in the U.K. or in Europe -- expensive monthly plans, you get a phone, you pay overages, you're killed with fees -- and their plan crashed and burned.
It's sold at umbrella stands all over the streets, where people are unregistered, unlicensed, but MTN makes most of its profits, perhaps 90 percent of its profits, from selling through System D, the informal economy.
And where do the phones come from?
Versace without the vowels.
S. Guuuci, and -- (Laughter) (Applause) All around the world this is how products are being distributed, so, for instance, in one street market on Rua 25 de Março in São Paulo, Brazil, you can buy fake designer glasses.
The sneaker manufacturer told me that if they find that Pumas are being pirated, or Adidas are being pirated and their sneakers aren't being pirated, they know they've done something wrong. (Laughter) So it's very important to them to track piracy exactly because of this, and the people who are buying, the pirates, are not their customers anyway, because their customers want the real deal.
Secondly, from the [Austrian] anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend, facts are relative, and what is a massive right of self-reliance to a Nigerian businessperson is considered unauthorized and horrible to other people, and we have to recognize that there are differences in how people define things and what their facts are.
Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
"Five hospitals in Aleppo have been bombed."
One of them was a children's hospital run by my Syrian colleagues at the Independent Doctors Association, IDA.
And I felt devastated.
Fellow humanitarians and I have spent blood, sweat and tears rebuilding hospitals so that our patients may live, not die.
The reason that people survive in crisis is because of the remarkable work of the people in crisis themselves.
People survive because of the local doctors, nurses and aid workers who are from the very heart of the affected community, the people who dare to work where others can't or won't.
Now, the data shows that Syrian organizations carry out 75 percent of the humanitarian work in Syria.
And what's more, the same is happening across the crises of the world.
It means those with the knowledge, skill and ability to respond on the front lines have little of the necessary tools, equipment and resources they need to save lives.
It means groups like IDA don't have funds to rebuild their hospital.
Now, at the time of receiving that message, I was on sabbatical from my clinical work, setting up CanDo, a start-up determined to address this imbalance and enable local responders to provide health care to their war-devastated communities.
It was a global crowdfunding campaign to enable IDA to rebuild a whole new children's hospital, and, if successful, we the people would take the medical equipment all the way from London to the Syria border.
Thousands of people came together from across the world to achieve a global first: we built the first-ever crowdfunded hospital.
IDA was so moved by people's response, they named it "Hope Hospital."
(Applause) We can provide lifesaving assistance in the most volatile places on earth.
The system needs to change, and change starts with us all sharing a new humanitarian vision, one where you, global citizens with skills, expertise and resources, stand together with the local responders; one where we are all humanitarians, putting the necessary resources in the hands of those who need them most and are best placed to use them effectively and efficiently.
Local humanitarians have the courage to persist, to dust themselves off from the wreckage and to start again, risking their lives to save others.
Thank you.
Why are hospitals being bombed?
So, Physicians for Human Rights have documented nearly 500 attacks on hospitals and over 800 medical personnel who have been killed -- over 90 percent of it by the Syrian regime -- and they say this is part of a systemic targeting and destruction of health care, using it as a weapon of war.
Tell me what it means to you that 5,000 people all over the world contributed 350,000 dollars to build Hope Hospital.
I think everyone who donated, they had their faith in humanity renewed, knowing there are people like IDA and those doctors, who are exhibiting the absolute best of humanity, and it was like an absolute reciprocation.
(Applause)
I have stage IV lung cancer.
I don't have young children.
(Laughter) (Applause) Oh, and the best thing of all -- I have a major accomplishment under my belt.
I didn't even know it until someone tweeted me a year ago.
(Laughter) But something happened that made me realize that reality may not be reality.
private yoga lessons -- I ended up with a development deal at Disney.
(Laughter) And that's when I knew.
So I dived into quantum physics and chaos theory to try to find actual reality, and I've just finished a movie -- yes, finally finished -- about all that, so I won't go into it here, and anyway, it wasn't until after we shot the movie, when I broke my leg and then it didn't heal, so then they had to do another surgery a year later, and then that took a year -- two years in a wheelchair, and that's when I came into contact with actual reality: limits.
And I should've known, given my equally shaky relationship with the zeitgeist ...
I have this -- not a scientist myself -- but an uncanny ability to understand everything about science, except the actual science -- (Laughter) which is math.
(Laughter) Wave-particle duality: the idea that one thing can manifest as two things ...
That a photon can manifest as a wave and a particle coincided with my deepest intuitions that people are good and bad, ideas are right and wrong.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
It doesn't make sense to me.
I think if you've actually read quantum physics as I have -- well, I read an email from someone who'd read it, but -- (Laughter) You have to understand that we don't live in Newton's clockwork universe anymore.
We live in a banana peel universe, and we won't ever be able to know everything or control everything or predict everything.
Nature is like a self-driving car.
And my source on this is Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who wrote a book called "The Human Condition."
Work is what comes out of the head; it's what we invent, it's what we create, it's how we leave our mark upon the world.
Whereas labor is associated with the body.
So to me, the mindset that denies that, that denies that we're in sync with the biorhythms, the cyclical rhythms of the universe, does not create a hospitable environment for women or for people associated with labor, which is to say, people that we associate as descendants of slaves, or people who perform manual labor.
First of all, I am incredibly grateful for life, but I don't want to be immortal.
(Laughter) And I have actual proof of that.
You know, I look at death now from the point of view of a German biologist, Andreas Weber, who looks at it as part of the gift economy.
It actually happens.
Ha, ha, ha, I win!
And, you know, quantum physicists are not exactly sure what happens when the wave becomes a particle.
Thank you so much for making my life real.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
The first happened in 1997, in which Garry Kasparov, a human, lost to Deep Blue, a machine.
To many, this was the dawn of a new era, one where man would be dominated by machine.
But here we are, 20 years on, and the greatest change in how we relate to computers is the iPad, not HAL.
Even a supercomputer was beaten by a grandmaster with a relatively weak laptop.
Licklider was a computer science titan who had a profound effect on the development of technology and the Internet.
Protein folding, a topic that shares the incredible expansiveness of chess — there are more ways of folding a protein than there are atoms in the universe.
Last year, on the site of the Twin Towers, the 9/11 memorial opened.
Or take another example: big data.
The major emphasis of most approaches to big data focus on, "How do I store this data? How do I search this data? How do I process this data?"
When PayPal was first starting as a business, their biggest challenge was not, "How do I send money back and forth online?"
In that last question, a surprising insight was revealed.
Analyzing this data was hard. The originals were sheets of paper in Arabic that had to be scanned and translated.
In January, 2010, a devastating 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, third deadliest earthquake of all time, left one million people, 10 percent of the population, homeless.
January and February are the dry months in Haiti, yet many of the camps had developed standing water.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Rajiv suffers from a mental illness.
The difference in the quality of medical care received by people with mental illness is one of the reasons why they live shorter lives than people without mental illness.
In the developing countries of the world, this gap is even larger.
But of course, mental illnesses can kill in more direct ways as well. The most obvious example is suicide.
But beyond the impact of a health condition on life expectancy, we're also concerned about the quality of life lived.
Now, in order for us to examine the overall impact of a health condition both on life expectancy as well as on the quality of life lived, we need to use a metric called the DALY, which stands for a Disability-Adjusted Life Year.
We discover that, for example, mental illnesses are amongst the leading causes of disability around the world.
Depression, for example, is the third-leading cause of disability, alongside conditions such as diarrhea and pneumonia in children.
When you put all the mental illnesses together, they account for roughly 15 percent of the total global burden of disease.
And an especially important challenge that I've had to face is the great shortage of mental health professionals, such as psychiatrists and psychologists, particularly in the developing world.
I worked in a team of incredibly talented, compassionate, but most importantly, highly trained, specialized mental health professionals.
Soon after my training, I found myself working first in Zimbabwe and then in India, and I was confronted by an altogether new reality.
This was a reality of a world in which there were almost no mental health professionals at all.
In Zimbabwe, for example, there were just about a dozen psychiatrists, most of whom lived and worked in Harare city, leaving only a couple to address the mental health care needs of nine million people living in the countryside.
To give you a perspective, if I had to translate the proportion of psychiatrists in the population that one might see in Britain to India, one might expect roughly 150,000 psychiatrists in India.
It became quickly apparent to me that I couldn't follow the sorts of mental health care models that I had been trained in, one that relied heavily on specialized, expensive mental health professionals to provide mental health care in countries like India and Zimbabwe.
I had to think out of the box about some other model of care.
It was then that I came across these books, and in these books I discovered the idea of task shifting in global health.
Well today, I'm very pleased to report to you that there have been many experiments in task shifting in mental health care across the developing world over the past decade, and I want to share with you the findings of three particular such experiments, all three of which focused on depression, the most common of all mental illnesses.
In rural Uganda, Paul Bolton and his colleagues, using villagers, demonstrated that they could deliver interpersonal psychotherapy for depression and, using a randomized control design, showed that 90 percent of the people receiving this intervention recovered as compared to roughly 40 percent in the comparison villages.
Similarly, using a randomized control trial in rural Pakistan, Atif Rahman and his colleagues showed that lady health visitors, who are community maternal health workers in Pakistan's health care system, could deliver cognitive behavior therapy for mothers who were depressed, again showing dramatic differences in the recovery rates. Roughly 75 percent of mothers recovered as compared to about 45 percent in the comparison villages.
What SUNDAR stands for, in Hindi, is "attractive."
It empowers ordinary people to be more effective in caring for the health of others in their community, and in doing so, to become better guardians of their own health. Indeed, for me, task shifting is the ultimate example of the democratization of medical knowledge, and therefore, medical power.
Just over 30 years ago, the nations of the world assembled at Alma-Ata and made this iconic declaration.
Indeed, to implement the slogan of Health for All, we will need to involve all in that particular journey, and in the case of mental health, in particular we would need to involve people who are affected by mental illness and their caregivers.
So when the White House was built in the early 19th century, it was an open house.
Neighbors came and went. Under President Adams, a local dentist happened by.
He wanted to shake the President's hand.
The President dismissed the Secretary of State, whom he was conferring with, and asked the dentist if he would remove a tooth.
Later, in the 1850s, under President Pierce, he was known to have remarked — probably the only thing he's known for — when a neighbor passed by and said, "I'd love to see the beautiful house," and Pierce said to him, "Why my dear sir, of course you may come in.
This isn't my house. It is the people's house."
We were running Windows 2000.
So when we wanted to create our Open Government policy, what did we do? We wanted, naturally, to ask public sector employees how we should open up government.
Today we have technology that lets us express ourselves a great deal, perhaps a little too much.
The same can be said for our social systems, for our systems of government, where, at the very least, flow offers us a helpful metaphor for understanding what the problem is, what's really broken, and the urgent need that we have, that we all feel today, to redesign the flow of our institutions.
Now, it's very easy to complain, of course, about partisan politics and entrenched bureaucracy, and we love to complain about government. It's a perennial pastime, especially around election time, but the world is complex. We soon will have 10 billion people, many of whom will lack basic resources.
You've got 3,000 employees at Facebook governing 900 million inhabitants.
But social media do teach us something.
Why is Twitter so successful? Because it opens up its platform.
We have a precedent for this. Good old Henry II here, in the 12th century, invented the jury.
Powerful, practical, palpable model for handing power from government to citizens.
Today we have the opportunity, and we have the imperative, to create thousands of new ways of interconnecting between networks and institutions, thousands of new kinds of juries: the citizen jury, the Carrotmob, the hackathon, we are just beginning to invent the models by which we can cocreate the process of governance.
Now, we don't fully have a picture of what this will look like yet, but we're seeing pockets of evolution emerging all around us -- maybe not even evolution, I'd even start to call it a revolution -- in the way that we govern.
Some of it's very high-tech, and some of it is extremely low-tech, such as the project that MKSS is running in Rajasthan, India, where they take the spending data of the state and paint it on 100,000 village walls, and then invite the villagers to come and comment who is on the government payroll, who's actually died, what are the bridges that have been built to nowhere, and to work together through civic engagement to save real money and participate and have access to that budget.
Created after the post-election riots in Kenya in 2008, this crisis-mapping website and community is actually able to crowdsource and target the delivery of better rescue services to people trapped under the rubble, whether it's after the earthquakes in Haiti, or more recently in Italy.
And the Red Cross too is training volunteers and Twitter is certifying them, not simply to supplement existing government institutions, but in many cases, to replace them.
In February, he approached the White House, and said, "I would like to fund a prize to create scalable national applications, apps, that will help not only the homeless but those who deliver services [to] them to do so better."
February 2012 to June of 2012, the finalists are announced in the competition.
Can you imagine, in the bureaucratic world of yesteryear, getting anything done in a four-month period of time?
And I want to be clear to mention that this open government revolution is not about privatizing government, because in many cases what it can do when we have the will to do so is to deliver more progressive and better policy than the regulations and the legislative and litigation-oriented strategies by which we make policy today.
In the State of Texas, they regulate 515 professions, from well-driller to florist.
Now, you can carry a gun into a church in Dallas, but do not make a flower arrangement without a license, because that will land you in jail.
So what is Texas doing? They're asking you and me, using online policy wikis, to help not simply get rid of burdensome regulations that impede entrepreneurship, but to replace those regulations with more innovative alternatives, sometimes using transparency in the creation of new iPhone apps that will allows us both to protect consumers and the public and to encourage economic development.
It's not only the benefits that we've talked about with regard to development. It's the economic benefits and the job creation that's coming from this open innovation work.
Sberbank, the largest and oldest bank in Russia, largely owned by the Russian government, has started practicing crowdsourcing, engaging its employees and citizens in the public in developing innovations.
Last year they saved a billion dollars, 30 billion rubles, from open innovation, and they're pushing radically the extension of crowdsourcing, not only from banking, but into the public sector.
And we see lots of examples of these innovators using open government data, not simply to make apps, but then to make companies and to hire people to build them working with the government.
In San Ramon, California, they published an iPhone app in which they allow you or me to say we are certified CPR-trained, and then when someone has a heart attack, a notification goes out so that you can rush over to the person over here and deliver CPR.
The victim who receives bystander CPR is more than twice as likely to survive.
Let me be very clear, and perhaps controversial, that open government is not about transparent government.
Russia is using wikis to get citizens writing law together, as is Lithuania. When we start to see power over the core functions of government — spending, legislation, decision-making — then we're well on our way to an open government revolution.
Obviously opening up the data is one, but the important thing is to create lots more -- create and curate -- lots more participatory opportunities.
And that's why we need to start with our youngest people.
When we start by teaching young people that we live, not in a passive society, a read-only society, but in a writable society, where we have the power to change our communities, to change our institutions, that's when we begin to really put ourselves on the pathway towards this open government innovation, towards this open government movement, towards this open government revolution.
We don't have words, really, to describe it yet.
Thank you. (Applause)
And for hundreds, even thousands of years, the home was really the center of life.
In China alone, 300 million people, some say 400 million people, will move to the city over the next 15 years.
Cities will account for 90 percent of the population growth, 80 percent of the global CO2, 75 percent of energy use, but at the same time it's where people want to be, increasingly.
More than half the people now in the world live in cities, and that will just continue to escalate.
Cities are places of celebration, personal expression.
You have -- (Laughter) Cities are where most of the wealth is created, and particularly in the developing world, it's where women find opportunities.
That's a lot of the reason why cities are growing very quickly.
(Laughter) In that it's a place for people, you know.
So with cities, you also have congestion and pollution and disease and all these negative things.
The 20 arrondissements of Paris are these little neighborhoods.
There's very little that's within a five-minute walk of most areas of places like Pittsburgh.
We've been developing, at the Media Lab, this little city car that is optimized for shared use in cities.
Mayor Menino in Boston says lack of affordable housing for young people is one of the biggest problems the city faces.
That means twice as much parking, though.
That goes down to 10,000 dollars per car, just for the cost of the parking.
We have sensors on all the furniture, all the infill, that understands where people are and what they're doing.
This just shows you the data that comes from the sensors that are embedded in the furniture.
We think these little wireless sensors are more effective.
This can be combined with LED lighting as well.
We think workplaces should be shared.
We need shared spaces for interaction and collaboration.
We think ultimately, all of this stuff can come together, a new model for mobility, a new model for housing, a new model for how we live and work, a path to market for advanced technologies.
Like many of you here, I am trying to contribute towards a renaissance in Africa.
The question of transformation in Africa really is a question of leadership.
And it is my contention that the manner in which we educate our leaders is fundamental to progress on this continent.
I want to tell you some stories that explain my view.
An American friend of mine this year volunteered as a nurse in Ghana, and in a period of three months she came to a conclusion about the state of leadership in Africa that had taken me over a decade to reach.
Twice she was involved in surgeries where they lost power at the hospital.
There was not a flashlight, not a lantern, not a candle -- pitch black.
The second time was a procedure that involved local anesthesia.
Anesthetic wears off. The patient feels pain.
And that hospital could have afforded flashlights.
And it happened twice.
Another time, she watched in horror as nurses watched a patient die because they refused to give her oxygen that they had.
And so three months later, just before she returned to the United States, nurses in Accra go on strike.
Start all over again.
They are the elite. They are our leaders.
Their decisions, their actions matter.
So when I speak of leadership, I'm not talking about just political leaders.
We've heard a lot about that.
I'm talking about the elite.
The lawyers, the judges, the policemen, the doctors, the engineers, the civil servants -- those are the leaders.
And we need to train them right.
Now, my first pointed and memorable experience with leadership in Ghana occurred when I was 16 years old.
And one day I go to the airport to meet my father, and as I walk up this grassy slope from the car park to the terminal building, I'm stopped by two soldiers wielding AK-47 assault weapons.
Now, I was 16. I was very worried about what my peers at school might think if they saw me running up and down this hill.
I was especially concerned of what the girls might think.
It was a little reckless, but you know, I was 16.
I got lucky.
A Ghana Airways pilot falls into the same predicament.
What lessons would you take from an experience like this?
I learned something about courage.
It was important not to look at those guns.
And I also learned that it can be helpful to think about girls.
(Laughter) So a few years after this event, I leave Ghana on a scholarship to go to Swarthmore College for my education.
In my economics classes I got high marks for my understanding of basic economics.
But I learned something more profound than that, which is that the leaders -- the managers of Ghana's economy -- were making breathtakingly bad decisions that had brought our economy to the brink of collapse.
And so here was this lesson again -- leadership matters.
But I didn't really fully understand what had happened to me at Swarthmore.
And I was part of this team -- this thinking, learning team whose job it was to design and implement new software that created value in the world.
And I realized just what had happened to me at Swarthmore, this transformation -- the ability to confront problems, complex problems, and to design solutions to those problems.
Now, while I was at Microsoft, the annual revenues of that company grew larger than the GDP of the Republic of Ghana.
Now, I've already spoken about one of the reasons why this has occurred.
But there were also some external factors: free markets, the rule of law, infrastructure.
These things were provided by institutions run by the people that I call leaders.
Somebody trained them to do the work that they do.
Now, while I was at Microsoft, this funny thing happened.
I became a parent.
Because I realized that the state of the African continent would matter to my children and their children.
That the state of the world -- the state of the world depends on what's happening to Africa, as far as my kids would be concerned.
And at this time, when I was going through what I call my "pre-mid-life crisis," Africa was a mess.
Rwanda was in the throes of this genocidal war.
I couldn't just stay in Seattle and raise my kids in an upper-middle class neighborhood and feel good about it.
And three things kept coming up for every problem: corruption, weak institutions and the people who run them -- the leaders.
But, for me, I asked the question, "Well, where are these leaders coming from?
What is it about Ghana that produces leaders that are unethical or unable to solve problems?"
And Ghana was not paying enough attention.
And this is true across sub-Saharan Africa, actually.
I'm trying to bring the experience that I had at Swarthmore to Africa.
I wish there was a liberal arts college in every African country.
And what Ashesi University is trying to do is to train a new generation of ethical, entrepreneurial leaders.
We're trying to train leaders of exceptional integrity, who have the ability to confront the complex problems, ask the right questions, and come up with workable solutions.
That if we involve them in their education, if we have them discuss the real issues that they confront -- that our whole society confronts -- and if we give them skills that enable them to engage the real world, that magic will happen.
And it is an awesome thing to be a part of empowering someone in this way.
I am thinking now.
Can we create a perfect society?
But the conversation they're having now -- about what their good society should look like, what their excellent society should look like, is a really good thing.
These young future leaders are beginning to understand the real business of leadership, the real privilege of leadership, which is after all to serve humanity.
It's the first time in the history of Ghana that a woman has been elected head of Student Government at any university.
She won with 75 percent of the vote.
It turns out that corporate West Africa also appreciates what's happening with our students.
I think that the current and future leaders of Africa have an incredible opportunity to drive a major renaissance on the continent.
It's an incredible opportunity.
There aren't very many more opportunities like this in the world.
We have reached a moment from which can emerge a great society within one generation.
(Applause)
The murder happened a little over 21 years ago, January the 18th, 1991, in a small bedroom community of Lynwood, California, just a few miles southeast of Los Angeles.
He was convicted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and transported to Folsom Prison.
It's called reconstructed memories.
It happens to us in all the aspects of our life, all the time.
But this occurred in mid-January, in the Northern Hemisphere, at 7 p.m. at night.
Now, he didn't use a real gun in his hand, so he had a black object in his hand that was similar to the gun that was described.
At this point, I became a little concerned.
This judge is someone you'd never want to play poker with.
Furthermore, the roof of the car is causing what we call a shadow cloud inside the car which is making it darker.
One suggestion is that all of us become much more attuned to the necessity, through policy, through procedures, to get more science in the courtroom, and I think one large step toward that is more requirements, with all due respect to the law schools, of science, technology, engineering, mathematics for anyone going into the law, because they become the judges.
Think about how we select our judges in this country.
We all have to be very careful.
All our memories are reconstructed memories.
Thank you. (Applause)
Some years ago, I set out to try to understand if there was a possibility to develop biofuels on a scale that would actually compete with fossil fuels but not compete with agriculture for water, fertilizer or land.
So what are microalgae? Microalgae are micro -- that is, they're extremely small, as you can see here a picture of those single-celled organisms compared to a human hair.
We call it OMEGA, which is an acronym for Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae.
The algae that grow produce oxygen, as I've mentioned, and they also produce biofuels and fertilizer and food and other bi-algal products of interest.
And finally, we wanted to see where we could look at what the impact of this structure would be in the marine environment, and we set up a field site at a place called Moss Landing Marine Lab in Monterey Bay, where we worked in a harbor to see what impact this would have on marine organisms.
So the most important feature that we needed to develop were these so-called photobioreactors, or PBRs.
So let me show you how the system works.
But this is a bit like putting your head in a plastic bag.
So we would remove the algaes that concentrated in the bottom of this column, and then we could harvest that by a procedure where you float the algae to the surface and can skim it off with a net.
So we wanted to also investigate what would be the impact of this system in the marine environment, and I mentioned we set up this experiment at a field site in Moss Landing Marine Lab.
Our research covered the biology of the system, which included studying the way algae grew, but also what eats the algae, and what kills the algae.
And what about operating costs?
And what about, just, the whole economic structure?
We'd be growing oysters and things that would be producing high value products and food, and this would be a market driver as we build the system to larger and larger scales so that it becomes, ultimately, competitive with the idea of doing it for fuels.
What are we going to do with all this plastic that we're going to need to use in our marine environment?
Well, that's less than one percent of the surface area of the bay.
There's, of course, San Francisco Bay, as I mentioned.
Biofuels production is integrated with alternative energy is integrated with aquaculture.
I set out to find a pathway to innovative production of sustainable biofuels, and en route I discovered that what's really required for sustainability is integration more than innovation.
Can this project continue to move forward within NASA or do you need some very ambitious green energy fund to come and take it by the throat?
So, embryonic stem cells are really incredible cells.
Soon, we actually will be able to use stem cells to replace cells that are damaged or diseased.
I truly believe that stem cell research is going to allow our children to look at Alzheimer's and diabetes and other major diseases the way we view polio today, which is as a preventable disease.
So here we have this incredible field, which has enormous hope for humanity, but much like IVF over 35 years ago, until the birth of a healthy baby, Louise, this field has been under siege politically and financially.
And so, in 2005, we started the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory so that we would have a small organization that could do this work and support it.
What we saw very quickly is the world of both medical research, but also developing drugs and treatments, is dominated by, as you would expect, large organizations, but in a new field, sometimes large organizations really have trouble getting out of their own way, and sometimes they can't ask the right questions, and there is an enormous gap that's just gotten larger between academic research on the one hand and pharmaceutical companies and biotechs that are responsible for delivering all of our drugs and many of our treatments, and so we knew that to really accelerate cures and therapies, we were going to have to address this with two things: new technologies and also a new research model.
In 1998, human embryonic stem cells were first identified, and just nine years later, a group of scientists in Japan were able to take skin cells and reprogram them with very powerful viruses to create a kind of pluripotent stem cell called an induced pluripotent stem cell, or what we refer to as an IPS cell.
This was really an extraordinary advance, because although these cells are not human embryonic stem cells, which still remain the gold standard, they are terrific to use for modeling disease and potentially for drug discovery.
So a few months later, in 2008, one of our scientists built on that research. He took skin biopsies, this time from people who had a disease, ALS, or as you call it in the U.K., motor neuron disease.
It's a terrible business model.
We've got to look at the big picture.
And so we need to move away from this one-size-fits-all model.
It doesn't work with shoes, and our bodies are many times more complicated than just our feet.
But even with that, there still was another big hurdle, and that actually brings us back to the mapping of the human genome, because we're all different.
It's like having an app without having a smartphone.
It has massively parallel processing capability, and it's going to change the way drugs are discovered, we hope, and I think eventually what's going to happen is that we're going to want to re-screen drugs, on arrays like this, that already exist, all of the drugs that currently exist, and in the future, you're going to be taking drugs and treatments that have been tested for side effects on all of the relevant cells, on brain cells and heart cells and liver cells.
At some point in our lives, all of us, or people we care about, become patients, and that's why I think that stem cell research is incredibly important for all of us.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life.
So adolescence is defined as the period of life that starts with the biological, hormonal, physical changes of puberty and ends at the age at which an individual attains a stable, independent role in society.
So this is a model of the human brain, and this is prefrontal cortex, right at the front.
It's also involved in social interaction, understanding other people, and self-awareness.
The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls, and that's probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average, and then during adolescence, there's a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex.
This is a really important process. It's partly dependent on the environment that the animal or the human is in, and the synapses that are being used are strengthened, and synapses that aren't being used in that particular environment are pruned away.
So this is a soccer game. (Laughter) Michael Owen has just missed a goal, and he's lying on the ground, and the first aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates is how automatic and instinctive social emotional responses are, so within a split second of Michael Owen missing this goal, everyone is doing the same thing with their arms and the same thing with their face, even Michael Owen as he slides along the grass, is doing the same thing with his arms, and presumably has a similar facial expression, and the only people who don't are the guys in yellow at the back — (Laughs) — and I think they're on the wrong end of the stadium, and they're doing another social emotional response that we all instantly recognize, and that's the second aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates, how good we are at reading other people's behavior, their actions, their gestures, their facial expressions, in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states.
So that's what we're interested in looking at in my lab.
So imagine that you're the participant in one of our experiments. You come into the lab, you see this computerized task.
They move the white truck instead of the blue truck.
So people often ask, "Well, is adolescence a kind of recent phenomenon?
And actually, the answer is probably not. There are lots of descriptions of adolescence in history that sound very similar to the descriptions we use today.
So there's a famous quote by Shakespeare from "The Winter's Tale" where he describes adolescence as follows: "I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting." (Laughter) He then goes on to say, "Having said that, would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather?" (Laughter) So almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today, but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.
They take more risks than children or adults, and they are particularly prone to taking risks when they're with their friends. There's an important drive to become independent from one's parents and to impress one's friends in adolescence.
So the limbic system is right deep inside the brain, and it's involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing. It gives you the rewarding feeling out of doing fun things, including taking risks.
All four of my grandparents, for example, left school in their early adolescence. They had no choice.
And yet, this is a period of life where the brain is particularly adaptable and malleable.
It actually reflects changes in the brain that provide an excellent opportunity for education and social development. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
It's time to start designing for our ears.
The sound around us is affecting us even though we're not conscious of it.
Spaces tend to include noise and acoustics.
Many rooms are not so good.
Noise levels in hospitals have doubled in the last few years, and it affects not just the patients but also the people working there.
Education.
("Do architects have ears?") (Laughter) Now, that's a little unfair. Some of my best friends are architects. (Laughter) And they definitely do have ears.
If education can be likened to watering a garden, which is a fair metaphor, sadly, much of the water is evaporating before it reaches the flowers, especially for some groups, for example, those with hearing impairment.
(Noisy conversation) This study in Germany found the average noise level in classrooms is 65 decibels.
Noise goes up, heart rate goes up.
I just moderated a major conference in London a few weeks ago called Sound Education, which brought together top acousticians, government people, teachers, and so forth.
Out of that conference, incidentally, also came a free app which is designed to help children study if they're having to work at home, for example, in a noisy kitchen.
It's time to start designing for the ears.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
I went to the local baker and took their stale bread.
We're talking about good, fresh food that is being wasted on a colossal scale.
A country like America has four times the amount of food that it needs.
When people talk about the need to increase global food production to feed those nine billion people that are expected on the planet by 2050, I always think of these graphs.
And yesterday, I went to one of the local supermarkets that I often visit to inspect, if you like, what they're throwing away.
As a result, this stuff gets fed to dogs at best, or is incinerated.
It's called sheep's organs.
This is an experiment I did on three lettuces.
Who keeps lettuces in their fridge?
Some food waste, as I said at the beginning, will inevitably arise, so the question is, what is the best thing to do with it?
And yet, in Europe, that practice has become illegal since 2001 as a result of the foot-and-mouth outbreak.
At the moment, Europe depends on importing millions of tons of soy from South America, where its production contributes to global warming, to deforestation, to biodiversity loss, to feed livestock here in Europe.
Stop wasting food. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
You know, we wake up in the morning, you get dressed, put on your shoes, you head out into the world.
And at that moment, when I heard that, I just got catapulted out of the subway car into a night when I had been getting a ride in an ambulance from the sidewalk where I had been stabbed to the trauma room of St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, and what had happened was a gang had come in from Brooklyn.
I ran down the street and collapsed, and the ambulance guys intubated me on the sidewalk and let the trauma room know they had an incoming.
and — (Laughter) — the nurse kind of had a hysterical laugh, and I'm turning my head trying to see everybody, and I had this weird memory of being in college and raising, raising money for the flood victims of Bangladesh, and then I look over and my anesthesiologist is clamping the mask on me, and I think, "He looks Bangladeshi," — (Laughter) — and I just have those two facts, and I just think, "This could work somehow." (Laughter) And then I go out, and they work on me for the rest of the night, and I needed about 40 units of blood to keep me there while they did their work, and the surgeon took out about a third of my intestines, my cecum, organs I didn't know that I had, and he later told me one of the last things he did while he was in there was to remove my appendix for me, which I thought was great, you know, just a little tidy thing there at the end. (Laughter) And I came to in the morning.
It's like I gave you a new car and you're complaining about not finding parking.
But you're alive. That's what it's about."
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Very lucky to be here. Thank you. (Applause)
I want to talk to you today about a difficult topic that is close to me, and closer than you might realize to you.
I was forced to leave the Democratic Republic of the Congo, my home, where I was a student activist.
I would love my children to be able to meet my family in the Congo.
It stores energy in our mobile phones, PlayStations and laptops.
It would be great if the story ended there.
Since 1996, over five million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Countless women, men and children have been raped, tortured or enslaved.
One well-known illicit trade route is that across the border to Rwanda, where Congolese tantalum is disguised as Rwandan.
As with the Arab Spring, during the recent elections in the Congo, voters were able to send text messages of local polling stations to the headquarters in the capital, Kinshasa.
The mobile phone has given people around the world an important tool towards gaining their political freedom.
It has truly revolutionized the way we communicate on the planet.
The mobile phone is an instrument of freedom and an instrument of oppression.
It is time to be asking questions about technology.
Here, I am speaking directly to you, the TED community, and to all those who might be watching on a screen, on your phone, across the world, in the Congo.
The US has recently passed legislation to target bribery and misconduct in the Congo.
In February, Nokia unveiled its new policy on sourcing minerals in the Congo, and there is a petition to Apple to make a conflict-free iPhone.
When I first came to the UK, 21 years ago, I was homesick.
It is time to demand fair-trade phones.
(Applause)
It's a great time to be a molecular biologist. (Laughter) Reading and writing DNA code is getting easier and cheaper.
It has the power, potentially, to replace our fossil fuels, to revolutionize medicine, and to touch every aspect of our daily lives.
The idea is that if you open up the science and you allow diverse groups to participate, it could really stimulate innovation.
So, three years ago, I got together with some friends of mine who had similar aspirations and we founded Genspace.
["Am I a biohazard?"] (Laughter) It was pretty depressing.
Biohackers work alone.
We work in groups, in big cities — (Laughter) — and in small villages.
We genetically engineer bacteria.
We make things grow.
Now, we follow state and local regulations.
We dispose of our waste properly, we follow safety procedures, we don't work with pathogens.
And sometimes people ask me, "Well, what about an accident?"
It's a study at Harvard where, at the end of the study, they're going to take my entire genomic sequence, all of my medical information, and my identity, and they're going to post it online for everyone to see.
There were a lot of risks involved that they talked about during the informed consent portion.
Now, you might be asking yourself, "Well, you know, what would I do in a biolab?"
Well, it wasn't that long ago we were asking, "Well, what would anyone do with a personal computer?"
We're only seeing just the tip of the DNA iceberg.
A biohacker in Germany, a journalist, wanted to know whose dog was leaving little presents on his street?
(Laughter) (Applause) Yep, you guessed it. He threw tennis balls to all the neighborhood dogs, analyzed the saliva, identified the dog, and confronted the dog owner.
It actually is a Japanese beetle.
You can send weather balloons up into the stratosphere, collect microbes, see what's up there.
You can make a biocensor out of yeast to detect pollutants in water.
You can make some sort of a biofuel cell.
You can also do an art science project. Some of these are really spectacular, and they look at social, ecological problems from a completely different perspective.
Some people ask me, well, why am I involved?
If you had spaces like this all over the world, it could really change the perception of who's allowed to do biotech.
So, we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language.
You know, we're interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) — an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake.
This lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States.
So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language -- but we call it nonverbals as social scientists -- it's language, so we think about communication.
So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people's body language, on judgments.
I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics.
And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance?
So again, both animals and humans do the same thing.
I notice a couple of things about this.
It seems to be related to gender.
But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves?
So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds?
There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people.
Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.
So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol.
So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind.
When you're touching your neck, you're really protecting yourself.
We then ask them, "How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample.
That's it. That's the whole experiment.
And we've all had the feeling, right?
But the next question, of course, is, can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways?
When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident.
My first introduction was at the Abidjan airport on a sweaty, Ivory Coast morning.
I had just left Wall Street, cut my hair to look like Margaret Mead, given away most everything that I owned, and arrived with all the essentials -- some poetry, a few clothes, and, of course, a guitar -- because I was going to save the world, and I thought I would just start with the African continent.
I was too young, unmarried, I had no children, didn't really know Africa, and besides, my French was pitiful.
And so, it was an incredibly painful time in my life, and yet it really started to give me the humility to start listening.
I think that failure can be an incredibly motivating force as well, so I moved to Kenya and worked in Uganda, and I met a group of Rwandan women, who asked me, in 1986, to move to Kigali to help them start the first microfinance institution there.
And so I started looking around, and I heard about a bakery that was run by 20 prostitutes.
I also found out that the bakery was nothing like a business, that, in fact, it was a classic charity run by a well-intentioned person, who essentially spent 600 dollars a month to keep these 20 women busy making little crafts and baked goods, and living on 50 cents a day, still in poverty.
And they started listening to the marketplace, and they came back with ideas for cassava chips, and banana chips, and sorghum bread, and before you knew it, we had cornered the Kigali market, and the women were earning three to four times the national average.
So, one week, two weeks, three weeks went by, and finally I said, "Well, how about blue?"
And they said, "Blue, blue, we love blue. Let's do it blue."
The walls were blue, the windows were blue, the sidewalk out front was painted blue.
And so, I lived in Kigali for about two and a half years, doing these two things, and it was an extraordinary time in my life.
The first is that dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth.
But as human beings, we also want to see each other, and we want to be heard by each other, and we should never forget that.
The second is that traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.
And so, on a micro level, there's a real role for this combination of investment and philanthropy.
And on a macro level -- some of the speakers have inferred that even health should be privatized.
But, having had a father with heart disease, and realizing that what our family could afford was not what he should have gotten, and having a good friend step in to help, I really believe that all people deserve access to health at prices they can afford.
And so, it was really those lessons that made me decide to build Acumen Fund about six years ago.
We've invested about 20 million dollars in 20 different enterprises, and have, in so doing, created nearly 20,000 jobs, and delivered tens of millions of services to people who otherwise would not be able to afford them.
I want to tell you two stories. Both of them are in Africa.
Both of them are about investing in entrepreneurs who are committed to service, and who really know the markets.
It's a company built in Kenya about seven years ago by an incredible entrepreneur named Patrick Henfrey and his three colleagues.
And I think some of you may have visited -- these farmers are helped by KickStart and TechnoServe, who help them become more self-sufficient.
Acumen's been working with ABE for the past year, year and a half, both on looking at a new business plan, and what does expansion look like, helping with management support and helping to do term sheets and raise capital.
This is Samuel. He's a farmer.
He was actually living in the Kibera slums when his father called him and told him about Artemisia and the value-add potential.
It's gone from socialist Tanzania into capitalist Tanzania, and continued to flourish. It had about 1,000 employees when we first found it.
They're in a joint venture with Sumitomo.
And so, Anuj and Acumen have been talking about testing the private sector, because the assumption that the aid establishment has made is that, look, in a country like Tanzania, 80 percent of the population makes less than two dollars a day.
And we said, "Well, there's another option.
She grew up on a farm in Austria, very poor, didn't have very much education.
She moved to the United States, where she met my grandfather, who was a cement hauler, and they had nine children. Three of them died as babies.
But because she had the opportunity of the marketplace, and she lived in a society that provided the safety of having access to affordable health and education, her children and their children were able to live lives of real purpose and follow real dreams.
I look around at my siblings and my cousins -- and as I said, there are a lot of us -- and I see teachers and musicians, hedge fund managers, designers.
And my wish, when I see those women, I meet those farmers, and I think about all the people across this continent who are working hard every day, is that they have that sense of opportunity and possibility, and that they also can believe and get access to services, so that their children, too, can live those lives of great purpose.
It shouldn't be that difficult.
It takes investing in those entrepreneurs that are committed to service as well as to success.
Thank you.
(Applause)
He surrounded himself with an entourage of young, unknown scholars like Martin Buber and Shai Agnon and Franz Kafka, and he paid each one of them a monthly salary so that they could write in peace.
His department stores confiscated, he spent the rest of his life in a relentless pursuit of art and culture.
Such is the power of self-study.
I remember quite vividly my father telling me that when everyone in the neighborhood will have a TV set, then we'll buy a normal F.M. radio. (Laughter) And that's me, I was going to say holding my first abacus, but actually holding what my father would consider an ample substitute to an iPad. (Laughter) So one thing that I took from home is this notion that educators don't necessarily have to teach.
So it's not surprising that, about 12 years ago, when Noam and I were already computer science professors, we were equally frustrated by the same phenomenon.
Now, we had to start somewhere, and so Noam and I decided to base our cathedral, so to speak, on the simplest possible building block, which is something called NAND.
And this is the great team that helped us make it happen.
And NAND2Tetris became one of the first massive, open, online courses, although seven years ago we had no idea that what we were doing is called MOOCs.
The people who are attracted to these courses typically have a hacker mentality.
They want to figure out how things work, and they want to do it in groups, like this hackers club in Washington, D.C., that uses our materials to offer community courses.
And because these materials are widely available and open-source, different people take them to very different and unpredictable directions.
And indeed, for quite a few people, taking this NAND2Tetris pilgrimage, if you will, has turned into a life-changing experience.
For example, take Dan Rounds, who is a music and math major from East Lansing, Michigan.
Courage, according to Churchill, is the ability to go from one defeat to another without losing enthusiasm. (Laughter) And [Joyce] said that mistakes are the portals of discovery.
When you deal with a concept like area -- well, we also provide a set of tools that the child is invited to experiment with in order to learn.
And this little exercise here gives you a first good insight of the notion of area.
(Applause) Now this particular transformation did not change the area of the original figure, so a six-year-old who plays with this has just discovered a clever algorithm to compute the area of any given parallelogram.
Now this transformation has doubled the area of the original figure, and therefore we have just learned that the area of the triangle equals the area of this rectangle divided by two.
So, in addition to learning some useful geometry, the child has been exposed to some pretty sophisticated science strategies, like reduction, which is the art of transforming a complex problem into a simple one, or generalization, which is at the heart of any scientific discipline, or the fact that some properties are invariant under some transformations.
And finally, we are putting together an adaptive ecosystem that will match different learners with different apps according to their evolving learning style.
Now, I don't know how many people here are familiar with the term "mensch."
The most important thing is to be a mensch." (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Well, I remember in third grade, I had this moment where my father, who never takes off from work, he's a classical blue collar, a working-class immigrant person, going to school to see his son, how he's doing, and the teacher said to him, he said, "You know, John is good at math and art."
It was called the Human Powered Computer Experiment.
I've turned the computer on, and these assistants are placing a giant floppy disk built out of cardboard, and it's put into the computer.
And so I'm going to talk today about four things, really.
So starting from technology, technology is a wonderful thing.
And then the browser appeared. The browser was great, but the browser was very primitive, very narrow bandwidth.
We're kind of stuck in a loop, perhaps, and this sense of possibility from computing is something I've been questioning for the last 10 or so years, and have looked to design, as we understand most things, and to understand design with our technology has been a passion of mine.
And I've been curious about how design and technology intersect, and I'm going to show you some old work I never really show anymore, to give you a sense of what I used to do.
This was a square that responds to sound.
And it was really at the time I was wondering why doesn't the computer respond to sound?
So I made this as a kind of an experiment at the time.
And then I spent a lot of time in the space of interactive graphics and things like this, and I stopped doing it because my students at MIT got so much better than myself, so I had to hang up my mouse.
It's paying a tribute to the wonderful typewriter that my mother used to type on all the time as a legal secretary.
It's kind of stressful typing out, so if you type on this keyboard, you can, like, balance it out.
At RISD, we have this amazing facility called the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab. It has 80,000 samples of animal, bone, mineral, plants.
You know, in Rhode Island, if an animal gets hit on the road, they call us up and we pick it up and stuff it.
It isn't about "old," the dirt, "new," the cloud. It's about what is good.
So art makes questions, and leadership is something that is asking a lot of questions.
And so today, leaders are faced with how to lead differently, I believe.
And by the end of the experience, I realized why I was doing this.
It's because leaders, what we do is we connect improbable connections and hope something will happen, and in that room I found so many connections between people across all of London, and so leadership, connecting people, is the great question today.
And one thing I've been doing is doing some research on systems that can combine technology and leadership with an art and design perspective.
And I believe that this kind of perspective will only begin to grow as more leaders enter the space of art and design, because art and design lets you think like this, find different systems like this, and I've just begun thinking like this, so I'm glad to share that with you.
Today I'd like to explore with you why the answer to this question will become profoundly important in an age where reputation will be your most valuable asset.
I caught up with him recently, where, over the course of several cups of tea, he told me how hosting guests from all over the world has enriched his life.
Now, as many of you know, Airbnb is a peer-to-peer marketplace that matches people who have space to rent with people who are looking for a place to stay in over 192 countries.
If you don't like the hotel, there's a castle down the road that you can rent for 5,000 dollars a night.
It's a fantastic example of how technology is creating a market for things that never had a marketplace before.
Even four years ago, letting strangers stay in your home seemed like a crazy idea.
And now, 2012.
It's an economy and culture called collaborative consumption, and, through it, people like Sebastian are becoming micro-entrepreneurs.
It's using the power of technology to build trust between strangers.
Now welcome to the wonderful world of collaborative consumption that's enabling us to match wants with haves in more democratic ways.
Now, four years ago, Chris lost his job, unfortunately, as an art buyer at Macy's, and like so many people, he struggled to find a new one during the recession.
Now, the story behind TaskRabbit starts like so many great stories with a very cute dog by the name of Kobe.
They realized they'd run out of dog food.
Six months later, Leah quit her job, and TaskRabbit was born.
It's essentially about how we use our online relationships to get things done in the real world.
But I love that the number one task posted, over a hundred times a day, is something that many of us have felt the pain of doing: yes, assembling Ikea furniture. (Laughter) (Applause) It's brilliant. Now, we may laugh, but Chris here is actually making up to 5,000 dollars a month running errands around his life.
And 70 percent of this new labor force were previously unemployed or underemployed.
Now, when you think about it, it's amazing, right, that over the past 20 years, we've evolved from trusting people online to share information to trusting to handing over our credit card information, and now we're entering the third trust wave: connecting trustworthy strangers to create all kinds of people-powered marketplaces.
Virtual trust will transform the way we trust one another face to face.
How do we mimic the way trust is built face-to-face online?
You can see that over 200 people have given him an average rating over 4.99 out of 5.
Just consider this: Five million nights have been booked on Airbnb in the past six months alone.
30 million rides have been shared on Carpooling.com.
It's a bit like when I moved from New York to Sydney.
Just because Sebastian is a wonderful host does not mean that he can assemble Ikea furniture.
It's only a matter of time before we'll be able to perform a Facebook- or Google-like search and see a complete picture of someone's behaviors in different contexts over time.
There are actually a wave of startups like Connect.Me and Legit and TrustCloud that are figuring out how you can aggregate, monitor and use your online reputation.
Indeed, reputation is a currency that I believe will become more powerful than our credit history in the 21st century.
Let me give you one example from the world of recruiting, where reputation data will make the résumé seem like an archaic relic of the past.
Four years ago, tech bloggers and entrepreneurs Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, decided to start something called Stack Overflow.
Now, Stack Overflow is basically a platform where experienced programmers can ask other good programmers highly detailed technical questions on things like tiny pixels and chrome extensions.
Now thousands of programmers today are finding better jobs this way, because Stack Overflow and the reputation dashboards provide a priceless window into how someone really behaves, and what their peers think of them.
But the bigger principle of what's happening behind Stack Overflow, I think, is incredibly exciting.
You know, it's very interesting.
On Stack Overflow, it creates a level playing field, enabling the people with the real talent to rise to the top.
He's turning 50 this year, and he's convinced that the rich tapestry of reputation he's built on Airbnb will lead him to doing something interesting with the rest of his life.
In the 21st century, new trust networks, and the reputation capital they generate, will reinvent the way we think about wealth, markets, power and personal identity, in ways we can't yet even imagine.
Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
And then one of the professors starts to speak, and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy."
I wanted to be a designer because I wanted to solve real problems.
But I was also kind of intrigued, because joy is this intangible feeling, and how does that come from the stuff on the table next to me?
I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy?
How do tangible things make us feel intangible joy?"
and this launched a journey -- one that I didn't know at the time would take me 10 years -- to understand the relationship between the physical world and the mysterious, quixotic emotion we call "joy."
And I found that even scientists don't always agree, and they sometimes use the words "joy" and "happiness" and "positivity" more or less interchangeably.
But broadly speaking, when psychologists use the word joy, what they mean is an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion -- one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down.
And this was interesting to me because as a culture, we are obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, and yet in the process, we kind of overlook joy.
So this got me thinking: Where does joy come from?
(Laughter) And after a few months of this, I noticed that there were certain things that started to come up again and again and again.
The sharply divided, politically polarized world we live in sometimes has the effect of making our differences feel so vast as to be insurmountable.
I had pictures of them up on my studio wall, and every day, I would come in and try to make sense of it.
And since these patterns were telling me that joy begins with the senses, I began calling them "Aesthetics of Joy"; the sensations of joy.
And in the wake of this discovery, I noticed something that as I walked around, I began spotting little moments of joy everywhere I went -- a vintage yellow car or a clever piece of street art.
It was like I had a pair of rose-colored glasses, and now that I knew what to look for, I was seeing it everywhere.
And this is most acute for the places that house the people that are most vulnerable among us: nursing homes, hospitals, homeless shelters, housing projects.
And this led me to the work of the artist Arakawa and the poet Madeline Gins, who believed that these kinds of environments are literally killing us.
And this aligns with research conducted in four countries, which shows that people working in more colorful offices are actually more alert, more confident and friendlier than those working in drab spaces.
Color, in a very primal way, is a sign of life, a sign of energy.
And the same is true of abundance.
We evolved in a world where scarcity is dangerous, and abundance meant survival.
So, one confetto -- which happens to be the singular of confetti, in case you were wondering -- (Laughter) isn't very joyful, but multiply it, and you have a handful of one of the most joyful substances on the planet.
The architect Emmanuelle Moureaux uses this idea in her work a lot.
This is a nursing home she designed, where she uses these multicolored spheres to create a feeling of abundance.
Well, it turns out neuroscientists have studied this, too.
You can see this in action in the new Sandy Hook Elementary School.
After the mass shooting there in 2012, the architects Svigals + Partners knew that they needed to create a building that was secure, but they wanted to create one that was joyful, and so they filled it with curves.
Each moment of joy is small, but over time, they add up to more than the sum of their parts.
And so maybe instead of chasing after happiness, what we should be doing is embracing joy and finding ways to put ourselves in the path of it more often.
Deep within us, we all have this impulse to seek out joy in our surroundings.
It's directly connected to our fundamental instinct for survival.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
We have a behavioral superpower in our brain, and it at least in part involves dopamine.
Let me give you an example of this.
She's three months old. She still poops in her diapers and she can't do calculus.
You can cover up one of her eyes, and you can still read something in the other eye, and I see sort of curiosity in one eye, I see maybe a little bit of surprise in the other.
One area is called experimental economics. The other area is called behavioral economics.
There's another hub in London, now, and the rest are getting set up. We hope to give the data away at some stage. That's a complicated issue about making it available to the rest of the world.
The fact is, though, that even when we're alone, we're a profoundly social creature. We're not a solitary mind built out of properties that kept it alive in the world independent of other people. In fact, our minds depend on other people. They depend on other people, and they're expressed in other people, so the notion of who you are, you often don't know who you are until you see yourself in interaction with people that are close to you, people that are enemies of you, people that are agnostic to you.
Thanks for having me. (Applause) (Applause)
So this red line is the employment-to-population ratio, in other words, the percentage of working-age people in America who have work.
But the story is not just a recession story.
Just in the past couple years, we've seen digital tools display skills and abilities that they never, ever had before, and that kind of eat deeply into what we human beings do for a living.
Now we have multi-language, instantaneous, automatic translation services available for free via many of our devices, all the way down to smartphones.
A lot of people look at this and they say, "OK, but those are very specific, narrow tasks, and most knowledge workers are actually generalists.
One of the most impressive knowledge workers in recent memory is a guy named Ken Jennings.
That's Ken on the right, getting beat three-to-one by Watson, the Jeopardy-playing supercomputer from IBM.
So when we look at what technology can do to general knowledge workers, I start to think there might not be something so special about this idea of a generalist, particularly when we start doing things like hooking Siri up to Watson, and having technologies that can understand what we're saying and repeat speech back to us.
Now, Siri is far from perfect, and we can make fun of her flaws, but we should also keep in mind that if technologies like Siri and Watson improve along a Moore's law trajectory, which they will, in six years, they're not going to be two times better or four times better, they'll be 16 times better than they are right now.
But they're getting better quite quickly and DARPA, which is the investment arm of the Defense Department, is trying to accelerate their trajectory.
In the short term, we can stimulate job growth by encouraging entrepreneurship and by investing in infrastructure, because the robots today still aren't very good at fixing bridges.
But in the not-too-long-term, I think within the lifetimes of most of the people in this room, we're going to transition into an economy that is very productive, but that just doesn't need a lot of human workers.
And managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society faces.
Voltaire summarized why; he said, "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need."
But despite this challenge -- personally, I'm still a huge digital optimist, and I am supremely confident that the digital technologies that we're developing now are going to take us into a Utopian future, not a dystopian future.
Now, I want to share some of the answers that I've gotten in response to this question.
So when you do this and when you plot the data, you pretty quickly come to some weird conclusions.
Let me give you a couple examples.
Economies don't run on energy.
And over and over again, we see this happening in the technology-facilitated world.
The work of innovation is becoming more open, more inclusive, more transparent and more merit-based, and that's going to continue no matter what MIT and Harvard think of it, and I couldn't be happier about that development.
The economist Robert Jensen did this wonderful study a while back where he watched, in great detail, what happened to the fishing villages of Kerala, India, when they got mobile phones for the very first time.
So in March, 2012, just one month ago, some researchers reported in the journal Nature how they had tried to replicate 53 different basic science studies looking at potential treatment targets in cancer, and out of those 53 studies, they were only able to successfully replicate six.
Early on its development, they did a very small trial, just under a hundred patients.
Fifty patients got lorcainide, and of those patients, 10 died.
But this problem of negative results that go missing in action is still very prevalent. In fact it's so prevalent that it cuts to the core of evidence-based medicine.
So this is a drug called reboxetine, and this is a drug that I myself have prescribed. It's an antidepressant.
And I'm a very nerdy doctor, so I read all of the studies that I could on this drug. I read the one study that was published that showed that reboxetine was better than placebo, and I read the other three studies that were published that showed that reboxetine was just as good as any other antidepressant, and because this patient hadn't done well on those other antidepressants, I thought, well, reboxetine is just as good. It's one to try.
Three trials were published comparing reboxetine against other antidepressants in which reboxetine was just as good, and they were published, but three times as many patients' worth of data was collected which showed that reboxetine was worse than those other treatments, and those trials were not published.
But it turns out that this phenomenon of publication bias has actually been very, very well studied.
Only three of the negative trials were published, but all but one of the positive trials were published.
In fact, there have been so many studies conducted on publication bias now, over a hundred, that they've been collected in a systematic review, published in 2010, that took every single study on publication bias that they could find.
Publication bias affects every field of medicine.
This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
But they didn't hold the line. In 2008, a study was conducted which showed that half of all of trials published by journals edited by members of the ICMJE weren't properly registered, and a quarter of them weren't registered at all.
And then finally, the FDA Amendment Act was passed a couple of years ago saying that everybody who conducts a trial must post the results of that trial within one year.
Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
And especially since about 2007, when I got an iPhone, I was not only sitting in front of my screen all day, but I was also getting up at the end of the day and looking at this little screen that I carried in my pocket.
Was the Internet actually a place that you could visit?
But, in fact, it is. There is a real world of the Internet out there, and that's what I spent about two years visiting, these places of the Internet. I was in large data centers that use as much power as the cities in which they sit, and I visited places like this, 60 Hudson Street in New York, which is one of the buildings in the world, one of a very short list of buildings, about a dozen buildings, where more networks of the Internet connect to each other than anywhere else.
And 60 Hudson in particular is interesting because it's home to about a half a dozen very important networks, which are the networks which serve the undersea cables that travel underneath the ocean that connect Europe and America and connect all of us.
They stretch across the ocean. They're three or five or eight thousand miles in length, and if the material science and the computational technology is incredibly complicated, the basic physical process is shockingly simple. Light goes in on one end of the ocean and comes out on the other, and it usually comes from a building called a landing station that's often tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood, and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles they amplify the signal, and since the rate of transmission is incredibly fast, the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second wavelength of light, maybe a thousand times your own connection, or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams, but not only that, but you'll put not just one wavelength of light through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light through a single fiber, and then you'll have maybe eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction.
This is in Halifax, a cable that stretches from Halifax to Ireland.
And the landscape is changing. Three years ago, when I started thinking about this, there was one cable down the Western coast of Africa, represented in this map by Steve Song as that thin black line.
So this is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate.
And I've never met him. We've only communicated via this telepresence system, which always makes me think of him as the man inside the Internet. (Laughter) And he is English. The undersea cable industry is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42.
(Laughter) Because they all started at the same time with the boom about 20 years ago.
And Tata had gotten its start as a communications business when they bought two cables, one across the Atlantic and one across the Pacific, and proceeded to add pieces onto them, until they had built a belt around the world, which means they will send your bits to the East or the West.
But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination.
And Simon was working on a new cable, WACS, the West Africa Cable System, that stretched from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa, to Cote d'Ivoire, to Ghana, to Nigeria, to Cameroon.
Then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this specialized cable landing ship, and it was floated on these buoys until it was in the right place.
You see the local laborers. You see the English engineer giving directions in the background. And more importantly, the places are the same. These cables still connect these classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Mombasa, Mumbai, Singapore, New York.
And then the process on shore takes around three or four days, and then, when it's done, they put the manhole cover back on top, and they push the sand over that, and we all forget about it.
And it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud, but every time we put something on the cloud, we give up some responsibility for it.
And we should know, I think, we should know where our Internet comes from, and we should know what it is that physically, physically connects us all.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thanks. (Applause)
(Music) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. It's a distinct privilege to be here.
And in this session, Gabby's working with a speech therapist, and she's struggling to produce some of the most basic words, and you can see her growing more and more devastated, until she ultimately breaks down into sobbing tears, and she starts sobbing wordlessly into the arms of her therapist.
And after a few moments, her therapist tries a new tack, and they start singing together, and Gabby starts to sing through her tears, and you can hear her clearly able to enunciate the words to a song that describe the way she feels, and she sings, in one descending scale, she sings, "Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine."
Schlaug found that his stroke victims who were aphasic, could not form sentences of three- or four-word sentences, but they could still sing the lyrics to a song, whether it was "Happy Birthday To You" or their favorite song by the Eagles or the Rolling Stones.
And after 70 hours of intensive singing lessons, he found that the music was able to literally rewire the brains of his patients and create a homologous speech center in their right hemisphere to compensate for the left hemisphere's damage.
I had just completed my undergraduate, and I was working as a research assistant at the lab of Dennis Selkoe, studying Parkinson's disease at Harvard, and I had fallen in love with neuroscience. I wanted to become a surgeon.
But a year later, I met another musician who had also studied at Juilliard, one who profoundly helped me find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician.
Nathaniel's story has become a beacon for homelessness and mental health advocacy throughout the United States, as told through the book and the movie "The Soloist," but I became his friend, and I became his violin teacher, and I told him that wherever he had his violin, and wherever I had mine, I would play a lesson with him.
And this is a particularly poignant quote because Schumann himself suffered from schizophrenia and died in asylum.
And inspired by what I learned from Nathaniel, I started an organization on Skid Row of musicians called Street Symphony, bringing the light of music into the very darkest places, performing for the homeless and mentally ill at shelters and clinics on Skid Row, performing for combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, and for the incarcerated and those labeled as criminally insane.
After one of our events at the Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, a woman walked up to us and she had tears streaming down her face, and she had a palsy, she was shaking, and she had this gorgeous smile, and she said that she had never heard classical music before, she didn't think she was going to like it, she had never heard a violin before, but that hearing this music was like hearing the sunshine, and that nobody ever came to visit them, and that for the first time in six years, when she heard us play, she stopped shaking without medication.
The synchrony of emotions that we experience when we hear an opera by Wagner, or a symphony by Brahms, or chamber music by Beethoven, compels us to remember our shared, common humanity, the deeply communal connected consciousness, the empathic consciousness that neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says is hard-wired into our brain's right hemisphere.
And for those living in the most dehumanizing conditions of mental illness within homelessness and incarceration, the music and the beauty of music offers a chance for them to transcend the world around them, to remember that they still have the capacity to experience something beautiful and that humanity has not forgotten them.
Keats himself had also given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry, but he died when he was a year older than me.
That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."
(Music) (Applause)
Please welcome John Lloyd.
There's more of it than you think, actually.
We can see the stars and the planets but we can't see what holds them apart, or what draws them together.
In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there.
Gravity is one thing that we can't see, and which we don't understand.
It's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, and the weakest, and nobody really knows what it is or why it's there.
Isn't that amazing?
In the Sufi faith, this great Middle Eastern religion which some claim is the root of all religions, Sufi masters are all telepaths, so they say, but their main exercise of telepathy is to send out powerful signals to the rest of us that it doesn't exist.
Interesting.
And I've found a very useful new word -- ignostic.
[God?] I refuse to be drawn on the question on whether God exists until somebody properly defines the terms.
Another thing we can't see is the human genome.
And this is increasingly peculiar, because about 20 years ago when they started delving into the genome, they thought it would probably contain around 100 thousand genes.
This is extraordinary, because rice -- get this -- rice is known to have 38 thousand genes.
Potatoes have 48 chromosomes, two more than people, and the same as a gorilla.
Time. Nobody can see time.
There's a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist, because it's too inconvenient for the figures.
You can't see the future, obviously, and you can't see the past, except in your memory.
One of the interesting things about the past is you particularly can't see -- my son asked me this the other day, "Dad, can you remember what I was like when I was two?
Which is great news for psychoanalysts, because otherwise they'd be out of a job.
Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff -- but every cell in your body is replaced at some point.
Taste buds, every ten days or so.
Spine takes several years.
It's said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual.
When it's dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won't see it.
Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this.
Heinrich Hertz, when he discovered radio waves, in 1887, he called them radio waves because they radiated.
Thomas Edison once said, "We don't know one percent of one millionth about anything."
One a mathematician and engineer, and the other a poet.
The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, "I don't know why we are here, but I am pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves."
(Laughter) (Applause) (Circus music) [Get your souvenir photo here!] [Continue your journey into the unknown!] (Circus music)
When I was considering a career in the art world, I took a course in London, and one of my supervisors was this irascible Italian called Pietro, who drank too much, smoked too much and swore much too much.
But he was a passionate teacher, and I remember one of our earlier classes with him, he was projecting images on the wall, asking us to think about them, and he put up an image of a painting.
Tapestries were ubiquitous between the Middle Ages and, really, well into the 18th century, and it was pretty apparent why.
In due course, I ended up as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, because I saw the Met as one of the few places where I could organize really big exhibitions about the subject I cared so passionately about.
But in reality, in the course of the coming weeks and months, hundreds of thousands of people came to see the show.
The exhibition was designed to be an experience, and tapestries are hard to reproduce in photographs.
From there, you can walk in any direction to almost any culture.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
And the students wanted to speak to the government, and police answered with bullets.
And I was very young then. I think I was 11 years, and I started asking questions, and that’s when my political education started.
And I used to run away from home, when I know that maybe the police might be coming around the ninth or 10th of June or so.
And my grandmother one time said, "No, look, you’re not going to run away.
This is your place, you stay here."
So it was on the 10th of June, and they came, and they surrounded the house, and my grandmother switched off all the lights in the house, and opened the kitchen door.
The answer is?
Size and scale are no longer the same.
(Applause) Thank you, thank you. (Applause)
To understand the world that live in, we tell stories.
And while remixing and sharing have come to define the web as we know it, all of us can now be part of that story through simple tools that allow us to make things online.
But video has been left out. It arrived on the web in a small box, and there it has remained, completely disconnected from the data and the content all around it.
In fact, in over a decade on the web, the only thing that has changed about video is the size of the box and the quality of the picture.
It's an online tool that allows anyone to combine video with content pulled live directly from the web.
Videos created with Popcorn behave like the web itself: dynamic, full of links, and completely remixable, and finally allowed to break free from the frame.
It will be completely free, and it will work in any browser.
So, every Popcorn production begins with the video, and so I've made a short, 20-second clip using a newscaster template that we use in workshops.
Hi, and welcome to my newscast.
You can add pop-ups with live links and custom icons, or pull in content from any web service, like Flickr, or add articles and blog posts with links out to the full content.
So this is the timeline, and if you've ever edited video, you're familiar with this, but instead of clips in the timeline, what you're looking at is web events pulled into the video.
There are two pop-ups bringing you some other information, and a final article with a link out to the original article.
Let's go to this Google Map, and I'll show you how you can edit it.
And it's live. It's not an image. So you click on it, you zoom in, right down to street view if you want to.
Let's try something else, maybe something a bit more relevant to today.
Everything you've seen today is built with the basic building blocks of the web: HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
That means it's completely remixable. It also means there's no proprietary software. All you need is a web browser.
So imagine if every video that we watched on the web worked like the web, completely remixable, linked to its source content, and interactive for everyone who views it.
I think Popcorn could change the way that we tell stories on the web, and the way we understand the world we live in.
Thank you. (Applause)
[This talk contains mature content Viewer discretion is advised] My specialty, as a sex educator, is I bring the science.
At the end of a conference in a hotel lobby once, I'm literally on my way out the door and a colleague chases me down.
A friend of mine -- (Laughter) wants to know if it's possible to get addicted to her vibrator."
A different conference, this one in an outdoor tropical paradise, I'm at the breakfast buffet, and a couple approaches me.
"Hi, Emily, we're sorry to interrupt you but we just wanted to ask a quick question about premature ejaculation."
Because I want to share with you today a piece of science that has changed how I think about everything, from the behavior of neurotransmitters in our emotional brain, to the dynamics of our interpersonal relationships.
I think calling it the reward center is a little bit like calling your face your nose.
It's actually three intertwined but separable systems.
And the third system is learning.
You remember Pavlov?
What Pavlov did was make the bell food-related.
Research over the last 30 years has found that genital blood flow can increase in response to sex-related stimuli even if those sex-related stimuli are not also associated with the subjective experience of wanting and liking.
In fact, the predictive relationship between genital response and subjective experience is between 10 and 50 percent.
You just can't predict necessarily how a person feels about that sex-related stimulus just by looking at their genital blood flow.
If you're experiencing unwanted pain, talk to a medical provider.
(Laughter) And the guy comes back and she says, "I am bored."
Is it sex-related to have pressure directly against your clitoris?
All he had to do was listen to her words.
But can we make sure we're noticing how clear consent is if we eliminate this myth?
The National Judicial Education Program published a document called "Judges Tell: What I Wish I Had Known Before I Presided in a Case of an Adult Victim of Sexual Assault."
Imagine you're on the jury and you learn that the victim had orgasms.
Let me remind you, orgasm is physiological; it is a spontaneous, involuntary release of tension, generated in response to sex-related stimuli.
You don't have to say "clitoris" in front of 1000 strangers.
Almost half of transgender folks.
Say it to a judge you know or a lawyer you know, or a cop or anyone who might sit on a jury in a sexual assault case.
Say, if you bite this moldy fruit and your mouth waters, nobody would say to you, "Well, you just don't want to admit how much you like it."
(Applause) The roots of this myth are deep and they are entangled with some very dark forces in our culture.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Helen Walters: Emily, come up here.
Thank you so much.
So thank you.
I think, though, there's a lot of fear around being too different sexually.
When people are asking me, "Is this thing I'm experiencing normal," what they're actually asking me is, "Do I belong?"
There is no script, there is no box you have to fit into, you're allowed, as long as there is consent and no unwanted pain, you're totally free to do whatever you want.
(Applause)
(Cello music starts) You found me, you found me under a pile of broken memories with your steady, steady love.
(Applause)
It's essentially this virtual map that only exists in your brain.
No, what you've just drawn is more like a diagram or a schematic.
It's a visual construct of lines, dots, letters, designed in the language of our brains.
Now we've reached the subject of public transport, and public transport here in Dublin is a somewhat touchy subject.
Each individual route is represented by a separate line.
In 2008, Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath killed 138,000 in Myanmar.
In New Orleans, the elderly and female-headed households were among the most vulnerable.
That's the Russians planting a flag on the ocean bottom to stake a claim for minerals under the receding Arctic sea ice.
Their March electricity bill was only 48 dollars.
And around the world, satellites and warning systems are saving lives in flood-prone areas such as Bangladesh.
But as important as technology and infrastructure are, perhaps the human element is even more critical.
While it's true that many who died in Katrina did not have access to transportation, others who did refused to leave as the storm approached, often because available transportation and shelters refused to allow them to take their pets.
Imagine leaving behind your own pet in an evacuation or a rescue.
Farmers are facing challenges of drought from Asia to Africa, from Australia to Oklahoma, while heat waves linked with climate change have killed tens of thousands of people in Western Europe in 2003, and again in Russia in 2010.
Oxfam and Swiss Re, together with Rockefeller Foundation, are helping farmers like this one build hillside terraces and find other ways to conserve water, but they're also providing for insurance when the droughts do come.
The stability this provides is giving the farmers the confidence to invest.
It's a virtuous cycle, and one that could be replicated throughout the developing world.
That's where half of Vietnam's rice is grown.
Airports around the world are located on the coast.
It makes sense, right? There's open space, the planes can take off and land without worrying about creating noise or avoiding tall buildings.
Other examples to consider. In the U.K., the Thames Barrier protects London from storm surge.
New York City is incredibly vulnerable to storms, as you can see from this clever sign, and to sea level rise, and to storm surge, as you can see from the subway flooding.
But back above ground, these raised ventilation grates for the subway system show that solutions can be both functional and attractive. In fact, in New York, San Francisco and London, designers have envisioned ways to better integrate the natural and built environments with climate change in mind.
Why? Well, there are no experts.
We're entering uncharted territory, and yet our expertise and our systems are based on the past.
"Stationarity" is the notion that we can anticipate the future based on the past, and plan accordingly, and this principle governs much of our engineering, our design of critical infrastructure, city water systems, building codes, even water rights and other legal precedents.
We're operating outside the bounds of CO2 concentrations that the planet has seen for hundreds of thousands of years.
One in four people suffer from some sort of mental illness, so if it was one, two, three, four, it's you, sir.
You. Yeah. (Laughter) With the weird teeth. And you next to him. (Laughter) You know who you are.
I think I inherit it from my mother, who, used to crawl around the house on all fours.
So before I start, I would like to thank the makers of Lamotrigine, Sertraline, and Reboxetine, because without those few simple chemicals, I would not be vertical today.
And all the girlies, girlies running, running, running, everybody except for my daughter, who was just standing at the starting line, just waving, because she didn't know she was supposed to run.
I'd like to talk a little bit more about the brain, because I know you like that here at TED, so if you just give me a minute here, okay.
Here we go. (Laughter) This little baby has a lot of horsepower.
We've got the occipital lobe so we can actually see the world.
We got the temporal lobe so we can actually hear the world.
For every one single neuron, you can actually have from 10,000 to 100,000 different connections or dendrites or whatever you want to call it, and every time you learn something, or you have an experience, that bush grows, you know, that bush of information.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you.
So I have bad news, I have good news, and I have a task.
So the bad news is that we all get sick.
And we've gotten sick as long as we've been people.
This is a guy named Carlos Finlay. He had a hypothesis that was way outside the box for his time, in the late 1800s.
He thought it was transmitted by mosquitos.
They signed this document, and it's called an informed consent document.
And informed consent is an idea that we should be very proud of as a society, right? It's something that separates us from the Nazis at Nuremberg, enforced medical experimentation. It's the idea that agreement to join a study without understanding isn't agreement.
The way we gain informed consent was formed in large part after World War II, around the time that picture was taken.
My sister is a cancer survivor.
People you don't know come in and look at you and poke you and prod you, and when I tell cancer survivors that this tool we created to protect them is actually preventing their data from being used, especially when only three to four percent of people who have cancer ever even sign up for a clinical study, their reaction is not, "Thank you, God, for protecting my privacy."
So a lot of people talk about it as digital exhaust.
This is the interpretation of it. As you can see, I carry a 32 percent risk of prostate cancer, 22 percent risk of psoriasis and a 14 percent risk of Alzheimer's disease.
As you can see, I have high cholesterol.
And there's been a lot of talk about commonses, right, here, there, everywhere, right. A commons is nothing more than a public good that we build out of private goods.
Right. That's all a commons is. It's something that we build together because we think it's important.
And a commons of data is something that's really unique, because we make it from our own data. And although a lot of people like privacy as their methodology of control around data, and obsess around privacy, at least some of us really like to share as a form of control, and what's remarkable about digital commonses is you don't need a big percentage if your sample size is big enough to generate something massive and beautiful.
So not that many programmers write free software, but we have the Apache web server.
Not that many people who read Wikipedia edit, but it works. So as long as some people like to share as their form of control, we can build a commons, as long as we can get the information out.
So people like to share, if you give them the opportunity and the choice.
And the reason that I got obsessed with this, besides the obvious family aspects, is that I spend a lot of time around mathematicians, and mathematicians are drawn to places where there's a lot of data because they can use it to tease signals out of noise.
So if you reach behind yourself and you grab the dust, if you reach into your body and grab your genome, if you reach into the medical system and somehow extract your medical record, you can actually go through an online informed consent process -- because the donation to the commons must be voluntary and it must be informed -- and you can actually upload your information and have it syndicated to the mathematicians who will do this sort of big data research, and the goal is to get 100,000 in the first year and a million in the first five years so that we have a statistically significant cohort that you can use to take smaller sample sizes from traditional research and map it against, so that you can use it to tease out those subtle correlations between the variations that make us unique and the kinds of health that we need to move forward as a society.
And I've spent a lot of time around other commons.
Those are strengths in the system.
Closed systems, corporations, make a lot of money on the open web, and they're one of the reasons why the open web lives is that corporations have a vested interest in the openness of the system.
It's very much the design principles of a commons that we're trying to bring to health data.
I don't like being patient when systems are broken, and health care is broken.
I'm not talking about the politics of health care, I'm talking about the way we scientifically approach health care.
But it's a challenge that I hope you'll take, and maybe you'll share it. Maybe you won't.
And being naked and alone can be terrifying.
(Applause)
We live in a modern, global world.
So 3, 2, 1. (Explosion sound) Very good. (Laughter) Now, lady in 15J was a suicide bomber amongst us all.
There was a father and a son who sat in that seat over there.
But mistakes of the past are inevitable.
It's human nature.
There was a famous Irish terrorist who once summed up the point very beautifully. He said, "The thing is, about the British government, is, is that it's got to be lucky all the time, and we only have to be lucky once."
We see it as terrorism versus democracy in that brand war.
It's a question that's been tackled by many great thinkers and writers: What if society actually needs crisis to change?
What if society actually needs terrorism to change and adapt for the better?
Thank you.
Audience: What are you reading?
The problem with questions is they create uncertainty.
Now, uncertainty is a very bad thing. It's evolutionarily a bad thing. If you're not sure that's a predator, it's too late.
Okay? (Laughter) Even seasickness is a consequence of uncertainty.
Your brain cannot deal with the uncertainty of that information, and it gets ill.
The question "why?" is one of the most dangerous things you can do, because it takes you into uncertainty.
And it enables us to address even the most difficult of questions. The best questions are the ones that create the most uncertainty.
So what is evolution's answer to the problem of uncertainty?
Play is one of the only human endeavors where uncertainty is actually celebrated. Uncertainty is what makes play fun.
Science is not defined by the method section of a paper.
But we wondered if there's a possible link with other animals. It'd be amazing if humans and bees thought similar, since they seem so different from us.
So we asked if humans and bees might solve complex problems in the same way.
So I'm not going to go through the whole details of the study because actually you can read about it, but the next step is observation. So here are some of the students doing the observations. They're recording the data of where the bees fly.
"I'm afraid the paper fails our initial quality control checks in several different ways." (Laughter) In other words, it starts off "once upon a time," the figures are in crayon, etc. (Laughter) So we said, we'll get it reviewed. So I sent it to Dale Purves, who is at the National Academy of Science, one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, and he says, "This is the most original science paper I have ever read" — (Laughter) — "and it certainly deserves wide exposure."
And there, it was reviewed by five independent referees, and it was published. Okay? (Applause) (Applause) It took four months to do the science, two years to get it published. (Laughter) Typical science, actually, right? So this makes Amy and her friends the youngest published scientists in the world.
Well, it was published two days before Christmas, downloaded 30,000 times in the first day, right?
It was the Editors' Choice in Science, which is a top science magazine.
Curiosity, interest, innocence and zeal are the most basic and most important things to do science.
Everyone over there shout. (Shouts) Where's the sound coming from? (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) What's the point? The point is what science does for us.
That's what science offers us. It offers the possibility to step on uncertainty through the process of play, right?
AO: This project was really exciting for me, because it brought the process of discovery to life, and it showed me that anyone, and I mean anyone, has the potential to discover something new, and that a small question can lead into a big discovery.
But changing the way I thought about science was surprisingly easy. Once we played the games and then started to think about the puzzle, I then realized that science isn't just a boring subject, and that anyone can discover something new.
In 1975, I met in Florence a professor, Carlo Pedretti, my former professor of art history, and today a world-renowned scholar of Leonardo da Vinci.
Well, we also learned that Vasari, who was commissioned to remodel the Hall of the 500 between 1560 and 1574 by the Grand Duke Cosimo I of the Medici family, we have at least two instances when he saved masterpieces specifically by placing a brick wall in front of it and leaving a small air gap.
Well, from there, unfortunately, in 2004, the project came to a halt. Many political reasons.
So I decided to go back to my alma mater, and, at the University of California, San Diego, and I proposed to open up a research center for engineering sciences for cultural heritage.
But I would say the discovery that really caught my imagination, my admiration, is the incredibly vivid drawing under this layer, brown layer, of "The Adoration of the Magi." Here you see a handmade setting XYZ scanner with an infrared camera put on it, and just peering through this brown layer of this masterpiece to reveal what could have been underneath.
This was an epiphany. We came to understand and to prove that the brown coating that we see today was not done by Leonardo da Vinci, which left us only the other drawing that for five centuries we were not able to see, so thanks only to technology.
Okay? Let's go and find the elephant.
Well, our vision is to rediscover the spirit of the Renaissance, create a new discipline where engineering for cultural heritage is actually a symbol of blending art and science together.
As long as we live a life of curiosity and passion, there is a bit of Leonardo in all of us. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
I am very happy and honored to be amidst very, very innovative and intelligent people.
(Laughter) But there is a saying in my culture that if a bud leaves a tree without saying something, that bud is a young one.
It is the G8 Summit.
Unfortunately, I personally do not believe in the Marshall Plan.
One, because the benefits of the Marshall Plan have been overstated.
How the media covers Africa in the West, and the consequences of that.
By displaying despair, helplessness and hopelessness, the media is telling the truth about Africa, and nothing but the truth.
Because despair, civil war, hunger and famine, although they're part and parcel of our African reality, they are not the only reality.
Africa has 53 nations.
But the effect of that presentation is, it appeals to sympathy.
And, as a consequence, the Western view of Africa's economic dilemma is framed wrongly.
I want to say that it is important to recognize that Africa has fundamental weaknesses.
We need to reframe the challenge that is facing Africa, from a challenge of despair, which is called poverty reduction, to a challenge of hope.
Medicines for the poor, food relief for those who are hungry, and peacekeepers for those who are facing civil war.
Now, once we begin to talk about wealth creation in Africa, our second challenge will be, who are the wealth-creating agents in any society?
Support private investment in Africa, both domestic and foreign.
Support research institutions, because knowledge is an important part of wealth creation.
But what is the international aid community doing with Africa today?
Does any one of you know a country that developed because of the generosity and kindness of another?
Africa has received many opportunities.
Under the Cotonou Agreement, formerly known as the Lome Convention, African countries have been given an opportunity by Europe to export goods, duty-free, to the European Union market.
My own country, Uganda, has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the European Union market.
We haven't exported one kilogram yet.
Secondly, under the beef protocol of that agreement, African countries that produce beef have quotas to export beef duty-free to the European Union market.
None of those countries, including Africa's most successful nation, Botswana, has ever met its quota.
So, I want to argue today that the fundamental source of Africa's inability to engage the rest of the world in a more productive relationship is because it has a poor institutional and policy framework.
Because all governments across the world need money to survive.
You have to pay the army and the police to show law and order.
Why should people support their government?
The fact is no government in the world, with the exception of a few, like that of Idi Amin, can seek to depend entirely on force as an instrument of rule.
Many countries in the [unclear], they need legitimacy.
To get legitimacy, governments often need to deliver things like primary education, primary health, roads, build hospitals and clinics.
Talk to them about the kind of policies and institutions that are necessary for them to expand a scale and scope of business so that it can collect more tax revenues from them.
Rather than sit with Ugandan -- (Applause) -- rather than sit with Ugandan entrepreneurs, Ghanaian businessmen, South African enterprising leaders, our governments find it more productive to talk to the IMF and the World Bank.
Some aid may have built a hospital, fed a hungry village.
Aid increases the resources available to governments, and that makes working in a government the most profitable thing you can have, as a person in Africa seeking a career.
By increasing the political attractiveness of the state, especially in our ethnically fragmented societies in Africa, aid tends to accentuate ethnic tensions as every single ethnic group now begins struggling to enter the state in order to get access to the foreign aid pie.
Ladies and gentlemen, the most enterprising people in Africa cannot find opportunities to trade and to work in the private sector because the institutional and policy environment is hostile to business.
I also want to say that it is important for us to note that, over the last 50 years, Africa has been receiving increasing aid from the international community, in the form of technical assistance, and financial aid, and all other forms of aid.
Between 1960 and 2003, our continent received 600 billion dollars of aid, and we are still told that there is a lot of poverty in Africa.
Where has all the aid gone?
I want to use the example of my own country, called Uganda, and the kind of structure of incentives that aid has brought there.
In the 2006-2007 budget, expected revenue: 2.5 trillion shillings.
The expected foreign aid: 1.9 trillion.
Uganda's recurrent expenditure -- by recurrent what do I mean?
Why does the government of Uganda budget spend 110 percent of its own revenue?
The military, 380 billion.
Agriculture, which employs 18 percent of our poverty-stricken citizens, takes only 18 billion.
Trade and industry takes 43 billion.
Each local government is organized like the central government -- a bureaucracy, a cabinet, a parliament, and so many jobs for the political hangers-on.
You need Wembley Stadium to host our parliament.
A recent government of Uganda study found that there are 3,000 four-wheel drive motor vehicles at the Minister of Health headquarters.
Uganda has 961 sub-counties, each of them with a dispensary, none of which has an ambulance.
So, the four-wheel drive vehicles at the headquarters drive the ministers, the permanent secretaries, the bureaucrats and the international aid bureaucrats who work in aid projects, while the poor die without ambulances and medicine.
(Laughter) Thank you very much.
Companies are losing control.
What happens on Wall Street no longer stays on Wall Street.
What happens in Vegas ends up on YouTube. (Laughter) Reputations are volatile. Loyalties are fickle.
However, in the same survey, only four percent of employees agreed.
Companies are losing control of their customers and their employees.
Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room, the saying goes.
When Microsoft Kinect came out, the motion-controlled add-on to its Xbox gaming console, it immediately drew the attention of hackers.
Microsoft first fought off the hacks, but then shifted course when it realized that actively supporting the community came with benefits.
In an even more radical stance against consumerism, the company placed a "Don't Buy This Jacket" advertisement during the peak of shopping season.
The Brazilian company Semco Group famously lets employees set their own work schedules and even their salaries.
Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior, but when everything is consistent and standardized, how do you create meaningful experiences?
Take the travel service Nextpedition.
It does not tell the traveler where she's going until the very last minute, and information is provided just in time. Similarly, Dutch airline KLM launched a surprise campaign, seemingly randomly handing out small gifts to travelers en route to their destination.
Is there anything companies can do to make their employees feel less pressed for time? Yes.
For the true selves of companies to come through, openness is paramount, but radical openness is not a solution, because when everything is open, nothing is open.
"A smile is a door that is half open and half closed," the author Jennifer Egan wrote.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Five years ago, I experienced a bit of what it must have been like to be Alice in Wonderland.
Penn State asked me, a communications teacher, to teach a communications class for engineering students.
But as these conversations unfolded, I experienced what Alice must have when she went down that rabbit hole and saw that door to a whole new world.
And I believe the key to opening that door is great communication.
We desperately need great communication from our scientists and engineers in order to change the world.
And when you're describing your science, beware of jargon.
A slide like this is not only boring, but it relies too much on the language area of our brain, and causes us to become overwhelmed.
I'm here to talk to you about how globalized we are, how globalized we aren't, and why it's important to actually be accurate in making those kinds of assessments.
The other thing I would add is that this is not a new view.
So the best way I've found of trying to get people to take seriously the idea that the world may not be flat, may not even be close to flat, is with some data.
I'm not going to present all the data that I have here today, but let me just give you a few data points.
One particular thing we might look at, in terms of long-term flows of people, is what percentage of the world's population is accounted for by first-generation immigrants?
What percentage of that was accounted for by foreign direct investment?
If you look at the official statistics, they typically indicate a little bit above 30 percent.
However, there's a big problem with the official statistics, in that if, for instance, a Japanese component supplier ships something to China to be put into an iPod, and then the iPod gets shipped to the U.S., that component ends up getting counted multiple times.
And third, this is not just confined to the readers of the Harvard Business Review.
Especially because, I suspect, some of you may still be a little bit skeptical of the claims, I think it's important to just spend a little bit of time thinking about why we might be prone to globaloney.
And this caused me to scratch my head, because as I went back through his several-hundred-page book, I couldn't find a single figure, chart, table, reference or footnote.
A second reason has to do with peer pressure.
And I got this question often enough that I thought I'd better do some research on Facebook.
The answer is probably somewhere between 10 to 15 percent.
I want to suggest that actually, globaloney can be very harmful to your health.
So I actually spend most of my "World 3.0" book working through a litany of market failures and fears that people have that they worry globalization is going to exacerbate.
Think of France and the current debate about immigration.
When you ask people in France what percentage of the French population is immigrants, the answer is about 24 percent. That's their guess.
Once upon a time, the world was a big, dysfunctional family.
Then one day, a man came to town with boxes and boxes of secret documents stolen from the parents' rooms.
But it ended up in this very long, protracted legal battle and there I was after five years fighting against Parliament in front of three of Britain's most eminent High Court judges waiting for their ruling about whether or not Parliament had to release this data.
So we are moving to this democratization of information, and I've been in this field for quite a while.
Obviously the Church weren't very happy about this, and they tried to suppress it, but what they hadn't counted on was technology, and then they had the printing press, which suddenly enabled these ideas to spread cheaply, far and fast, and people would come together in coffee houses, discuss the ideas, plot revolution.
Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks.
It's the system by which we organize and exercise power, and there I'm talking about politics, because in politics, we're back to this system, this top-down hierarchy.
So that's open-source and it can be used in any country where there is some kind of Freedom of Information law.
This is Birgitta Jónsdóttir. She's an Icelandic MP.
It's the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, and they've just got funding to make it an international modern media project, and this is taking all of the best laws around the world about freedom of expression, protection of whistleblowers, protection from libel, source protection, and trying to make Iceland a publishing haven.
Again, this is all based around leaks, 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, and I was involved in this investigation because I got this leak through a leak from a disgruntled WikiLeaker and ended up going to work at the Guardian.
It reminded me of that scene in "The Wizard of Oz."
Beyond that, what I found most fascinating was the level of endemic corruption that I saw across all different countries, and particularly centered around the heart of power, around public officials who were embezzling the public's money for their own personal enrichment, and allowed to do that because of official secrecy.
Because that is what Julian Assange did.
And humility because we are all human. We all make mistakes.
So what is the solution? It is, I believe, to embody within the rule of law rights to information.
At the moment our rights are incredibly weak.
Some fairy tales have happy endings. Some don't.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
And this isn't just a problem in Britain.
It's a problem across the developing world, and in middle income countries too. In Jamaica, for example -- look at Jamaican members of Parliament, you meet them, and they're often people who are Rhodes Scholars, who've studied at Harvard or at Princeton, and yet, you go down to downtown Kingston, and you are looking at one of the most depressing sites that you can see in any middle-income country in the world: a dismal, depressing landscape of burnt and half-abandoned buildings.
Ten years ago, however, the promise of democracy seemed to be extraordinary. George W. Bush stood up in his State of the Union address in 2003 and said that democracy was the force that would beat most of the ills of the world. He said, because democratic governments respect their own people and respect their neighbors, freedom will bring peace.
In Pakistan, in lots of sub-Saharan Africa, again you can see democracy and elections are compatible with corrupt governments, with states that are unstable and dangerous.
Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty. It reflects an idea of dignity, the dignity of the individual, the idea that each individual should have an equal vote, an equal say, in the formation of their government.
Democracy is not simply a question of structures.
Politicians also need to learn, occasionally, to say that certain things that voters want, certain things that voters have been promised, may be things that we cannot deliver or perhaps that we feel we should not deliver.
For politicians to be honest, the public needs to allow them to be honest, and the media, which mediates between the politicians and the public, needs to allow those politicians to be honest.
In other words, if democracy is to be rebuilt, is to become again vigorous and vibrant, it is necessary not just for the public to learn to trust their politicians, but for the politicians to learn to trust the public.
Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)
Pip from "Great Expectations" was adopted; Superman was a foster child; Cinderella was a foster child; Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, was fostered and institutionalized; Batman was orphaned; Lyra Belacqua from Philip Pullman's "Northern Lights" was fostered; Jane Eyre, adopted; Roald Dahl's James from "James and the Giant Peach;" Matilda; Moses -- Moses! (Laughter) Moses! (Laughter) -- the boys in Michael Morpurgo's "Friend or Foe;" Alem in Benjamin Zephaniah's "Refugee Boy;" Luke Skywalker -- Luke Skywalker! (Laughter) -- Oliver Twist; Cassia in "The Concubine of Shanghai" by Hong Ying; Celie in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."
It was the primary purpose of the social worker, the aim, to get the woman at her most vulnerable time in her entire life, to sign the adoption papers.
It was a summer of love if you were white.
If you were black, it was a summer of hate.
His name is Norman." (Laughter) Norman! (Laughter) Norman!
I was Norman Mark Greenwood.
They sat me at a table, my foster mom, and she said to me, "You don't love us, do you?" At 11 years old.
I didn't say goodbye to anybody, not my mother, my father, my sisters, my brothers, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my grandparents, nobody.
You couldn't see it from the street, because the home was surrounded by beech trees.
By the way, years later, my social worker said that I should never have been put in there.
They -- I was put in a dormitory with a confirmed Nazi sympathizer.
All of the staff were ex-police -- interesting -- and ex-probation officers.
The man who ran it was an ex-army officer.
See, that's what family does.
I've just got to say it to you all: I found all of my family in my adult life. I spent all of my adult life finding them, and I've now got a fully dysfunctional family just like everybody else.
Thanks very much. It's been an honor. (Applause) (Applause)
In the 17th century, a woman named Giulia Tofana had a very successful perfume business.
It sort of ended abruptly when she was executed — (Laughter) — for murdering 600 men. You see, it wasn't a very good perfume.
Darwin was probably one of the first scientists to systematically investigate the human emotions, and he pointed to the universal nature and the strength of the disgust response.
This is an anecdote from his travels in South America.
Richard Dawkins: "We've evolved around courtship and sex, are attached to deep-rooted emotions and reactions that are hard to jettison overnight."
One of the features, though, of disgust, is not just its universality and its strength, but the way that it works through association.
A more modern example comes from people who try to convince us that homosexuality is immoral.
They're like "dogs eating their own vomit and sows wallowing in their own feces."
When we were first investigating the role of disgust in moral judgment, one of the things we became interested in was whether or not these sorts of appeals are more likely to work in individuals who are more easily disgusted.
So while disgust, along with the other basic emotions, are universal phenomena, it just really is true that some people are easier to disgust than others.
So it not only predicted self-reported political orientation, but actual voting behavior. And also we were able, with this sample, to look across the world, in 121 different countries we asked the same questions, and as you can see, this is 121 countries collapsed into 10 different geographical regions.
And what they've demonstrated is that people who report being more politically conservative are also more physiologically aroused when you show them disgusting images like the ones that I showed you.
So physiological arousal predicted, in this study, attitudes toward gay marriage.
But even with all these data linking disgust sensitivity and political orientation, one of the questions that remains is what is the causal link here? Is it the case that disgust really is shaping political and moral beliefs?
In another set of studies we actually simply reminded people -- this was at a time when the swine flu was going around -- we reminded people that in order to prevent the spread of the flu that they ought to wash their hands.
For some participants, we actually had them take questionnaires next to a sign that reminded them to wash their hands.
And when we asked them a variety of questions about the rightness or wrongness of certain acts, what we also found was that simply being reminded that they ought to wash their hands made them more morally conservative.
In the case of disgust, what is a little bit more surprising is the scope of this influence. It makes perfect sense, and it's a very good emotion for us to have, that disgust would make me change the way that I perceive the physical world whenever contamination is possible.
Thank you. (Applause)
And you might remember, some of you, how the cars were back then, and it was a common problem of overheating.
In the past, before air conditioning, we had thick walls.
Then in about the 1930s, with the advent of plate glass, rolled steel and mass production, we were able to make floor-to-ceiling windows and unobstructed views, and with that came the irreversible reliance on mechanical air conditioning to cool our solar-heated spaces.
If we look at biology, and many of you probably don't know, I was a biology major before I went into architecture, the human skin is the organ that naturally regulates the temperature in the body, and it's a fantastic thing.
I'm also looking at trying to develop some building components for the market, and so here you see a pretty typical double-glazed window panel, and in that panel, between those two pieces of glass, that double-glazing, I'm trying to work on making a thermo-bimetal pattern system so that when the sun hits that outside layer and heats that interior cavity, that thermo-bimetal will begin to curl, and what actually will happen then is it'll start to block out the sun in certain areas of the building, and totally, if necessary.
I grew up in Bihar, India's poorest state, and I remember when I was six years old, I remember coming home one day to find a cart full of the most delicious sweets at our doorstep.
My father was responsible for building roads in Bihar, and he had developed a firm stance against corruption, even though he was harassed and threatened.
And I experienced this most viscerally when I traveled to remote villages to study poverty.
Later, I joined the World Bank, which sought to fight such poverty by transferring aid from rich to poor countries.
Bihar represents the challenge of development: abject poverty surrounded by corruption.
Globally, 1.3 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day, and the work I did in Uganda represents the traditional approach to these problems that has been practiced since 1944, when winners of World War II, 500 founding fathers, and one lonely founding mother, gathered in New Hampshire, USA, to establish the Bretton Woods institutions, including the World Bank.
And that traditional approach to development had three key elements. First, transfer of resources from rich countries in the North to poorer countries in the South, accompanied by reform prescriptions.
And third, the engagement in developing countries was with a narrow set of government elites with little interaction with the citizens, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of development assistance.
Open knowledge, open aid, open governance, and together, they represent three key shifts that are transforming development and that also hold greater hope for the problems I witnessed in Uganda and in Bihar.
The first key shift is open knowledge.
You know, developing countries today will not simply accept solutions that are handed down to them by the U.S., Europe or the World Bank.
They want to know how China lifted 500 million people out of poverty in 30 years, how Mexico's Oportunidades program improved schooling and nutrition for millions of children.
In this manner, the World Bank has now GeoMapped 30,000 project activities in 143 countries, and donors are using a common platform to map all their projects.
From the Arab Spring to the Anna Hazare movement in India, using mobile phones and social media not just for political accountability but also for development accountability.
Are governments delivering services to the citizens?
So for instance, several governments in Africa and Eastern Europe are opening their budgets to the public.
To tackle this problem, governments are using new tools to visualize the budget so it's more understandable to the public.
Tools like this help turn a shelf full of inscrutable documents into a publicly understandable visual, and what's exciting is that with this openness, there are today new opportunities for citizens to give feedback and engage with government.
So in the Philippines today, parents and students can give real-time feedback on a website, Checkmyschool.org, or using SMS, whether teachers and textbooks are showing up in school, the same problems I witnessed in Uganda and in Bihar.
And the government is responsive. So for instance, when it was reported on this website that 800 students were at risk because school repairs had stalled due to corruption, the Department of Education in the Philippines took swift action.
And you know what's exciting is that this innovation is now spreading South to South, from the Philippines to Indonesia, Kenya, Moldova and beyond.
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, even an impoverished community was able to use these tools to voice its aspirations.
Today, even Bihar is turning around and opening up under a committed leadership that is making government transparent, accessible and responsive to the poor.
But, you know, in many parts of the world, governments are not interested in opening up or in serving the poor, and it is a real challenge for those who want to change the system.
These examples give new hope, new possibility to the problems I witnessed in Uganda or that my father confronted in Bihar.
He fought till the end, increasingly passionate that to combat corruption and poverty, not only did government officials need to be honest, but citizens needed to join together to make their voices heard.
These became the two bookends of his life, and the journey he traveled in between mirrored the changing development landscape.
Today, I'm inspired by these changes, and I'm excited that at the World Bank, we are embracing these new directions, a significant departure from my work in Uganda 20 years ago.
If we do, we will find that the collective voices of the poor will be heard in Bihar, in Uganda, and beyond.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
As a truck driver once said to me, "The world had a new center, and that center was Mary Anne."
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.
As one Polynesian said, "I felt like jumping in the sky."
And we found activity in a lot of brain regions.
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.
So with that preamble, I want to go into discussing the two most profound social trends.
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.
Women are moving back into the job market.
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.
I don't know why they want to think that men and women are alike.
Even in places like India and Japan, where women are not moving rapidly into the regular job market, they're moving into journalism.
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.
We now know the brain circuitry of imagination, of long-term planning.
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.
But in fact, women moving into the job market is having a huge impact on sex and romance and family life.
Anyway.
We're also returning to an ancient form of marriage equality.
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.
For one of my books, I looked at divorce data in 58 societies.
So the divorce rate right now is stable in America, and it's actually beginning to decline.
These three brain systems -- lust, romantic love and attachment -- don't always go together.
With orgasm you get a spike of dopamine.
But these three brain systems: lust, romantic love and attachment, aren't always connected to each other.
Over 100 million prescriptions of antidepressants are written every year in the United States.
I know one girl who's been on these antidepressants, SSRIs, serotonin-enhancing antidepressants -- since she was 13.
And by raising levels of serotonin, you suppress the dopamine circuit.
Dopamine is associated with romantic love.
The things are connected in the brain.
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.
That's my current project; it will be my next book.
Timing is important. Proximity is important.
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.
(Laughter) (Applause) There's magic to love!
Please don't tell me I'm normal.
Now I'd like to introduce you to my brothers.
Remi is 22, tall and very handsome.
When he sings songs from our childhood, attempting words that not even I could remember, he reminds me of one thing: how little we know about the mind, and how wonderful the unknown must be.
Samuel is 16. He's tall. He's very handsome.
He has the most impeccable memory.
He doesn't remember if he stole my chocolate bar, but he remembers the year of release for every song on my iPod, conversations we had when he was four, weeing on my arm on the first ever episode of Teletubbies, and Lady Gaga's birthday.
But most people don't agree.
Now, for you who may be less familiar with the term "autism," it's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication, learning and sometimes physical skills.
And across the world, every 20 minutes, one new person is diagnosed with autism, and although it's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world, there is no known cause or cure.
And I cannot remember the first moment I encountered autism, but I cannot recall a day without it.
I was just three years old when my brother came along, and I was so excited that I had a new being in my life.
Remi lived and reigned in his own world, with his own rules, and he found pleasure in the smallest things, like lining up cars around the room and staring at the washing machine and eating anything that came in between.
And as he grew older, he grew more different, and the differences became more obvious.
Yet beyond the tantrums and the frustration and the never-ending hyperactivity was something really unique: a pure and innocent nature, a boy who saw the world without prejudice, a human who had never lied.
Normality overlooks the beauty that differences give us, and the fact that we are different doesn't mean that one of us is wrong.
Because autistic or not, the differences that we have -- We've got a gift! Everyone's got a gift inside of us, and in all honesty, the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential.
Please -- don't tell me I'm normal.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Across Europe and Central Asia, approximately one million children live in large residential institutions, usually known as orphanages.
But 60 years of research has demonstrated that separating children from their families and placing them in large institutions seriously harms their health and development, and this is particularly true for young babies.
Every time a young baby learns something new -- to focus its eyes, to mimic a movement or a facial expression, to pick something up, to form a word or to sit up -- new synaptic connections are being built in the brain.
They communicate their delight to their children, who respond with smiles, and a desire to achieve more and to learn more.
I was asked to help the director of a large institution to help prevent the separation of children from their families.
Housing 550 babies, this was Ceausescu's show orphanage, and so I'd been told the conditions were much better.
Since my first visit to Ceausescu's institution, I've seen hundreds of such places across 18 countries, from the Czech Republic to Sudan.
For those without disabilities, at age three, they're transferred to another institution, and at age seven, to yet another. Segregated according to age and gender, they are arbitrarily separated from their siblings, often without even a chance to say goodbye.
In Moldova, young women raised in institutions are 10 times more likely to be trafficked than their peers, and a Russian study found that two years after leaving institutions, young adults, 20 percent of them had a criminal record, 14 percent were involved in prostitution, and 10 percent had taken their own lives.
But why are there so many orphans in Europe when there hasn't been a great deal of war or disaster in recent years?
Every child has the right to a family, deserves and needs a family, and children are amazingly resilient.
We find that if we get them out of institutions and into loving families early on, they recover their developmental delays, and go on to lead normal, happy lives.
Now, there are less than 10,000, and family support services are provided across the country.
Many countries have developed national action plans for change.
If we know people who are planning to support orphanages, we should convince them to support family services instead.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
In the summer of 2016, I did the sensible thing: I quit my cushy job at a hedge fund to write a play about my family's murder.
(Sighs) I told my friends and family that this was about art, but in truth, I was on a spiritual vision quest.
I was seeking closure to a relationship with someone that I barely knew - the kid who killed my mother and brother.
He was my friend's younger brother, a kid from our neighborhood.
My mom actually used to wave to him from the van and say, "He's going through a hard time, I just want to make sure he knows that I see him."
He broke into our house a couple of days before Christmas, looking for some stuff to sell for cash.
When he came across my brother Jim asleep on the couch, he panicked, shot him and fled the scene.
Then he realized he forgot his coat.
He is currently serving back-to-back life sentences in a prison in Southwestern Virginia.
He became a non-person to me.
I googled his prisoner ID number.
Conditions are so bad that in 2012 the entire prison went on a hunger strike.
I remember the first time I saw mom and Jim's bodies in the funeral home, how my recoiled when I felt the small, destructive supernova that the bullet made in the back of Jim's skull.
But when I pictured him - beaten, starving, crying out in a dark cell - yeah, that was somehow just as painful.
And I realized it was because we were still connected.
That steel tether of trauma that he hooked into my side when he killed them was still there, and I had been lurching against its pull and dragging him through the mud for the past seven years, whether I knew it or not.
So after wading through all the options - I mean, literally every option at my disposal - I realized the only way to get rid of this dude was to forgive him.
(Laughter) Because the truth was I thought that I already had forgiven him.
So if saying you forgive someone is not the same thing as doing it, why was this guy still hooked into my side, dragging me around, making me do dumb things like quit my job to write a play?
(Laughter) And then there's this doctor Wayne guy over here, who says, "To forgive, we just got to let go and be like water."
(Laughter) "Trying to forgive the kid who killed my family, but nobody will tell me how."
Why forgive? Why do it?
That's when I discovered that most of us are forgiving for the wrong reasons.
Some victims, like me, try to forgive right away because it's the right thing to do.
But if we're honest with ourselves, there's only three reasons a victim forgives automatically.
If forgiveness is good, a good person should forgive right away.
Two: victims feel a lot of pressure to forgive from everyone else.
Three: you think that forgiveness is a shortcut to healing.
You think if you skip to the end of the story, you can bypass all the angry, vulnerable, messy healing crap.
I want to be a good person, I love pleasing other people, and I hate the vulnerable, angry, messy, healing crap.
If your motivation is selfish, even a good selfish thing like healing, it will collapse in on itself like a dying star.
When you say, "I forgive you," what you're really saying is, "I know what you did.
Forgiveness is the only real path to freedom.
But to get free, you have to get super specific about what exactly it is that you're forgiving because you cannot forgive something that didn't happen to you.
In Judaism, the family can't forgive murderers, because they were not killed.
This is why justice often feels really cold for victims.
And it is the criminal justice system's job to assess what is owed to society.
Most of us avoid forgiveness like the plague because we do not want to look at our wounds.
Anger is important; it is the fire that cauterizes our wounds and lets them scar over and heal.
But once you know what's happened to you, it's time for some good old-fashioned justice.
An apology? An explanation?
A front-row seat to their torture chamber?
Which is why forgiveness is not the right thing in most situations.
I went to grad school, I married a wonderful man, I started a career that I honestly really love.
That's when I was ready to forgive.
(Sighs) Sometimes I miss him.
(Laughter) Not him, the monster that I created.
But my story was about the three of them, always.
Once I did that, I found myself alone, center stage, in the spotlight, with endless possibilities.
Real forgiveness has to let go of all expectations.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As a cyber-magician, I combine elements of illusion and science to give us a feel of how future technologies might be experienced.
Winter is like magic. It's a time of change, when warmth turns to cold, water turns to snow, and then it all disappears.
Voice: The moon is one of the most potent symbols of magic.
Make a wish. (Blowing noise) Voice: Don't tell, or it won't come true.
And I thought, "Well, sir, I am not a strategist, nor am I specialist. I am merely a storyteller."
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
So I want to talk a little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view, and this world I'm going to talk about is the micro world.
A human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see.
When I first saw living cells in a microscope, I was absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like.
So this whole world, the nano world, this area in here is called the nano world, and the nano world, the whole micro world that we see, there's a nano world that is wrapped up within that, and the whole -- and that is the world of molecules and atoms.
But I want to talk about this larger world, the world of the micro world.
Here's a close-up picture, or this is actually a regular picture of a water hyacinth, and if you had really, really good vision, with your naked eye, you'd see it about that well.
I became interested in sand about 10 years ago, when I first saw sand from Maui, and in fact, this is a little bit of sand from Maui.
So sand is about a tenth of a millimeter in size.
Each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size.
So here's, for example, a picture of sand from Maui.
This is from Lahaina, and when we're walking along a beach, we're actually walking along millions of years of biological and geological history.
Here's what most of the sand in our world looks like.
So every grain of sand is unique. Every beach is different.
Every single grain is different. There are no two grains of sand alike in the world.
So NASA wanted me to take some pictures of Moon sand, so they sent me sand from all the different landings of the Apollo missions that happened 40 years ago.
I thought it looked kind of a little bit like the Moon, which is sort of interesting.
This is a very small grain of sand, this whole thing.
And that's called a ring agglutinate.
Now here's a grain of sand that is from the Moon, and you can see that the entire crystal structure is still there.
This grain of sand is probably about three and a half or four billion years old, and it's never eroded away like the way we have sand on Earth erodes away because of water and tumbling, air, and so forth. All you can see is a little bit of erosion down here by the Sun, has these solar storms, and that's erosion by solar radiation.
I think that this was best put by William Blake when he said, "To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour."
Thank you. (Applause)
The first thing I'm going to tell you about this mammal is that it is essential for our ecosystems to function correctly.
One fifth of all living mammals is a bat, and they have very unique attributes.
Bats as we know them have been around on this planet for about 64 million years.
Now flight is an inherently difficult thing.
Flight within vertebrates has only evolved three times: once in the bats, once in the birds, and once in the pterodactyls.
Bats have learned and evolved how to deal with this.
But one other extremely unique thing about bats is that they are able to use sound to perceive their environment. They use echolocation.
Now, what I mean by echolocation -- they emit a sound from their larynx out through their mouth or through their nose. This sound wave comes out and it reflects and echoes back off objects in their environment, and the bats then hear these echoes and they turn this information into an acoustic image.
We're a visual species. When scientists first realized that bats were actually using sound to be able to fly and orient and move at night, we didn't believe it.
Now, if you look at this bat, it looks a little bit alien.
Indeed, the very famous philosopher Thomas Nagel once said, "To truly experience an alien life form on this planet, you should lock yourself inside a room with a flying, echolocating bat in complete darkness."
And if you look at the actual physical characteristics on the face of this beautiful horseshoe bat, you see a lot of these characteristics are dedicated to be able to make sound and perceive it.
So again, if you just look at this bat, you realize sound is very important for its survival.
So among and within bats is a huge variation in their ability to use sensory perception.
The Chinese word for "bat" sounds like the Chinese word for "happiness," and they believe that bats bring wealth, health, longevity, virtue and serenity.
Now as I said before, bats are essential for our ecosystems to function correctly. And why is this?
Bats in the tropics are major pollinators of many plants.
They also feed on fruit, and they disperse the seeds of these fruits. Bats are responsible for pollinating the tequila plant, and this is a multi-million dollar industry in Mexico. So indeed, we need them for our ecosystems to function properly.
It's been estimated in the U.S., in a tiny colony of big brown bats, that they will feed on over a million insects a year, and in the United States of America, right now bats are being threatened by a disease known as white-nose syndrome.
And for one year in the U.S. alone, it's estimated that it's going to cost 22 billion U.S. dollars, if we remove bats. So indeed, bats then do bring us wealth.
So again, that's the first blessing. Bats are important for our ecosystems.
And what about the second? What about health?
Inside every cell in your body lies your genome.
Now since the new advancements in modern molecular technologies, it is now possible for us to sequence our own genome in a very rapid time and at a very, very reduced cost.
So through natural selection, over time, mutations, variations that disrupt the function of a protein will not be tolerated over time.
Evolution acts as a sieve. It sieves out the bad variation.
So in this case here, if all the mammals that we look at have a yellow-type genome at that site, it probably suggests that purple is bad.
So say, for example, the region of the genome that I was looking at was a region that's important for vision.
So in my lab, we've been using bats to look at two different types of diseases of the senses.
Three hundred and fourteen million people are visually impaired, and 45 million of these are blind. So blindness is a big problem, and a lot of these blind disorders come from inherited diseases, so we want to try and better understand which mutations in the gene cause the disease.
Also we look at deafness. One in every 1,000 newborn babies are deaf, and when we reach 80, over half of us will also have a hearing problem.
So what we've been doing in my lab is looking at these unique sensory specialists, the bats, and we have looked at genes that cause blindness when there's a defect in them, genes that cause deafness when there's a defect in them, and now we can predict which sites are most likely to cause disease.
So bats are also important for our health, to enable us to better understand how our genome functions.
So this is where we are right now, but what about the future?
What about longevity?
So why should we be interested in aging at all?
Well, really, this is a picture drawn from the 1500s of the Fountain of Youth. Aging is considered one of the most familiar, yet the least well-understood, aspects of all of biology, and really, since the dawn of civilization, mankind has sought to avoid it.
In Europe alone, by 2050, there is going to be a 70 percent increase of individuals over 65, and 170 percent increase in individuals over 80.
So how could the secret of everlasting youth actually lie within the bat genome? Does anybody want to hazard a guess over how long this bat could live for?
So typically, small mammals live fast, die young.
There are 19 species of mammal that live longer than expected, given their body size, than man, and 18 of those are bats.
So right now, in my lab, we're combining state-of-the-art bat field biology, going out and catching the long-lived bats, with the most up-to-date, modern molecular technology to understand better what it is that they do to stop aging as we do.
Aging is a big problem for humanity, and I believe that by studying bats, we can uncover the molecular mechanisms that enable mammals to achieve extraordinary longevity. If we find out what they're doing, perhaps through gene therapy, we can enable us to do the same thing.
And the reality is that bats can bring us so much benefit if we just look in the right place. They're good for our ecosystem, they allow us to understand how our genome functions, and they potentially hold the secret to everlasting youth.
So tonight, when you walk out of here and you look up in the night skies, and you see this beautiful flying mammal, I want you to smile. Thank you. (Applause)
Ladies and gentlemen, and more importantly, Mo Bros and Mo Sistas — (Laughter) — for the next 17 minutes, I'm going to share with you my Movember journey, and how, through that journey, we've redefined charity, we're redefining the way prostate cancer researchers are working together throughout the world, and I hope, through that process, that I inspire you to create something significant in your life, something significant that will go on and make this world a better place.
Why hasn't that made a comeback? (Laughter) So then there was a lot more beers, and then the day ended with a challenge to bring the mustache back. (Laughter) So in Australia, "mo" is slang for mustache, so we renamed the month of November "Movember" and created some pretty basic rules, which still stand today.
And I started to research that topic, and discovered prostate cancer is the male equivalent of breast cancer in terms of the number of men that die from it and are diagnosed with it.
Every day -- this morning, I wake up and go, my life is about a mustache. (Laughter) Essentially, I'm a mustache farmer. (Laughter) And my season is November. (Applause) (Applause) So in 2005, the campaign got more momentum, was more successful in Australia and then New Zealand, and then in 2006 we came to a pivotal point.
So again we persisted, and Foster's Brewing came to the party and gave us our first ever sponsorship, and that was enough for me to quit my job, I did consulting on the side.
So we'd racked up at this stage about 600,000 dollars worth of debt. So if Movember 2006 didn't happen, the four founders, well, we would've been broke, we would've been homeless, sitting on the street with mustaches. (Laughter) But we thought, you know what, if that's the worst thing that happens, so what?
Then in early 2007, a really interesting thing happened.
(Applause) And that makes Movember now the biggest funder of prostate cancer research and support programs in the world.
So now I live in Los Angeles, because the Prostate Cancer Foundation of the U.S. is based there, and I always get asked by the media down there, because it's so celebrity-driven, "Who are your celebrity ambassadors?"
And I say to them, "Last year we were fortunate enough to have 450,000 celebrity ambassadors."
Now what I want to share with you is one of my most touching Movember moments, and it happened here in Toronto last year, at the end of the campaign.
And I said, "Okay, that's interesting."
And we sort of all choked up in the back of the taxi, and I didn't tell him who I was, because I didn't think it was appropriate, and I just shook his hand and I said, "Thank you so much.
And from that moment I realized that Movember is so much more than a mustache, having a joke.
He came up to me and said, "Thank you for starting Movember."
And I looked at him, and I was like, "I'm pretty sure you can't grow a mustache." (Laughter) And I said, "What's your Movember story?"
And he said, "I grew the worst mustache ever." (Laughter) "But I went home for Thanksgiving dinner, and pretty quickly the conversation around the table turned to what the hell was going on." (Laughter) "And we talked -- I talked to them about Movember, and then after that, my dad came up to me, and at the age of 26, for the first time ever, I had a conversation with my dad one on one about men's health. I had a conversation with my dad about prostate cancer, and I learned that my grandfather had prostate cancer and I was able to share with my dad that he was twice as likely to get that disease, and he didn't know that, and he hadn't been getting screened for it."
So they identified that as a priority, and then they've got and recruited now 300 researchers from around the world that are studying that topic, essentially the same topic.
So, what I know about my Movember journey is that, with a really creative idea, with passion, with persistence, and a lot of patience, four mates, four mustaches, can inspire a room full of people, and that room full of people can go on and inspire a city, and that city is Melbourne, my home.
And that city can go on and inspire a state, and that state can go on and inspire a nation, and beyond that, you can create a global movement that is changing the face of men's health.
Thank you. (Applause)
So, people want a lot of things out of life, but I think, more than anything else, they want happiness.
Aristotle called happiness "the chief good," the end towards which all other things aim.
According to this view, the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable.
We live longer. We have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago.
The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically, we haven't actually gotten any happier.
In fact, in the last few years, there's been an explosion in research on happiness. For example, we've learned a lot about its demographics, how things like income and education, gender and marriage relate to it.
I think that's a question we haven't really answered yet, but I think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences.
Maybe, to really be happy, we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment.
Well, one fact that we can take advantage of, I think a fact you'll all agree is true, is that time goes forward, not backward. Right? The cause has to come before the effect.
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Two years ago, after having served four years in the United States Marine Corps and deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself in Port-au-Prince, leading a team of veterans and medical professionals in some of the hardest-hit areas of that city, three days after the earthquake.
We were going to the places that nobody else wanted to go, the places nobody else could go, and after three weeks, we realized something. Military veterans are very, very good at disaster response.
The first problem is there's inadequate disaster response.
It's slow. It's antiquated. It's not using the best technology, and it's not using the best people.
And we can use veterans to improve disaster response.
But it was earlier this year, when one of our original members caused us to shift focus in the organization.
We served together in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Earlier this year, in March, Clay took his own life.
This was a tragedy, but it really forced us to refocus what it is that we were doing.
You know, Clay didn't kill himself because of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clay killed himself because of what he lost when he came home.
But after Clay, we shifted that focus, and suddenly, now moving forward, we see ourselves as a veteran service organization that's using disaster response.
Because we think that we can give that purpose and that community and that self-worth back to the veteran.
And tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and Joplin, and then later Hurricane Irene, gave us an opportunity to look at that.
Now I want you to imagine for a second an 18-year-old boy who graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri.
He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle.
They send him to Iraq.
He's got a purpose. But he comes home [to] Kansas City, Missouri, maybe he goes to college, maybe he's got a job, but he doesn't have that same sense of purpose.
Every day he looks into the same sets of eyes around him.
He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle.
They send him to Iraq.
But you send him to Joplin after a tornado, and somebody once again is walking up to him and shaking their hand and thanking them for their service, now they have self-worth again.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Music: DJ Shadow.
So now that we developed these tools and found these materials that let us do these things, we started to realize that, essentially, anything that we can do with paper, anything that we can do with a piece of paper and a pen we can now do with electronics.
So thank you very much. (Applause)
How about this word?
The dictionary is not carved out of a piece of granite, out of a lump of rock. It's made up of lots of little bits.
Now one of the perks of being a lexicographer -- besides getting to come to TED -- is that you get to say really fun words, like lexicographical.
But the thing is, I don't want to be a traffic cop.
And for another, deciding what words are good and what words are bad is actually not very easy.
Why do I blame the Queen?
The design has not changed.
And OK, what about online dictionaries, right?
Online dictionaries must be different.
This is my favorite word, by the way.
And in fact, online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print, except for searchability.
Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for, because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.
Woman's making a ham for a big, family dinner.
When they find a word that's not in the dictionary, they think, "This must be a bad word." Why? It's more likely to be a bad dictionary.
Why are you blaming the ham for being too big for the pan?
No. There will still be paper dictionaries.
You know, there're still going to be paper dictionaries, but it's not going to be the dominant dictionary.
So, think about it this way: if you've got an artificial constraint, artificial constraints lead to arbitrary distinctions and a skewed worldview.
They think, "OK, if we think words are the tools that we use to build the expressions of our thoughts, how can you say that screwdrivers are better than hammers?
And so people say to me, "How do I know if a word is real?"
You know, anybody who's read a children's book knows that love makes things real.
If you love a word, use it. That makes it real.
Being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction.
And any time one of those little parts of the mobile changes, is touched, any time you touch a word, you use it in a new context, you give it a new connotation, you verb it, you make the mobile move.
You can ask for help!
Library of Congress: 17 million books, of which half are in English.
If only one out of every 10 of those books had a word that's not in the dictionary in it, that would be equivalent to more than two unabridged dictionaries.
See, I just gave you a lot of words and a lot of numbers, and this is more of a visual explanation.
If we think of the dictionary as being the map of the English language, these bright spots are what we know about, and the dark spots are where we are in the dark.
If that was the map of all the words in American English, we don't know very much.
If this was the dictionary -- if this was the map of American English -- look, we have a kind of lumpy idea of Florida, but there's no California!
We're missing California from American English.
We just don't know enough, and we don't even know that we're missing California.
So again, lexicography is not rocket science.
For instance, there's eBird, where amateur birdwatchers can upload information about their bird sightings.
He's found so many comets, they named a comet after him.
But he found 140 comets without a telescope.
If we can find comets without a telescope, shouldn't we be able to find words?
And the Internet is great for collecting words, because the Internet's full of collectors.
And words and enthusiasm actually happen to be the recipe for lexicography. Isn't that great?
So there are a lot of really good word-collecting sites out there right now, but the problem with some of them is that they're not scientific enough.
What newspaper was it in? What book?
Because a word is like an archaeological artifact.
We can put in all the meanings.
This is what dictionaries used to look like.
It wasn't really what people needed.
We can leave the aesthetic judgments to the writers and the speakers.
There are 10,000 species of birds in the world.
Vultures are amongst the most threatened group of birds.
They've also be associated with Disney — (Laughter) — personified as goofy, dumb, stupid characters.
So why are vultures important? First of all, they provide vital ecological services. They clean up.
Recent studies have shown that in areas where there are no vultures, carcasses take up to three to four times to decompose, and this has huge ramifications for the spread of diseases.
Vultures also have tremendous historical significance.
Nekhbet was the symbol of the protector and the motherhood, and together with the cobra, symbolized the unity between Upper and Lower Egypt.
In Hindu mythology, Jatayu was the vulture god, and he risked his life in order to save the goddess Sita from the 10-headed demon Ravana.
So what is the problem with vultures?
We have eight species of vultures that occur in Kenya, of which six are highly threatened with extinction.
In South Asia, in countries like India and Pakistan, four species of vultures are listed as critically endangered, which means they have less than 10 or 15 years to go extinct, and the reason is because they are falling prey by consuming livestock that has been treated with a painkilling drug like Diclofenac.
Kenya is going to have one of the largest wind farms in Africa: 353 wind turbines are going to be up at Lake Turkana.
I am not against wind energy, but we need to work with the governments, because wind turbines do this to birds. They slice them in half.
In West Africa, there's a horrific trade of dead vultures to serve the witchcraft and the fetish market.
We're working with local communities.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
So I went home, and I did a little research, and I found some very shocking statistics.
Over 2.5 billion people in the world today do not have proper access to water and sanitation.
Various diseases thrive in this environment, the most drastic of which is called trachoma.
Trachoma is an infection of the eye due to dirt getting into your eye. Multiple infections of trachoma can leave you permanently blind.
The disease leaves eight million people permanently blind each and every year. The shocking part about it is that to avoid being infected with trachoma, all you have to do is wash your face: no medicine, no pills, no injections.
Much of the deception is everyday. In fact, a lot of research shows that we all lie once or twice a day, as Dave suggested.
I was a customs officer for Canada back in the mid-'90s.
But even since just 1995, '96, the way we communicate has been completely transformed. We email, we text, we skype, we Facebook. It's insane.
It sounds a little bit like a weird book, but actually they're all new types of lies.
Let me give you a very recent example, as in, like, last week.
Here's R.J. Ellory, best-seller author in Britain.
And of course, you might suspect that Nicodemus Jones is R.J. Ellory.
In North America, we call this Astroturfing, and Astroturfing is very common now. There's a lot of concerns about it.
How about Facebook itself?
Well it has to do with Pinocchio's nose.
So there are some pathological liars, but they make up a tiny portion of the population. We lie for a reason.
Most linguists agree that we started speaking somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That's a long time ago.
In fact, I think in the very near future, it's not just what we write that will be recorded, everything we do will be recorded.
Now, as I said, as a social scientist, this is wonderful.
First, lying online can be very dangerous, right?
This one is more than 400 years old.
I just took this out of the kiln last week, and the kiln itself takes another day or two to cool down, but raku is really fast. You do it outside, and you take the kiln up to temperature. In 15 minutes, it goes to 1,500 degrees, and as soon as you see that the glaze has melted inside, you can see that faint sheen, you turn the kiln off, and you reach in with these long metal tongs, you grab the pot, and in Japan, this red-hot pot would be immediately immersed in a solution of green tea, and you can imagine what that steam would smell like.
The filmmaker Mira Nair speaks about growing up in a small town in India. Its name is Bhubaneswar, and here's a picture of one of the temples in her town.
The sculptor Richard Serra talks about how, as a young artist, he thought he was a painter, and he lived in Florence after graduate school.
While he was there, he traveled to Madrid, where he went to the Prado to see this picture by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez.
He's standing on the left with his paintbrush in one hand and his palette in the other.
Richard Serra: I was standing there looking at it, and I realized that Velázquez was looking at me, and I thought, "Oh. I'm the subject of the painting."
That tension resonates in the work of the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, who at the beginning of his career was known for his street photography, for capturing a moment on the street, and also for his beautiful photographs of landscapes -- of Tuscany, of Cape Cod, of light.
Joel Meyerowitz: And like all the other passersby, I stood outside the chain link fence on Chambers and Greenwich, and all I could see was the smoke and a little bit of rubble, and I raised my camera to take a peek, just to see if there was something to see, and some cop, a lady cop, hit me on my shoulder, and said, "Hey, no pictures!"
Looking at these photographs today brings back the smell of smoke that lingered on my clothes when I went home to my family at night.
Creativity is essential to all of us, whether we're scientists or teachers, parents or entrepreneurs.
I want to leave you with another image of a Japanese tea bowl. This one is at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C.
My wife replied, "None of your business."
She replied, I also know about [sanitary pads], but myself and my sisters, if they start using that, we have to cut our family milk budget.
I went to a local shop, I tried to buy her a sanitary pad packet.
I need a woman volunteer. Where can I get one in India?
Then I made a sanitary pad and handed it to Shanti -- my wife's name is Shanti.
Close your eyes."
But here the problem is, one company is making napkin out of cotton. It is working well.
That is my invention.
That's why I am giving this machine only in rural India, for rural women, because in India, [you'll be] surprised, only two percent of women are using sanitary pads. The rest, they're using a rag cloth, a leaf, husk, [saw] dust, everything except sanitary pads.
It is the same in the 21st century. That's why I am going to decide to give this machine only for poor women across India.
(Applause) Play video one.
She replied immediately, "I know about napkins, but if I start using napkins, then we have to cut our family milk budget."
So I decided I'm going to sell this new machine only for Women Self Help Groups.
(Applause)
Hello, everyone.
It's a bit funny, because I did write that humans will become digital, but I didn't think it will happen so fast and that it will happen to me.
But here I am, as a digital avatar, and here you are, so let's start.
(Laughter) Well, it's a bit difficult to say, because we've forgotten what fascism is.
Or they confuse fascism with nationalism.
So let's take a few minutes to clarify what fascism actually is, and how it is different from nationalism.
For example, I don't know the eight million people who share my Israeli citizenship.
But thanks to nationalism, we can all care about one another and cooperate effectively.
This is very good.
Some people, like John Lennon, imagine that without nationalism, the world will be a peaceful paradise.
But far more likely, without nationalism, we would have been living in tribal chaos.
If you look today at the most prosperous and peaceful countries in the world, countries like Sweden and Switzerland and Japan, you will see that they have a very strong sense of nationalism.
In contrast, countries that lack a strong sense of nationalism, like Congo and Somalia and Afghanistan, tend to be violent and poor.
So what is fascism, and how is it different from nationalism?
Usually, of course, people have many identities and loyalties to different groups.
Life is complicated.
There is really just one yardstick: if the movie serves the interests of the nation, it's a good movie; if the movie doesn't serve the interests of the nation, it's a bad movie.
Similarly, how does a fascist decide what to teach kids in school?
Now, the horrors of the Second World War and of the Holocaust remind us of the terrible consequences of this way of thinking.
But usually, when we talk about the ills of fascism, we do so in an ineffective way, because we tend to depict fascism as a hideous monster, without really explaining what was so seductive about it.
When I see these movies, I never understand -- why would anybody be tempted to follow a disgusting creep like Voldemort?
The problem with evil is that in real life, evil doesn't necessarily look ugly.
This is why it's so difficult to resist the temptations of Satan, and why it is also difficult to resist the temptations of fascism.
Fascism makes people see themselves as belonging to the most beautiful and most important thing in the world -- the nation.
And then people think, "Well, they taught us that fascism is ugly.
But when I look in the mirror, I see something very beautiful, so I can't be a fascist, right?"
Wrong.
That's the problem with fascism.
When you look in the fascist mirror, you see yourself as far more beautiful than you really are.
In the 1930s, when Germans looked in the fascist mirror, they saw Germany as the most beautiful thing in the world.
If today, Russians look in the fascist mirror, they will see Russia as the most beautiful thing in the world.
And if Israelis look in the fascist mirror, they will see Israel as the most beautiful thing in the world.
This does not mean that we are now facing a rerun of the 1930s.
Fascism and dictatorships might come back, but they will come back in a new form, a form which is much more relevant to the new technological realities of the 21st century.
In ancient times, land was the most important asset in the world.
And dictatorship meant that all the land was owned by a single ruler or by a small oligarch.
And in the modern age, machines became more important than land.
And dictatorship meant that too many of the machines became concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite.
Now data is replacing both land and machines as the most important asset.
And dictatorship now means that too much data is being concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite.
The greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is that the revolution in information technology will make dictatorships more efficient than democracies.
In the 20th century, democracy and capitalism defeated fascism and communism because democracy was better at processing data and making decisions.
But it is not a law of nature that centralized data processing is always less efficient than distributed data processing.
With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it might become feasible to process enormous amounts of information very efficiently in one place, to take all the decisions in one place, and then centralized data processing will be more efficient than distributed data processing.
A dictator may not be able to provide me with good health care, but he will be able to make me love him and to make me hate the opposition.
Democracy will find it difficult to survive such a development because, in the end, democracy is not based on human rationality; it's based on human feelings.
And if somebody can manipulate your emotions effectively, democracy will become an emotional puppet show.
So what can we do to prevent the return of fascism and the rise of new dictatorships?
The number one question that we face is: Who controls the data?
If you are an engineer, then find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands.
And find ways to make sure the distributed data processing is at least as efficient as centralized data processing.
But now, the enemies of democracy are using this very method to sell us fear and hate and vanity.
And it is therefore the responsibility of all of us to get to know our weaknesses and make sure that they do not become a weapon in the hands of the enemies of democracy.
As we explained earlier, fascism exploits our vanity.
It makes us see ourselves as far more beautiful than we really are.
If somebody puts a mirror in front of your eyes that hides all your ugly bits and makes you see yourself as far more beautiful and far more important than you really are, just break that mirror.
Thank you.
It seems easier to imagine that than, say, citizens rising up and taking down a government that is in control of everything.
So in theory, yes, in theory, you can rise against a corporation, just as, in theory, you can rise against a dictatorship.
CA: So in "Homo Deus," you argue that this would be the century when humans kind of became gods, either through development of artificial intelligence or through genetic engineering.
Has this prospect of political system shift, collapse impacted your view on that possibility?
So these kinds of crises might serve the same function as the two world wars in the 20th century.
The two world wars greatly accelerated the development of new and dangerous technologies.
And the same thing might happen in the 21st century.
Roll the clock forward 30 years.
And especially if you look at liberal democracy and you think things are bad now, just remember how much worse things looked in 1938 or in 1968.
But you can never know, because, as a historian, I know that you should never underestimate human stupidity.
Have a great evening there in Tel Aviv.
(Applause)
Living with a physical disability isn't easy anywhere in the world, but if you live in a country like the United States, there's certain appurtenances available to you that do make life easier.
So if you're in a building, you can take an elevator.
But in the developing world, things are quite different.
But when you get home or want to go indoors at your work, it's got to be small enough and maneuverable enough to use inside.
So what's exciting about this system is that it's really, really mechanically simple, and you could make it using technology that's been around for hundreds of years.
Now, when you want to use the LFC indoors, all you have to do is pull the levers out of the drivetrain, stow them in the frame, and it converts into a normal wheelchair that you can use just like any other normal wheelchair, and we sized it like a normal wheelchair, so it's narrow enough to fit through a standard doorway, it's low enough to fit under a table, and it's small and maneuverable enough to fit in a bathroom and this is important so the user can get up close to a toilet, and be able to transfer off just like he could in a normal wheelchair.
(Applause)
From 1971 to 1977 -- I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) -- I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia, in projects of technical cooperation with African countries.
I worked for an Italian NGO, and every single project that we set up in Africa failed.
Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book, "Ripples from the Zambezi," was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food.
So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River, and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini and ...
And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully.
Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.
We Western donor countries have given the African continent two trillion American dollars in the last 50 years.
I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done.
The two words come from the Latin root "pater," which means "father."
That's why the white people in Africa are called "bwana," boss.
We have helped to start 40,000 businesses.
Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history, died age 96, a few years ago.
Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophy before becoming involved in business, and this is what Peter Drucker says: "Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy."
In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients.
What we have to look at is at how we feed, cure, educate, transport, communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way.
There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860.
So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies -- 1,001.
Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford.
We activate communities.
Thank you. (Applause)
I'm a brain scientist, and as a brain scientist, I'm actually interested in how the brain learns, and I'm especially interested in a possibility of making our brains smarter, better and faster.
This is in this context I'm going to tell you about video games. When we say video games, most of you think about children.
Well, I'm not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health.
What we do in the lab is actually measure directly, in a quantitative fashion, what is the impact of video games on the brain.
Imagine you're driving in a fog. That makes a difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding the accident, or getting into an accident.
So clearly playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems.
But a few kids are sad and blue because they've forgotten their coat.
Was it yellow initially or blue?
Yellow or blue?
The other one is the frontal lobe, which controls how we sustain attention, and another one is the anterior cingulate, which controls how we allocate and regulate attention and resolve conflict.
Now, when we do brain imaging, we find that all three of these networks are actually much more efficient in people that play action games.
Why? Because as your attention shifts to your cell phone, you are actually losing the capacity to react swiftly to the car braking in front of you, and so you're much more likely to get engaged into a car accident.
Now I'd like you to remember that result, and put it in the context of another group of technology users, a group which is actually much revered by society, which are people that engage in multimedia-tasking.
What is multimedia-tasking? It's the fact that most of us, most of our children, are engaged with listening to music at the same time as they're doing search on the web at the same time as they're chatting on Facebook with their friends.
Different video games have a different effect on your brains.
Now in a sense, when we think about the effect of video games on the brain, it's very similar to the effect of wine on the health.
That's the point of rehabilitation or education.
Who really wants to eat chocolate-covered broccoli?
I'm Robbie Mizzone. I'm 13, and I play the fiddle.
And on guitar is my 14-year-old brother, Tommy.
(Applause) We call ourselves the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys.
(Video) Narrator: Eventually, these beasts are going to live in herds on the beaches.
Learning to live on their own -- and it'll take couple of more years to let them walk on their own.
This is the wave, going from left to right.
(Applause) Thank you.
There are 11 numbers, which I call The 11 Holy Numbers.
In fact, it's a new invention of the wheel.
In fact, this is better than a wheel, because when you try to drive your bicycle on the beach, you will notice it's very hard to do.
So, imagine that the animal is walking towards the sea.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Anyway, the American cities: lots of roads dispersed over large areas, almost no public transportation.
But all of these attempts have one thing in common.
Now, planning a complex social system is a very hard thing to do, and let me tell you a story.
Back in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, an urban planner in London got a phone call from a colleague in Moscow saying, basically, "Hi, this is Vladimir. I'd like to know, who's in charge of London's bread supply?"
And the urban planner in London goes, "What do you mean, who's in charge of London's — I mean, no one is in charge."
"Oh, but surely someone must be in charge.
I mean, it's a very complicated system. Someone must control all of this."
That's an example of a complex social system which has the ability of self-organizing, and this is a very deep insight.
When you try to solve really complex social problems, the right thing to do is most of the time to create the incentives.
And let's now look at how we can use this insight to combat road congestion.
This is a map of Stockholm, my hometown.
Now, Stockholm is a medium-sized city, roughly two million people, but Stockholm also has lots of water and lots of water means lots of bridges -- narrow bridges, old bridges -- which means lots of road congestion.
And these red dots show the most congested parts, which are the bridges that lead into the inner city.
Now, one or two euros, that isn't really a lot of money, I mean compared to parking charges and running costs, etc., so you would probably expect that car drivers wouldn't really react to this fairly small charge.
Now, 20 percent, well, that's a fairly huge figure, you might think, but you've still got 80 percent left of the problem, right?
Now, congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm on January 3, 2006, and the first picture here is a picture of Stockholm, one of the typical streets, January 2.
But you see, there's an interesting gap here in the time series in 2007.
I mean, this was a really fun experiment to start with, and we actually got to do it twice.
But it was fun anyway.
This is the last day with the congestion charges, July 31, and you see the same street but now it's summer, and summer in Stockholm is a very nice and light time of the year, and the first day without the congestion charges looked like this.
The first day they all came back.
I mean, the 20 percent of the car drivers that disappeared, surely they must be discontent in a way.
Who changed their opinion, and why?
You should just nudge them in the right direction.
Thank you. (Applause)
As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team headed towards the Winter Olympics, I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates.
As we made our way up towards the spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney, it was the perfect autumn day: sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream.
Where was I? What was happening?
I had extensive and life-threatening injuries.
I was at a crossroads.
The next concern was whether I would walk again, because I was paralyzed from the waist down.
I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excited that the operation had been a success, because at that stage, I had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes, and I thought, "Great, because I'm going to the Olympics!"
And the question I asked myself is: If I couldn't do that, then who was I?
But before I left hospital, the head nurse had said to me, "Janine, I want you to be ready, because when you get home, something's going to happen."
In the spinal ward, that's normal. You're in a wheelchair. That's normal.
I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back.
Maria was in a car accident, and she woke up on her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic, had no movement from the neck down, had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk.
She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again, albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once.
And then I stopped asking, "Why me?"
And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottom is actually the perfect place to start.
I was an athlete; my body was a machine.
And even though I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do, in that uncertainty came a sense of freedom.
Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast, an airplane flew overhead.
They get me out on the tarmac, and there was this red, white and blue airplane -- it was beautiful.
And as we took off down the runway, and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne, I had the most incredible sense of freedom.
And Andrew said to me, as we got over the training area, "You see that mountain over there?"
And as I looked up, I realized that he was pointing towards the Blue Mountains, where the journey had begun.
I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot.
So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan.
And little goals kept me going along the way, and eventually I got my private pilot's license.
And then I got my commercial pilot's license.
And then I found myself back at that same school where I'd gone for that very first flight, teaching other people how to fly ...
(Applause) Thank you.
I'm a designer and an educator.
But how efficient is, really, this multitasking?
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm going to talk about the power of a word: jihad.
To the vast majority of practicing Muslims, jihad is an internal struggle for the faith.
It's a very powerful word, jihad, if you look at it in that respect, and there's a certain almost mystical resonance to it.
And that's the reason why, for hundreds of years, Muslims everywhere have named their children Jihad, their daughters as much as their sons, in the same way that, say, Christians name their daughters Grace, and Hindus, my people, name our daughters Bhakti, which means, in Sanskrit, spiritual worship.
But there have always been, in Islam, a small group, a minority, who believe that jihad is not only an internal struggle but also an external struggle against forces that would threaten the faith, or the faithul.
And so the thousands of young Muslim men who flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation of a Muslim country, in their minds they were fighting a jihad, they were doing jihad, and they named themselves the Mujahideen, which is a word that comes from the same root as jihad.
And we forget this now, but back then the Mujahideen were celebrated in this country, in America.
But within that group, a tiny, smaller group, a minority within a minority within a minority, were coming up with a new and dangerous conception of jihad, and in time this group would come to be led by Osama bin Laden, and he refined the idea.
We just assumed that if this insane man and his psychopathic followers were calling what they did jihad, then that's what jihad must mean.
But it wasn't just us. Even in the Muslim world, his definition of jihad began to gain acceptance.
A year ago I was in Tunis, and I met the imam of a very small mosque, an old man.
Fifteen years ago, he named his granddaughter Jihad, after the old meaning. He hoped that a name like that would inspire her to live a spiritual life.
He worried that if he called her by that name, especially outdoors, outside in public, he might be seen as endorsing bin Laden's idea of jihad.
Why do you keep using the word jihad in your Friday sermons?
Do you hate Americans?
And so there's now a lot of different violent jihads all over the world.
In Somalia, in Mali, in Nigeria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, there are groups that claim to be the inheritors of the legacy of Osama bin Laden.
But if you look closely, they're not fighting a global jihad.
More often than not, it's a power struggle in one country, or even a small region within one country.
Occasionally they will go across a border, from Iraq to Syria, from Mali to Algeria, from Somalia to Kenya, but they're not fighting a global jihad against some far enemy.
Last year, they took control over a portion of southern Yemen, and ran it, Taliban-style.
Local jihad, if you ignore it, becomes global jihad again.
Who ended the global jihad?
Who killed bin Ladenism? Let's start with bin Laden himself.
In reality, it was the beginning of the end for him.
He killed 3,000 innocent people, and that filled the Muslim world with horror and revulsion, and what that meant was that his idea of jihad could never become mainstream.
Who killed bin Ladenism? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed it.
Any claim that al Qaeda had to being protectors of Islam against the Western crusaders was drowned in the blood of Iraqi Muslims.
Who killed Osama bin Laden? The SEAL Team Six.
Who killed bin Ladenism? Al Jazeera did, Al Jazeera and half a dozen other satellite news stations in Arabic, because they circumvented the old, state-owned television stations in a lot of these countries which were designed to keep information from people.
Now, not all of these things will work in local jihad.
Satellite television and the Internet are informing and empowering young Muslims in exciting new ways.
I live in New York now. Just this week, posters have gone up in subway stations in New York that describe jihad as savage.
Bin Laden is dead. Bin Ladenism has been defeated.
His definition of jihad can now be expunged.
B.J. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future.
You want a cigarette in prison? Three to five dollars.
Look, I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it.
The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons, because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills that's going to help them, and they'll be right back.
School's almost over. Summer is near.
He was coughing, crying, blood spilled on the street.
Very next day, I bopped into school with my brand new Air Jordans, man, I was cool.
The hunger and thirst was, and still remains: How do I get people who hate poetry to love me?
Because I'm an extension of my work, and if they love me, then they will love my work, and if they love my work, then they will love poetry, and if they love poetry, then I will have done my job, which is to transcend it to the world.
And in 1996, I found the answer in principles in a master spoken-word artist named Reg E. Gaines, who wrote the famous poem, "Please Don't Take My Air Jordans."
Now I could have quit. I should have quit.
I mean, I thought poetry was just self-expression.
I didn't know you actually have to have creative control.
The biggest lesson I learned was many years later when I went to Beverly Hills and I ran into a talent agent who looked at me up and down and said I don't look like I have any experience to be working in this business.
Method acting is nothing but a mixture of multiple personalities, believing your own lies are reality, like in high school cool Kenny telling me he wanted to be a cop.
Thank you. (Applause)
I'd like to show you a video of some of the models I work with.
And one day we hope that these tissues can serve as replacement parts for the human body.
You go from drug formulation, lab testing, animal testing, and then clinical trials, which you might call human testing, before the drugs get to market.
It costs a lot of money, a lot of time, and sometimes, even when a drug hits the market, it acts in an unpredictable way and actually hurts people.
One of the key technologies that's really important is what's called induced pluripotent stem cells.
So we can make a model of your heart, your brain on a chip.
It would be like having a clinical trial on a chip.
This is another example of patient-specific stem cells that were engineered from someone with retinitis pigmentosa.
A drug for the heart can get metabolized in the liver, and some of the byproducts may be stored in the fat.
This is an example from Karen Burg's lab, where they're using inkjet technologies to print breast cancer cells and study its progressions and treatments.
And some of our colleagues at Tufts are mixing models like these with tissue-engineered bone to see how cancer might spread from one part of the body to the next, and you can imagine those kinds of multi-tissue chips to be the next generation of these kinds of studies.
Essentially, we're dramatically speeding up that feedback between developing a molecule and learning about how it acts in the human body.
Our process for doing this is essentially transforming biotechnology and pharmacology into an information technology, helping us discover and evaluate drugs faster, more cheaply and more effectively.
Thank you. (Applause)
In 2002, a group of treatment activists met to discuss the early development of the airplane.
That was common practice in the industry, and those who held patents on airplanes were defending them fiercely and suing competitors left and right.
This actually wasn't so great for the development of the aviation industry, and this was at a time that in particular the U.S. government was interested in ramping up the production of military airplanes.
In 2002, Nelson Otwoma, a Kenyan social scientist, discovered he had HIV and needed access to treatment.
AIDS had become a chronic disease.
Not so for Nelson. He wasn't rich enough, and not so for his three-year-old son, who he discovered a year later also had HIV.
Prices for ARVs, the drugs needed to treat HIV, cost about 12,000 [dollars] per patient per year.
The patents on those drugs were held by a number of Western pharmaceutical companies that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available.
There were countries that did not recognize pharmaceutical product patents, such as India, and Indian pharmaceutical companies started to produce so-called generic versions, low-cost copies of antiretroviral medicines, and make them available in the developing world, and within a year the price had come down from 10,000 dollars per patient per year to 350 dollars per patient per year, and today that same triple pill cocktail is available for 60 dollars per patient per year, and of course that started to have an enormous effect on the number of people who could afford access to those medicines.
Today, eight million people have access to antiretroviral drugs.
Well, things have changed.
First of all, the rules have changed.
Today, all countries are obliged to provide patents for pharmaceuticals that last at least 20 years.
This is as a result of the intellectual property rules of the World Trade Organization.
Second, the practice of patent-holding companies have changed.
So unless we act, unless we do something today, we will soon be faced [with] what some have termed the treatment time bomb.
It isn't only the number of drugs that are patented.
So surely if a patent pool could be established to ramp up the production of military airplanes, we should be able to do something similar to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
In 2010, UNITAID established the Medicines Patent Pool for HIV.
And this is how it works: Patent holders, inventors that develop new medicines patent those inventions, but make those patents available to the Medicines Patent Pool. The Medicines Patent Pool then license those out to whoever needs access to those patents.
It can also be not-for-profit drug development agencies, for example.
They pay royalties over the sales to the patent holders, so they are remunerated for sharing their intellectual property.
There is one key difference with the airplane patent pool.
It relies on the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to license their patents and make them available for others to use.
His son will soon be 14 years old.
In August of this year, the United States drug agency approved a new four-in-one AIDS medication.
The company, Gilead, that holds the patents, has licensed the intellectual property to the Medicines Patent Pool.
This has never been done before.
This has never been seen before.
Nelson's expectations are very high, and quite rightly so. He and his son will need access to the next generation of antiretrovirals and the next, throughout their lifetime, so that he and many others in Kenya and other countries can continue to live healthy, active lives.
Now we count on the willingness of drug companies to make that happen. We count on those companies that understand that it is in the interest, not only in the interest of the global good, but also in their own interest, to move from conflict to collaboration, and through the Medicines Patent Pool they can make that happen.
Thank you. (Applause)
Within South Africa, we've got about 800 species of dung beetles, in Africa we've got 2,000 species of dung beetles, and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles.
This is Africa. It's hot.
So a classic experiment here, in that what we did was we moved the sun.
What we do is we get a great big polarization filter, pop the beetle underneath it, and the filter is at right angles to the polarization pattern of the sky.
The beetle comes out from underneath the filter and it does a right-hand turn, because it comes back under the sky that it was originally orientated to and then reorientates itself back to the direction it was originally going in.
So that's the dance, but after spending many years sitting in the African bush watching dung beetles on nice hot days, we noticed that there was another behavior associated with the dance behavior.
Every now and then, when they climb on top of the ball, they wipe their face.
So the ball leaves a little thermal shadow, and the beetle climbs on top of the ball and wipes its face, and all the time it's trying to cool itself down, we think, and avoid the hot sand that it's walking across.
This is a different species in the same genus but exactly the same foraging behavior.
So here's our cunning experimenter.
I love coming to Doha. It's such an international place.
My Indian cab driver showed up at the W, and I asked him to take me to the Sheraton, and he said, "No problem, sir."
(Laughter) (Applause) Who would have thought?
(Laughter) "I will kill you in the name of Allah, wuhahahahaha."
For example, I don't know if you heard about this, a little while ago in the US, there was a Muslim family walking down the aisle of an airplane, talking about the safest place to sit on the plane.
(Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) Rainbow!
Thank you very much. Have a good night.
We're holding hands, staring at the door.
My siblings and I were waiting for my mother to come back from the hospital.
She was there because my grandmother had cancer surgery that day.
I was barely 12 years old, and when the shock wore off, my mother's words were ringing in my ears.
We had moved from Korea to Argentina six years prior, without knowing any Spanish, or how we were going to make a living.
And upon arrival, we were immigrants who had lost everything, so we had to work really hard to rebuild our lives.
I was born in Korea -- the land of kimchi; raised in Argentina, where I ate so much steak that I'm probably 80 percent cow by now; and I was educated in the US, where I became addicted to peanut butter.
I remember on the first day of middle school, my Spanish literature teacher came into the room.
But by then I was fluent in Spanish already, so it felt as though I could be either Korean or Argentinian, but not both.
It felt like a zero-sum game, where I had to give up my old identity to be able to gain or earn a new one.
So when I was 18, I decided to go to Korea, hoping that finally I could find a place to call home.
But there people asked me, "Why do you speak Korean with a Spanish accent?"
And so it turns out that I was too Korean to be Argentinian, but too Argentinian to be Korean.
But how many Japanese-looking Koreans who speak with a Spanish accent -- or even more specific, Argentinian accent -- do you think are out there?
It was easy for me to stand out, which couldn't hurt in a world that was rapidly changing, where skills could become obsolete overnight.
Instead, I realized that oftentimes, I was the only overlap between groups of people that were usually in conflict with each other.
(Laughter) I switched majors so many times that my advisors joked that I should get a degree in "random studies."
(Laughter) I told this to my kids.
You see, my siblings and I are the first generation to go to university, so for a family of immigrants, this was kind of a big deal.
You can imagine how this conversation was going to go.
(Laughter) Hi, Mom.
My boys now are three years and five months old today, and they were already born with three nationalities and four languages.
I should mention now that my husband is actually from Denmark -- just in case I don't have enough culture shocks in my life, I decided to marry a Danish guy.
I also hope that they will use their unique combination of values and languages and cultures and skills to help create a world where identities are no longer used to alienate what looks different, but rather, to bring together people.
And most importantly, I really hope that they find tremendous joy in going through these uncharted territories, because I know I have.
Now, as for my grandmother, her last wish was also her last lesson to me.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Images like this, from the Auschwitz concentration camp, have been seared into our consciousness during the twentieth century and have given us a new understanding of who we are, where we've come from and the times we live in.
Now, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq, a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. But I'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years, although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the sixteenth century. One sees it all over the world, although not homogeneously.
You can find four or five passages in the Bible of this ilk.
Well, let's click the zoom lens down one order of magnitude, and look at the century scale.
So I wrote a letter.
Thirty seconds later, the first message went onto Twitter, and this was someone saying "temblor," which means earthquake.
And in photos, Instagram, 58 photos are uploaded to Instagram a second.
And a good example of how useful it can be but also how difficult was the Egyptian revolution in 2011.
And how do you build a list like that from scratch?
The bridge looks like it's crossing the river east to west.
Truth is emotional, it's fluid, and above all, it's human.
Thanks very much. (Applause)
In 1924 he was last seen disappearing into the clouds near the summit of Mt. Everest.
He may or may not have been the first person to climb Everest, more than 30 years before Edmund Hillary.
We don't live to eat and make money.
I planned essentially to walk from the north coast of Russia to the North Pole, and then to carry on to the north coast of Canada.
(Laughter) The journey from a small weather station on the north coast of Siberia up to my final starting point, the edge of the pack ice, the coast of the Arctic Ocean, took about five hours, and if anyone watched fearless Felix Baumgartner going up, rather than just coming down, you'll appreciate the sense of apprehension, as I sat in a helicopter thundering north, and the sense, I think if anything, of impending doom.
And that journey lasted 10 weeks, 72 days.
Beyond that, I didn't see anyone for 10 weeks.
I was dragging 180 kilos of food and fuel and supplies, about 400 pounds. The average temperature for the 10 weeks was minus 35. Minus 50 was the coldest.
And yet, if I've learned anything in nearly 12 years now of dragging heavy things around cold places, it is that true, real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge, from stepping away from what's comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Twelve years ago, I founded Zipcar.
Zipcar buys cars and parks them throughout dense metropolitan areas for people to use, by the hour and by the day, instead of owning their own cars.
Now, a decade later, it's really time to push the envelope a little bit, and so a couple years ago I moved to Paris with my husband and youngest child, and we launched Buzzcar a year ago.
Buzzcar lets people rent out their own cars to their friends and neighbors.
It's like saying yard sales are the same thing as eBay, or craft fairs are the same thing as Etsy.
It's a phenomenal thing. It's the equivalent of 2,500 TGV trains, and just think, they didn't have to lay a track or buy a car.
And then my all-time favorite, Etsy.
I see this incredible speed and scale.
I think of the difference of Google Video versus YouTube.
Last June 1, we launched. It was an exciting moment.
All the drivers are becoming members. It's excellent.
The reservations start coming in, and here, owners who were getting text messages and emails that said, "Hey, Joe wants to rent your car for the weekend.
And I can tell you two great stories.
A driver was telling me that they went to rent a car to go up the coast of France and the owner gave it to them, and said, "You know what, here's where the cliffs are, and here's all the beaches, and this is my best beach, and this is where the best fish restaurant is."
Together, we can. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
I'm a neuroscientist, and I study decision-making.
I'm here to tell you the secret to successful decision-making: a cheese sandwich.
That's right. According to scientists, a cheese sandwich is the solution to all your tough decisions.
We manipulated people's serotonin levels by giving them this really disgusting-tasting artificial lemon-flavored drink that works by taking away the raw ingredient for serotonin in the brain.
This is the amino acid tryptophan.
We gave people this horrible-tasting drink that affected their tryptophan levels.
But it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate.
Now let me pause here and take a moment to say that neuroscience has advanced a lot in the last few decades, and we're constantly discovering amazing things about the brain.
But the promise of neuroscience has led to some really high expectations and some overblown, unproven claims.
So the first unproven claim is that you can use brain scans to read people's thoughts and emotions.
Here's a study published by a team of researchers as an op-ed in The New York Times.
The headline? "You Love Your iPhone. Literally."
It quickly became the most emailed article on the site.
They put 16 people inside a brain scanner and showed them videos of ringing iPhones.
Sure, it is involved in positive emotions like love and compassion, but it's also involved in tons of other processes, like memory, language, attention, even anger, disgust and pain.
So based on the same logic, I could equally conclude you hate your iPhone.
So speaking of love and the brain, there's a researcher, known to some as Dr. Love, who claims that scientists have found the glue that holds society together, the source of love and prosperity.
No, it's a hormone called oxytocin.
So, Dr. Love bases his argument on studies showing that when you boost people's oxytocin, this increases their trust, empathy and cooperation.
So he's calling oxytocin "the moral molecule."
And in some cases, oxytocin can even decrease cooperation.
So based on these studies, I could say oxytocin is an immoral molecule, and call myself Dr. Strangelove.
SPECT imaging is a brain-scanning technology that uses a radioactive tracer to track blood flow in the brain.
These scans, the clinics say, can help prevent Alzheimer's disease, solve weight and addiction issues, overcome marital conflicts, and treat, of course, a variety of mental illnesses ranging from depression to anxiety to ADHD.
Some of these clinics are pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year in business.
There's just one problem.
I am more excited than most people, as a neuroscientist, about the potential for neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe to make us better and smarter.
But we're not there yet.
Maybe someday we will, but until then, we have to be careful that we don't let overblown claims detract resources and attention away from the real science that's playing a much longer game.
Thank you. (Applause)
My story begins when I was in New York City for a speaking engagement, and my wife took this picture of me holding my daughter on her first birthday. We're on the corner of 57th and 5th.
It's really become sacred to us.
This one was taken just weeks after 9/11, and I found myself trying to explain what had happened that day in ways a five-year-old could understand.
So these photos are far more than proxies for a single moment, or even a specific trip.
And now what she's looking at in New York are colleges, because she's determined to go to school in New York.
And it hit me: One of the most important things we all make are memories.
Thank you. (Applause)
This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag.
A few days ago, I was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store, and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other, and the owner was explaining to the client that we're going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel.
So I went to sleep, and that was it for me.
Because you have to understand, in Israel we don't talk with people from Iran.
So I went to my neighbors and friends and students and I just asked them, give me a picture, I will make you a poster.
Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too."
And we received Israeli posters, Israeli images, but also lots of comments, lots of messages from Iran.
The day after, Iranians started to respond with their own posters.
It's a two-way story. It's Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other.
"Lebanon?""Lebanon."
We really changed how people see the Middle East.
Today the Israel-Loves-Iran page is this number, 80,831, and two million people last week went on the page and shared, liked, I don't know, commented on one of the photos.
We're showing a new reality by just making images because that's how the world perceives us.
Look at this one. This is the Iran-Loves-Israel page.
And I was in Munich a few weeks ago.
Some girl that we met on Facebook never been in Israel, born and raised in Iran, lives in Germany, afraid of Israelis because of what she knows about us, decides after a few months of talking on the Internet with some Israelis to come to Israel, and she gets on the plane and arrives at Ben Gurion and says, "Okay, not that big a deal."
So -- (Applause) So you may ask yourself, who is this dude?
And sometimes war is inevitable, sometimes, but maybe [with] effort, we can avoid it.
And maybe that image will help us change something.
Don't cry.
(Applause)
As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates.
So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes, as a danger in and of itself.
What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself?
It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid.
I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier that hung above our dining table swing back and forth during every minor earthquake, and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping.
We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed, and not every earthquake brings buildings down.
To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms, to starve to death before reaching land.
In our fears, the characters are us.
Fears also have suspense.
In other words, our fears make us think about the future.
When I was writing my first novel, "The Age Of Miracles," I spent months trying to figure out what would happen if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down.
Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America.
When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism.
Herman Melville, who used this story as research for "Moby Dick," wrote years later, and from dry land, quote, "All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might in all human probability have been avoided had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti.
The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments, the artistic and the scientific.
Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature: a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing -- the truth.
Thank you. (Applause)
The light blue dotted line represents the Congressional Budget Office's best guess of what will happen if Congress really doesn't do anything, and as you can see, sometime around 2027, we reach Greek levels of debt, somewhere around 130 percent of GDP, which tells you that some time in the next 20 years, if Congress does absolutely nothing, we're going to hit a moment where the world's investors, the world's bond buyers, are going to say, "We don't trust America anymore. We're not going to lend them any money, except at really high interest rates."
The Democrats, they say, well, this isn't a big deal.
That's not going to create an equitable, fair society.
So basically Republicans who make more than 250,000 dollars a year don't want to be taxed.
Raising taxes on investment income, you also see about two thirds of Democrats but only one third of Republicans are comfortable with that idea.
Roughly a third of Americans say that they are Democrats.
The filmmaker Georges Méliès was first a magician.
Giambattista della Porta, a Neapolitan scholar in the 16th century, examined and studied the natural world and saw how it could be manipulated.
Playing with the world, and our perception of it, really is the essence of visual effects.
Isabelle: "The filmmaker Georges Méliès was one of the first to realize that films had the power to capture dreams."
The French Academy has two main tasks: it compiles a dictionary of official French.
They're now working on their ninth edition, which they began in 1930, and they've reached the letter P.
They also legislate on correct usage, such as the proper term for what the French call "email," which ought to be "courriel."
We see it in the constant appearance of slang and jargon, of the historical change in languages, in divergence of dialects and the formation of new languages.
So language is not so much a creator or shaper of human nature, so much as a window onto human nature.
In a book that I'm currently working on, I hope to use language to shed light on a number of aspects of human nature, including the cognitive machinery with which humans conceptualize the world and the relationship types that govern human interaction.
The verb is the chassis of the sentence.
An intransitive verb, such as "dine," for example, can't take a direct object.
You have to say, "Sam dined," not, "Sam dined the pizza."
A transitive verb mandates that there has to be an object there: "Sam devoured the pizza." You can't just say, "Sam devoured."
There are dozens or scores of verbs of this type, each of which shapes its sentence.
For example, the dative construction in English.
You can say, "Give a muffin to a mouse," the prepositional dative.
"Promise anything to her," "Promise her anything," and so on.
Unfortunately, there appear to be idiosyncratic exceptions.
You can say, "Biff drove the car to Chicago," but not, "Biff drove Chicago the car."
You can say, "Sal gave Jason a headache," but it's a bit odd to say, "Sal gave a headache to Jason."
So, "give the X to the Y," that construction corresponds to the thought "cause X to go to Y." Whereas "give the Y the X" corresponds to the thought "cause Y to have X."
Well, in both cases, the thing that is construed as being affected is expressed as the direct object, the noun after the verb.
So, when you think of the event as causing the muffin to go somewhere -- where you're doing something to the muffin -- you say, "Give the muffin to the mouse."
First, there's a level of fine-grained conceptual structure, which we automatically and unconsciously compute every time we produce or utter a sentence, that governs our use of language.
You can think of this as the language of thought, or "mentalese."
For example, this construction, the dative, is used not only to transfer things, but also for the metaphorical transfer of ideas, as when we say, "She told a story to me" or "told me a story," "Max taught Spanish to the students" or "taught the students Spanish."
For example, you can use the verb "go" and the prepositions "to" and "from" in a literal, spatial sense.
"The messenger went from Paris to Istanbul."
You can also say, "Biff went from sick to well."
Or, "The meeting went from three to four," in which we conceive of time as stretched along a line.
Likewise, we use "force" to indicate not only physical force, as in, "Rose forced the door to open," but also interpersonal force, as in, "Rose forced Sadie to go," not necessarily by manhandling her, but by issuing a threat.
Or, "Rose forced herself to go," as if there were two entities inside Rose's head, engaged in a tug of a war.
Just to give you a few examples: "ending a pregnancy" versus "killing a fetus;" "a ball of cells" versus "an unborn child;" "invading Iraq" versus "liberating Iraq;" "redistributing wealth" versus "confiscating earnings."
Well, I said I'd talk about two windows on human nature -- the cognitive machinery with which we conceptualize the world, and now I'm going to say a few words about the relationship types that govern human social interaction, again, as reflected in language.
Now, I'm sure most of you have seen the movie "Fargo."
So the puzzle is, why are bribes, polite requests, solicitations and threats so often veiled?
Well, language, as a social interaction, has to satisfy two conditions.
The simplest example of this is in the polite request.
One way of thinking about it is to imagine what it would be like if language -- where it could only be used literally.
So to sum up: language is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
We live in an incredibly busy world.
The pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we're always doing something.
So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class.
I'd also seen a few kung fu movies, and secretly I kind of thought I might be able to learn how to fly, but I was very young at the time.
It was a really very stressful time.
I guess we all deal with stress in different ways.
So I quit my degree, I headed off to the Himalayas, I became a monk, and I started studying meditation.
I think the present moment is so underrated.
47 percent.
At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness.
That's essentially what meditation is.
And that's what these are for, in case you've been wondering, because most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it's quite different from that.
But what do you do every 20, 30 seconds?
Well, whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear.
You don't have to burn any incense, and you definitely don't have to sit on the floor.
All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life.
So I'd like to start by focusing on the world's most dangerous animal.
Now, when you talk about dangerous animals, most people might think of lions or tigers or sharks.
But of course the most dangerous animal is the mosquito.
The mosquito has killed more humans than any other creature in human history.
And the mosquito has killed more humans than wars and plague.
But dengue fever now, according to the World Health Organization, infects between 50 and 100 million people every year, so that's equivalent to the whole of the population of the U.K. being infected every year.
In the last 50 years, the incidence of dengue has grown thirtyfold.
Now let me tell you a little bit about what dengue fever is, for those who don't know.
And let's assume you're bitten by a mosquito that's carrying that virus.
Now the odd thing is, is that once you've been bitten by this mosquito, and you've had this disease, your body develops antibodies, so if you're bitten again with that strain, it doesn't affect you.
So the next time you get dengue fever, if it's a different strain, you're more susceptible, you're likely to get worse symptoms, and you're more likely to get the more severe forms, hemorrhagic fever or shock syndrome.
So why is it spreading so fast?
This is Aedes aegypti.
Now this is a mosquito that came, like its name suggests, out of North Africa, and it's spread round the world.
Now, in fact, a single mosquito will only travel about 200 yards in its entire life. They don't travel very far.
What they're very good at doing is hitchhiking, particularly the eggs.
They will lay their eggs in clear water, any pool, any puddle, any birdbath, any flower pot, anywhere there's clear water, they'll lay their eggs, and if that clear water is near freight, it's near a port, if it's anywhere near transport, those eggs will then get transported around the world.
Two days ago, or yesterday, I can't remember which, I saw a Reuters report that said Madeira had had their first cases of dengue, about 52 cases, with about 400 probable cases.
That's two days ago.
So the one thing you'll find is that where the mosquito goes, dengue will follow.
Now in an urban environment, that's extraordinarily difficult.
So let's start again. Let's design a product, right from the word go, and decide what we want.
Well we clearly need something that is effective at reducing the mosquito population.
It has to be safe.
Maybe a better product comes along in 20, 30 years.
Now there are two features of mosquito biology that really help us in this project, and that is, firstly, males don't bite.
And the second is a phenomenon that males are very, very good at finding females.
If there's a male mosquito that you release, and if there's a female around, that male will find the female.
A single female will lay about up to 100 eggs at a time, up to about 500 in her lifetime.
Now if that male is carrying a gene which causes the death of the offspring, then the offspring don't survive, and instead of having 500 mosquitos running around, you have none.
So this is technology that was developed in Oxford University a few years ago.
It's not very expensive, because it's a coffee cup -- something the size of a coffee cup will hold about three million eggs.
And for Brazil, where we've been doing some trials, the Brazilian government themselves have now built their own mosquito factory, far bigger than ours, and we'll use that for scaling up in Brazil.
There you are. We've sent mosquito eggs.
Both have a side benefit, which is that we reduce pesticide use tremendously.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
So if you've been following the news, you've heard that there's a pack of giant asteroids headed for the United States, all scheduled to strike within the next 50 years.
Now I don't mean actual asteroids made of rock and metal.
Hansen says we can expect about a five-meter rise in sea levels.
Hansen closed his talk by saying, "Imagine a giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
Of course, the left wants to take action, but the right denies that there's any problem.
All right, now this might not sound as scary as an asteroid, but look at these graphs that Levin showed.
This graph shows the national debt as a percentage of America's GDP, and as you see, if you go all the way back to the founding, we borrowed a lot of money to fight the Revolutionary War.
We're approaching the levels of indebtedness we had at World War II, and the baby boomers haven't even retired yet, and when they do, this is what will happen.
All right, now what you might notice is that these two graphs are actually identical, not in terms of the x- and y-axes, or in terms of the data they present, but in terms of their moral and political implications, they say the same thing.
Think of it like this.
Large-scale cooperation is extremely rare on this planet.
There's only one species on the planet that can do this without kinship, and that, of course, is us.
This is a reconstruction of ancient Babylon, and this is Tenochtitlan.
As you see, temples and gods play a big role in all ancient civilizations.
This is an image of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca.
It causes them to distort reality.
But it is a gross distortion of reality.
And what you can see is that, in the decades after the Civil War, Congress was extraordinarily polarized, as you would expect, about as high as can be.
This was a golden age of bipartisanship, at least in terms of the parties' ability to work together and solve grand national problems.
Did anybody notice that in two of the three debates, Obama wore a blue tie and Romney wore a red tie?
So look at this data. This is from the American National Elections Survey.
The blue line shows how warmly Democrats feel about Democrats, and they like them.
But when you look at cross-party ratings, you find, well, that it's lower, but actually, when I first saw this data, I was surprised.
That's actually not so bad. If you go back to the Carter and even Reagan administrations, they were rating the other party 43, 45. It's not terrible.
It plummets. Something is going on here.
But there's a lot that we can do. There are dozens and dozens of reforms we can do that will make things better, because a lot of our dysfunction can be traced directly to things that Congress did to itself in the 1990s that created a much more polarized and dysfunctional institution.
These changes are detailed in many books.
But the third class of reforms is that we've got to change the nature of social relationships in Congress.
But beginning in the 1990s, first the House of Representatives changed its legislative calendar so that all business is basically done in the middle of the week.
And trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil.
So here's another asteroid.
Other people are clinging to a piece of driftwood.
Most Hispanic and black children are now born to unmarried mothers.
Within a decade or two, most American children will be born into homes with no father.
I'm actually more critical of the men who won't take responsibility for their own children and of an economic system that makes it difficult for many men to earn enough money to support those children.
The New York Times finally noticed this asteroid with a front-page story last July showing how the decline of marriage contributes to inequality.
So once again, we see that these two graphs are actually saying the same thing.
Because if you really care about income inequality, you might want to talk to some evangelical Christian groups that are working on ways to promote marriage.
So to conclude, there are at least four asteroids headed our way.
Please raise your hands.
Well, congratulations, you guys are the inaugural members of the Asteroids Club, which is a club for all Americans who are willing to admit that the other side actually might have a point.
No, we start by looking for common threats because common threats make common ground.
For example, the incarceration rate, the prison population in this country has quadrupled since 1980.
Now this is a social disaster, and liberals are very concerned about this.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is often fighting the prison-industrial complex, fighting to prevent a system that's just sucking in more and more poor young men.
And at times they have worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to oppose the building of new prisons and to work for reforms that will make the justice system more efficient and more humane.
And let our first mission be to press Congress to reform itself, before it's too late for our nation.
Thank you. (Applause)
It's wonderful to be here to talk about my journey, to talk about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me.
I started using a wheelchair 16 years ago when an extended illness changed the way I could access the world.
When I started using the wheelchair, it was a tremendous new freedom.
But even though I had this newfound joy and freedom, people's reaction completely changed towards me.
The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with.
For me, the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation.
In fact, I now call the underwater wheelchair "Portal," because it's literally pushed me through into a new way of being, into new dimensions and into a new level of consciousness.
(Applause)
Hello. My name is Jarrett Krosoczka, and I write and illustrate books for children for a living.
But here was this kid who loved Transformers and Snoopy and the Ninja Turtles, and the characters that I read about, I fell in love with, and they became my friends.
I went to Gates Lane Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I had wonderful teachers there, most notably in first grade Mrs. Alisch.
But he stopped next to my desk, and he tapped on my desk, and he said, "Nice cat." (Laughter) And he wandered away.
So I loved writing so much that I'd come home from school, and I would take out pieces of paper, and I would staple them together, and I would fill those blank pages with words and pictures just because I loved using my imagination.
So from sixth through 12th grade, once, twice, sometimes three times a week, I would take classes at the art museum, and I was surrounded by other kids who loved to draw, other kids who shared a similar passion.
I drew funny pictures of my teachers -- (Laughter) -- and I passed them around.
Well, in English class, in ninth grade, my friend John, who was sitting next to me, laughed a little bit too hard.
(Laughter) And a video camera.
I had this book that was how to draw comics in the Marvel way, and it taught me how to draw superheroes, how to draw a woman, how to draw muscles just the way they were supposed to be if I were to ever draw for X-Men or Spiderman.
But it was around this time I went to Camp Sunshine to volunteer a week and working with the most amazing kids, kids with leukemia, and this kid Eric changed my life.
I set up a studio and I tried to get published.
And I received an email from an editor at Random House with a subject line, "Nice work!" Exclamation point.
"Dear Jarrett, I received your postcard.
"Punk Farm," "Baghead," "Ollie the Purple Elephant."
Now my grandparents are no longer living, so to honor them, I started a scholarship at the Worcester Art Museum for kids who are in difficult situations but whose caretakers can't afford the classes.
Thank you. (Applause)
When I first met Celine, a little over a year ago, she had gone for 18 months without any antiretroviral therapy, and she was very ill.
She told me that she stopped coming to the clinic when the trial ended because she had no money for the bus fare and was too ill to walk the 35-kilometer distance.
Maybe it even got published in a high-profile scientific journal.
Maybe it would inform clinicians around the world on how to improve on the clinical management of HIV patients.
On the contrary, clinical trials are extremely useful tools, and are much needed to address the burden of disease in developing countries.
However, the inequalities that exist between richer countries and developing countries in terms of funding pose a real risk for exploitation, especially in the context of externally-funded research.
I'm sure you must be asking yourselves what makes developing countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, so attractive for these HIV clinical trials?
Sub-Saharan Africa largely fits this description, with 22 million people living with HIV, an estimated 70 percent of the 30 million people who are infected worldwide.
The high prevalence of HIV drives researchers to conduct research that is sometimes scientifically acceptable but on many levels ethically questionable.
Local communities need to be more involved in establishing the criteria for recruiting participants in clinical trials, as well as the incentives for participation.
The second point I would like for you to consider is the standard of care that is provided to participants within any clinical trial.
Should the control group in the clinical trial be given the best current treatment which is available anywhere in the world?
However, the best current treatment available anywhere in the world is often very difficult to provide in developing countries.
That brings us to the third point I want you think about: the ethical review of research.
Local governments need to set up effective systems for reviewing the ethical issues around the clinical trials which are authorized in different developing countries, and they need to do this by setting up ethical review committees that are independent of the government and research sponsors.
The final point I would like for you to consider tonight is what happens to participants in the clinical trial once the research has been completed.
Now, researchers need to make every effort to ensure that an intervention that has been shown to be beneficial during a clinical trial is accessible to the participants of the trial once the trial has been completed.
In addition, they should be able to consider the possibility of introducing and maintaining effective treatments in the wider community once the trial ends.
If, for any reason, they feel that this might not be possible, then I think they should have to ethically justify why the clinical trial should be conducted in the first place.
I was able to get her enrolled into a free HIV treatment program closer to her home, and with a support group to help her cope.
Her story has a positive ending, but there are thousands of others in similar situations who are much less fortunate.
Although she may not know this, my encounter with Celine has completely changed the way in which I view HIV clinical trials in developing countries, and made me even more determined to be part of the movement to change the way in which things are done.
I believe that every single person listening to me tonight can be part of that change.
If you work for a funding agency or pharmaceutical company, I challenge you to hold your employers to fund research that is ethically sound.
If you come from a developing country like myself, I urge you to hold your government to a more thorough review of the clinical trials which are authorized in your country.
Thank you.
And the girls decided to make it an annual event.
They hugged.
I'll never forget that one girl looked in her father's eyes with that camera and said, "Daddy, when you look at me, what do you see?"
(Applause) And that is why it is extremely special for me to make sure that these girls are connected to their fathers, especially those who are separated because of barbed wires and metal doors.
(Applause)
Hi. My name is Cameron Russell, and for the last little while, I've been a model.
Image is powerful, but also, image is superficial.
And I am on this stage because I am a model.
So the first question is, how do you become a model?
The next question people always ask is, "Can I be a model when I grow up?"
When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53% don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78% by the time that they're 17.
We say, "It's really amazing to travel, and it's amazing to get to work with creative, inspired, passionate people."
And I'm insecure because I have to think about what I look like every day.
So, before I became a dermatologist, I started in general medicine, as most dermatologists do in Britain.
What you learn when you go to Australia is the Australians are very competitive.
And of course, they were right.
Australians have about a third less heart disease than we do -- less deaths from heart attacks, heart failure, less strokes -- they're generally a healthier bunch.
This is after accounting for smoking, social class, diet, all those other known risk factors.
And we need vitamin D. It's now a requirement that children have a certain amount.
My grandmother grew up in Glasgow, back in the 1920s and '30s when rickets was a real problem and cod liver oil was brought in.
And I as a child was fed cod liver oil by my grandmother.
But an association: The higher people's blood levels of vitamin D are, the less heart disease they have, the less cancer.
There seems to be a lot of data suggesting that vitamin D is very good for you.
But if you give people vitamin D supplements, you don't change that high rate of heart disease.
High vitamin D levels, I think, are a marker for sunlight exposure, and sunlight exposure, in methods I'm going to show, is good for heart disease.
Anyway, I came back from Australia, and despite the obvious risks to my health, I moved to Aberdeen.
(Laughter) Now, in Aberdeen, I started my dermatology training.
But I also became interested in research, and in particular I became interested in this substance, nitric oxide.
Now these three guys up here, Furchgott, Ignarro and Murad, won the Nobel Prize for medicine back in 1998.
And they were the first people to describe this new chemical transmitter, nitric oxide.
What nitric oxide does is it dilates blood vessels, so it lowers your blood pressure.
And I started doing research, and we found, very excitingly, that the skin produces nitric oxide.
So I went off to the States, as many people do if they're going to do research, and I spent a few years in Pittsburgh. This is Pittsburgh.
We thought that maybe nitric oxide affected cell death, and how cells survive, and their resistance to other things.
And I first off started work in cell culture, growing cells, and then I was using knockout mouse models -- mice that couldn't make the gene.
Well, I'm an experimental dermatologist, so what we did was we thought we'd have to expose our experimental animals to sunlight.
And so what we did was we took a bunch of volunteers and we exposed them to ultraviolet light.
So we used ultraviolet A, which doesn't make vitamin D.
So this seems to be a feature of ultraviolet rays hitting the skin.
Now, we're still collecting data.
And the other thing I should mention was there was no change in vitamin D.
This is the mechanism by which you lower blood pressure, by which you dilate the coronary arteries also, to let the blood be supplied with the heart.
In winter or summer, it's the same amount of light.
Now, if you're on the equator here -- that's these two lines here, the red line and the purple line -- the amount of nitric oxide that's released is the area under the curve, it's the area in this space here.
So Ventura is in southern California.
I actually think a far more important message is that there are benefits as well as risks to sunlight.
Yes, sunlight is the major alterable risk factor for skin cancer, but deaths from heart disease are a hundred times higher than deaths from skin cancer.
(Applause)
Put your arms straight down at your side, look up, open your eyes, stare straight ahead, and speak out your question loudly so everybody can hear.
(Laughter) And this young man, his name is -- his last name Cruz -- he loved it. That's all over his Facebook page and it's gone viral.
When I get six- and seven-year-olds in a group, I have to figure out how to keep them quiet.
Do you understand?"
But anyway, it's a game I play, and it comes obviously from my military experience.
No, no, it begins the first time a child in a mother's arms looks up at the mother and says, "Oh, this must be my mother.
It's predictable.
I was not a great student.
And so they said, "But he does so well in ROTC.
So they shipped me off to the army, and lo and behold, many years later, I'm considered one of the greatest sons the City College of New York has ever had. (Laughter) So, I tell young people everywhere, it ain't where you start in life, it's what you do with life that determines where you end up in life, and you are blessed to be living in a country that, no matter where you start, you have opportunities so long as you believe in yourself, you believe in the society and the country, and you believe that you can self-improve and educate yourself as you go along.
And that's the key to success.
It's why we have a dropout rate of roughly 25 percent overall and almost 50 percent of our minority population living in low-income areas, because they're not getting the gift of a good start.
Children need a network. Children need to be part of a tribe, a family, a community.
Those that we call minorities now are going to be the majority.
But now I'm alone. I'm alone.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
So let's try to look at it from a different perspective.
Let's see what evolution can do for us.
And you can see these robots are not ready to take over the world yet, but they gradually learn how to move forward, and they do this autonomously.
So in these two examples, we had basically machines that learned how to walk in simulation, and also machines that learned how to walk in reality.
But I want to show you a different approach, and this is this robot over here, which has four legs.
It has also two tilt sensors that tell the machine which way it's tilting.
(Applause)
I love sharing my favorite movies with my kids, and when my daughter was four, we got to watch "The Wizard of Oz" together.
Now, there's a big difference between these two movies, a couple of really big differences between "The Wizard of Oz" and all the movies we watch today.
One is there's very little violence in "The Wizard of Oz."
But I think if "The Wizard of Oz" were made today, the wizard would say, "Dorothy, you are the savior of Oz that the prophecy foretold.
Alison Bechdel is a comic book artist, and back in the mid-'80s, she recorded this conversation she'd had with a friend about assessing the movies that they saw.
In fact, this week I went to see a very high-quality movie, "Argo."
Last year, The New York Times published a study that the government had done.
One out of five women in America say that they have been sexually assaulted some time in their life.
When I asked my daughter who her favorite character was in "Star Wars," do you know what she said?
Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan Kenobi and Glinda.
What do these two have in common?
Thank you.
This is how war starts.
The siege went on for three and a half years, and it was a siege without water, without power, without electricity, without heat, without food, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century.
Most of all, I learned about love.
Martha Gellhorn, who's one of my heroes, once said, "You can only love one war. The rest is responsibility."
It was a very somber gathering of the reporters that worked there during the war, humanitarian aid workers, and of course the brave and courageous people of Sarajevo themselves.
And then war and chaos descend.
In 1994, I briefly left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda.
So we learn a lot from war, and I mention Rwanda because it is one place, like South Africa, where nearly 20 years on, there is healing.
So when people ask me how I continue to cover war, and why I continue to do it, this is why.
When I go back to Syria, next week in fact, what I see is incredibly heroic people, some of them fighting for democracy, for things we take for granted every single day.
In 2004, I had a little baby boy, and I call him my miracle child, because after seeing so much death and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life, this ray of hope was born.
And I called him Luca, which means "The bringer of light," because he does bring light to my life.
Why aren't you home with Luca?"
I'm not Kofi Annan. He can't stop a war.
I'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor, and I can't tell you the times of how helpless I've felt to have people dying in front of me, and I couldn't save them.
My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless.
Who cares about Syria? Who cares about Bosnia?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Who here has had surgery?
Did you want it?
So this is gallbladder surgery.
All right, you've all heard the term: "He's a born surgeon."
Let me tell you, surgeons are not born.
Now that foundation is so important that a number of us from the largest general surgery society in the United States, SAGES, started in the late 1990s a training program that would assure that every surgeon who practices minimally invasive surgery would have a strong foundation of knowledge and skills necessary to go on and do procedures.
Now just this past year, one of our partners, the American College of Surgeons, teamed up with us to make an announcement that all surgeons should be FLS (Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery)-certified before they do minimally invasive surgery.
SAGES does surgery all over the world, teaching and educating surgeons.
And I think that we can develop some tools to do so.
So here's Allan teaching an English-speaking surgeon in Africa these basic fundamental skills necessary to do minimally invasive surgery.
Because for them it's not a surgery test, it's an English test.
I work at the Cambridge Hospital.
Because we need a lexicon. What is a lexicon?
So let me show you what we're doing.
Very good Oscar. I'll see you next week.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
We are all born artists.
And some kids, when they get a bit older, start to lie.
But you shouldn't worry.
It's amazing. It's a wonderful moment.
Take a look at this sentence: "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."
Yes, it's the first sentence of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis."
A kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller.
Kids do art.
I was in Jeju Island a few days ago.
When I ask my students to write about their happiest moment, many write about an early artistic experience they had as a kid.
The French writer Michel Tournier has a famous saying.
"Work is against human nature. The proof is that it makes us tired."
But kids, usually they do art for fun. It's playing.
And I explained, "It's a dark night and a crow is perching on a branch."
Look at this. Doesn't it look just like wallpaper?
Anyways, contemporary art in the 20th century is about doing something weird and filling the void with explanation and interpretation -- essentially the same as I did.
This is Picasso's.
That's our tragedy.
That's how a writing talent reveals itself on the dark side.
Yes, that's right.
There's one condition: You must write like crazy. Like crazy!
Art is the ultimate goal.
The ideal future I imagine is where we all have multiple identities, at least one of which is an artist.
So I asked the driver, "What is this?"
He said it was his profile. "Then what are you?" I asked. "An actor," he said.
King Lear.
Someone is a golfer by day and writer by night.
Any advice for aspiring Korean dancers?"
So what should we do now?
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm not a psychiatrist, a social worker or an expert in domestic violence.
I had moved to New York City for my first job as a writer and editor at Seventeen magazine.
The man who I loved more than anybody on Earth held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me more times than I can even remember.
It may even be your story.
I don't look like a typical domestic violence survivor.
I have a B.A. in English from Harvard College, an MBA in marketing from Wharton Business School.
I've been married for almost 20 years to my second husband and we have three kids together.
I was 22, and in the United States, women ages 16 to 24 are three times as likely to be domestic violence victims as women of other ages, and over 500 women and girls this age are killed every year by abusive partners, boyfriends, and husbands in the United States.
We started dating, and he loved everything about me, that I was smart, that I'd gone to Harvard, that I was passionate about helping teenage girls, and my job.
He wanted to know everything about my family and my childhood and my hopes and dreams.
I had no idea I was falling into crazy love, that I was walking headfirst into a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap.
It was 7 a.m. I still had on my nightgown.
One in three American women experiences domestic violence or stalking at some point in her life, and the CDC reports that 15 million children are abused every year, 15 million.
Because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is kill her.
Over 70 percent of domestic violence murders happen after the victim has ended the relationship, after she's gotten out, because then the abuser has nothing left to lose.
I realized that the man who I loved so much was going to kill me if I let him.
So I broke the silence.
I told everyone: the police, my neighbors, my friends and family, total strangers, and I'm here today because you all helped me.
But since publishing "Crazy Love," I have heard hundreds of stories from men and women who also got out, who learned an invaluable life lesson from what happened, and who rebuilt lives -- joyous, happy lives -- as employees, wives and mothers, lives completely free of violence, like me.
I remarried a kind and gentle man, and we have those three kids.
It's my way of helping other victims, and it's my final request of you.
Recognize the early signs of violence and conscientiously intervene, deescalate it, show victims a safe way out.
Thank you.
(Applause)
It's my first year as a new high school science teacher, and I'm so eager.
The main characters in the story are bacteria and viruses.
The real bacteria and viruses are so small we can't see them without a microscope, and you guys might know bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick.
But what a lot of people don't know is that viruses can also make bacteria sick."
Once upon a time, there's this happy little bacterium.
Because, you see, DNA is like a blueprint that tells living things what to make.
So this is kind of like going into a car factory and replacing the blueprints with blueprints for killer robots.
But that's not the only way that viruses infect bacteria.
So now you understand how viruses can attack cells.
There are two ways: On the left is what we call the lytic way, where the viruses go right in and take over the cells.
For example, I told you that viruses have DNA.
They have something called RNA instead.
If a young learner thinks that all viruses have DNA, that's not going to ruin their chances of success in science.
There's a growing number of online resources that are dedicated to just explaining science in simple, understandable ways.
And I myself spend most of my free time making these science videos that I put on YouTube.
I explain chemical equilibrium using analogies to awkward middle school dances, and I talk about fuel cells with stories about boys and girls at a summer camp.
Leave out those annoying details that nobody cares about and just get to the point.
How should you start?
Maybe I can work tomorrow, but I don't know if and when yet."
And it's extraordinarily difficult for these people to find the work that they so often need very badly.
Imagine that you run a cafe.
In an alternative view of this pool of local, very flexible people, here's a market research company, and it's inducted maybe 25 local people in how to do street interviewing.
Imagine that a young woman -- base of the economic pyramid, very little prospect of getting a job -- what economic activity could she theoretically engage in?
These are good sites, but I believe we can go a step further.
Markets have changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years, but only for organizations at the top of the economy.
If you're a Wall Street trader, you now take it for granted that you sell your financial assets in a system of markets that identifies the most profitable opportunities for you in real time, executes on that in microseconds within the boundaries you've set.
What have we gained at the bottom of the economy in terms of markets in the last 20 years?
So why do we have this disparity between these incredibly sophisticated markets at the top of the economy that are increasingly sucking more and more activity and resource out of the main economy into this rarefied level of trading, and what the rest of us have?
Suppose tomorrow morning the prime minister of Britain or the president of the U.S., or the leader of any other developed nation, woke up and said, "I'm never going to be able to create all the jobs I need in the current climate.
Not necessarily.
This act defines what a national lottery will look like.
Let's call it national e-markets, NEMs for short.
Think of it as a regulated public utility.
And there are certain obligations that should go with those benefits to be placed on the operators, and the key one is, of course, that the operators pay for everything, including all the interfacing into the public sector.
And this data can be used by investors.
Do not underestimate the transformative power of truly modern markets.
Thank you.
(Applause)
She wrote back to me and she said, "I'm so proud to have a son that created the software that allowed these kids to make Mother's Day cards for their mothers."
So my mom was happy, and that made me happy, but actually I was even happier for another reason.
And it's similar with new technologies.
By writing, be creating these interactive Mother's Day cards, these kids were showing that they were really fluent with new technologies.
Now maybe you won't be so surprised by this, because a lot of times people feel that young people today can do all sorts of things with technology.
You often see them in situations like this, or like this, and there's no doubt that young people are very comfortable and familiar browsing and chatting and texting and gaming.
So young people today have lots of experience and lots of familiarity with interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating with new technologies and expressing themselves with new technologies.
And that really means that they need to be able to write their own computer programs, or code.
You know, in recent years, there have been hundreds of new organizations and websites that are helping young people learn to code.
You look online, you'll see places like Codecademy and events like CoderDojo and sites like Girls Who Code, or Black Girls Code.
You know, just at the beginning of this year, at the turn of the new year, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a New Year's resolution that he was going to learn to code in 2012.
After you've created your program, you can click on "share," and then share your project with other people, so that they can use the project and start working on the project as well.
So I think there's so many different ways that people can express themselves using this, to be able to take their ideas and share their ideas with the world.
We're going to continue to look at new ways of bringing together the physical world and the virtual world and connecting to the world around us.
Here's an example.
It uses the webcam.
So it's a little bit like Microsoft Kinect, where you interact with gestures in the world.
The same way that this uses the camera to get information into Scratch, you can also use the microphone.
Here's an example of a project using the microphone.
When you learn to read and write, it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things.
When you learn to read, you can then read to learn.
Now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious.
These are after-school learning centers that we helped start that help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies.
So then, each time the big fish eats the little fish, he will increment the score, and the score will go up by one.
And he saw this, and he was so excited, he reached his hand out to me, and he said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
When you learn ideas like this in Scratch, you can learn it in a way that's really meaningful and motivating for you, that you can understand the reason for learning variables, and we see that kids learn it more deeply and learn it better.
Now he had a reason for learning variables.
So as kids like Victor are creating projects like this, they're learning important concepts like variables, but that's just the start.
As Victor worked on this project and created the scripts, he was also learning about the process of design, how to start with the glimmer of an idea and turn it into a fully-fledged, functioning project like you see here.
So he was learning many different core principles of design, about how to experiment with new ideas, how to take complex ideas and break them down into simpler parts, how to collaborate with other people on your projects, about how to find and fix bugs when things go wrong, how to keep persistent and to persevere in the face of frustrations when things aren't working well.
Now, who knows if Victor is going to grow up and become a programmer or a professional computer scientist?
It's probably not so likely, but regardless of what he does, he'll be able to make use of these design skills that he learned.
Very few people become professional writers.
So she made this project for my birthday and sent me a happy birthday Scratch card.
Thanks very much. (Applause)
Have you ever been divorced?
Sometimes, though, just the question "what do you do?"
And this can get really dangerous.
I was raised in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s, two blocks from the epicenter of punk music.
So when I was six, I decided that I wanted to be a boy.
So I went home, and I shaved my head, and I came back the next day and I said, "I'm a boy."
I didn't want anyone to know that I was a girl, and they didn't.
So this is me when I was 11.
I didn't feel like I was in the wrong body.
For me, photography is not just about exposing film, it's about exposing the viewer to something new, a place they haven't gone before, but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of.
(Music) Self Evident Truths is a photographic record of LGBTQ America today.
(Music) "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."
Today in 29 states, more than half of this country, you can legally be fired just for your sexuality.
Almost 85,000 people watched that video, and then they started emailing us from all over the country, asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces.
And a lot more people wanted to show their faces than I had anticipated.
That video was made in the spring of 2011, and as of today I have traveled to almost 20 cities and photographed almost 2,000 people.
Visibility really is key.
Familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy.
Of course, in my travels I met people who legally divorced their children for being other than straight, but I also met people who were Southern Baptists who switched churches because their child was a lesbian.
Sparking empathy had become the backbone of Self Evident Truths.
Once they got over the shock, though, by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent or the 3 to 20 percent marks.
And seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity.
It's too late.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I have never, ever forgotten the words of my grandmother who died in her exile: "Son, resist Gaddafi. Fight him.
Young Libyan women and men were at the forefront calling for the fall of the regime, raising slogans of freedom, dignity, social justice.
For four decades Gaddafi's tyrannical regime destroyed the infrastructure as well as the culture and the moral fabric of Libyan society.
After a period of 33 years in exile, I went back to Libya, and with unique enthusiasm, I started organizing workshops on capacity building, on human development of leadership skills.
With an amazing group of women, I co-founded the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace, a movement of women, leaders, from different walks of life, to lobby for the sociopolitical empowerment of women and to lobby for our right for equal participation in building democracy and peace.
Women won 17.5 percent of the National Congress in the first elections ever in 52 years.
On another day we wake up to the news of the murder of the American ambassador and the attack on the consulate.
And every day, every day we wake up with the rule of the militias and their continuous violations of human rights of prisoners and their disrespect of the rule of law.
I'm rather here today to confess that we as a nation took the wrong choice, made the wrong decision.
Maybe what was missing was not the women only, but the feminine values of compassion, mercy and inclusion.
That's the real zipper.
According to a Quranic verse "Salam" -- peace -- "is the word of the all-merciful God, raheem."
In turn, the word "raheem," which is known in all Abrahamic traditions, has the same root in Arabic as the word "rahem" -- womb -- symbolizing the maternal feminine encompassing all humanity from which the male and the female, from which all tribes, all peoples, have emanated from.
May we all be granted a grace of mercy.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause)
Welcome to Doha.
And of course, most of you have had three meals today, and probably will continue to have after this event.
There was no water. There was no energy, no oil, no cars, none of that.
Most of the people who lived here either lived in coastal villages, fishing, or were nomads who roamed around with the environment trying to find water.
1939, that's when they discovered oil.
My mother has an accent that is so different to my father, and we're all a population of about 300,000 people in the same country.
This is probably the skyline that most of you know about Doha.
It's 1.7 million people.
The average growth of our economy is about 15 percent for the past five years.
Water consumption has increased to 430 liters.
The interesting part is that we continue to grow 15 percent every year for the past five years without water.
Not only cities that we're building, but cities with dreams and people who are wishing to be scientists, doctors.
So Brazil has 1,782 millimeters per year of precipitation of rain.
This is the situation in Qatar, for those who don't know.
We import 90 percent of our food, and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land.
Is there a sustainable solution?
So if we're going to need energy, what sort of energy?
And so we will use that renewable energy to produce the water that we need.
That water will go then to the farmers, and the farmers will be able to water their plants, and they will be able then to supply society with food.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Applause)
So, I'm an artist.
Basically I'm recording one second of every day of my life for the rest of my life, chronologically compiling these one-second tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video until, you know, I can't record them anymore.
And something that I realized early on in the project was that if I wasn't doing anything interesting, I would probably forget to record the video.
And I don't know, I think this project has a lot of possibilities, and I encourage you all to record just a small snippet of your life every day, so you can never forget that that day, you lived.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I still paint. I love art.
For 11 years, I was mayor of Tirana, our capital.
"Because the colors you have ordered do not meet European standards," he replied.
(Applause) So it's time for change.
The rehabilitation of public spaces revived the feeling of belonging to a city that people lost.
We demolished more than 5,000 illegal buildings all over the city, up to eight stories high, the tallest of them.
International organizations have invested a lot in Albania during these 20 years, not all of it well spent.
Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians, while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation.
Barack Obama won — (Applause) — because he mobilized people as never before through the use of social networks.
It is about how people think, how they view the world around them, how they use their time and their energy.
When people say all politicians are the same, ask yourself if Obama was the same as Bush, if François Hollande is the same as Sarkozy.
When people say nothing can change, just stop and think what the world was like 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago.
I gave you a very small example of how one thing, the use of color, can make change happen.
(Applause)
So we took a lot of samples from this road and we tested them in the lab.
Thank you.
(Applause)
My father was listening to BBC News on his small, gray radio.
There was a big smile on his face which was unusual then, because the news mostly depressed him.
A morning that I will never forget.
You see, I was six when the Taliban took over Afghanistan and made it illegal for girls to go to school.
So for the next five years, I dressed as a boy to escort my older sister, who was no longer allowed to be outside alone, to a secret school.
I was very lucky to grow up in a family where education was prized and daughters were treasured.
But my educated mother became a teacher.
And my father -- that's him -- he was the first ever in his family to receive an education.
Your money can be stolen. You can be forced to leave your home during a war.
I was raised in a country that has been destroyed by decades of war.
Instead, I stand here a proud graduate of Middlebury College.
(Applause) When I returned to Afghanistan, my grandfather, the one exiled from his home for daring to educate his daughters, was among the first to congratulate me.
(Applause) My family believes in me.
That's why I am a global ambassador for 10x10, a global campaign to educate women.
But today, more than three million girls are in school in Afghanistan.
(Applause) Afghanistan looks so different from here in America.
To me, Afghanistan is a country of hope and boundless possibilities, and every single day the girls of SOLA remind me of that.
Like me, they are dreaming big.
Thank you.
(Applause)
But in the 1970s, some countries caught up.
So with PISA, we try to change this by measuring the knowledge and skills of people directly.
In our latest assessment in 2009, we measured 74 school systems that together cover 87 percent of the economy.
In red, sort of below OECD average.
With PISA, we wanted to measure how they actually deliver equity, in terms of ensuring that people from different social backgrounds have equal chances.
The red dot shows you spending per student relative to a country's wealth.
One way you can spend money is by paying teachers well, and you can see Korea investing a lot in attracting the best people into the teaching profession.
So you can see two countries spent their money very differently, and actually how they spent their money matters a lot more than how much they invest in education.
Let's go back to the year 2000.
Remember, that was the year before the iPod was invented.
Very disappointing results.
And all that raises, of course, the question: What can we learn from those countries in the green quadrant who have achieved high levels of equity, high levels of performance, and raised outcomes?
How do the media talk about schools and teachers?
The other part is the belief that all children are capable of success.
You have some countries where students are segregated early in their ages.
The goal of the past was standardization and compliance.
Last but not least, those countries align policies across all areas of public policy.
And the example of PISA shows that data can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy through which we usually run education systems.
If we can help every child, every teacher, every school, every principal, every parent see what improvement is possible, that only the sky is the limit to education improvement, we have laid the foundations for better policies and better lives.
Thank you.
(Applause)
"There is also a strong belief, which I share, that bad or oversimplistic and overconfident economics helped create the crisis."
Now, you've probably all heard of similar criticism coming from people who are skeptical of capitalism.
The first quote is from Jean-Claude Trichet when he was governor of the European Central Bank.
Are these people implying that we don't understand the economic systems that drive our modern societies?
"We spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe, while we still don't understand the conditions for a stable society, a functioning economy, or peace."
But there's an intriguing solution which is coming from what is known as the science of complexity.
This paradox is what got me interested in complex systems.
So these are systems which are made up of many interconnected or interacting parts: swarms of birds or fish, ant colonies, ecosystems, brains, financial markets.
Interestingly, complex systems are very hard to map into mathematical equations, so the usual physics approach doesn't really work here.
So what do we know about complex systems?
Well, it turns out that what looks like complex behavior from the outside is actually the result of a few simple rules of interaction.
And it gets even better, because most complex systems have this amazing property called emergence.
So if it's a cell or a termite or a bird, you just focus on the rules of interaction.
The nodes in the network are the system's components, and the links are given by the interactions.
So what equations are for physics, complex networks are for the study of complex systems.
This approach has been very successfully applied to many complex systems in physics, biology, computer science, the social sciences, but what about economics?
Where are economic networks?
So here the nodes are companies, people, governments, foundations, etc.
And we also assign a value to the company given by the operating revenue.
In other words, who controls the world?
So we started with a database containing 13 million ownership relations from 2007.
Well, ownership gives voting rights to shareholders.
This is the normal notion of control.
So think about water flowing in pipes, where the pipes have different thickness.
We're seeing the emergence of long-term and highly-funded programs which aim at understanding our networked world from a complexity point of view.
I really hope that this complexity perspective allows for some common ground to be found.
But this is just my own personal ideology.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, why does good sex so often fade, even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever?
And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex, contrary to popular belief?
And when you love, how does it feel?
So I travel the globe, and what I'm noticing is that everywhere where romanticism has entered, there seems to be a crisis of desire.
So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult?
Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship.
Because therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
And if there is a verb that comes with desire, it is "to want."
Desire needs space.
And I've gone to more than 20 countries in the last few years with "Mating in Captivity," and I asked people, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner?
But then the second group is even more interesting.
Basically, when I look at my partner radiant and confident.
Novelty is, what parts of you do you bring out?
What parts of you do you connect to?
What do you seek to express there?
You know, animals have sex.
So when I began to think about eroticism, I began to think about the poetics of sex.
And if I look at it as an intelligence, then it's something that you cultivate.
Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love -- mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other -- are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
Our need for connection, our need for separateness, or our need for security and adventure, or our need for togetherness and for autonomy, and if you think about the little kid who sits on your lap and who is cozily nested here and very secure and comfortable, and at some point all of us need to go out into the world to discover and to explore.
Translate this into adult language.
Foreplay pretty much starts at the end of the previous orgasm.
(Applause)
The advances that have taken place in astronomy, cosmology and biology, in the last 10 years, are really extraordinary -- to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine.
The science writers and editors -- I shouldn't say science writers, I should say people who write about science -- and editors would sit down over a couple of beers, after a hard day of work, and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works.
And that got me into a discussion with some other people, other scientists, about maybe some other subjects, and one of the guys I talked to, who was a neuroscientist, said, "You know, I think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up," and reminds me of Michael's talk yesterday and his mother saying you can't have a solution if you don't have a problem.
So, we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow, and lo and behold, we found them.
Which leads me to a videotape of a President Bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago.
President George W. Bush: Whatever it costs to defend our security, and whatever it costs to defend our freedom, we must pay it.
We live in an incredible age of modern medicine.
We are all much healthier than we were 20 years ago.
The World Health Organization now estimates that one out of five people on the planet is clinically depressed.
And the World Health Organization also says that depression is the biggest epidemic that humankind has ever faced.
Now the problem with all of this, getting older, is that people over 65 are the most likely people to commit suicide.
But it is often a combination of talk therapy and pills.
Moving on. Number nine -- don't laugh -- aliens invade Earth.
1995, we found three. The count now is up to 80 -- we're finding about two or three a month.
In a few years, NASA is going to launch four or five telescopes out to Jupiter, where there's less dust, and start looking for Earth-like planets, which we cannot see with present technology, nor detect.
We can look at our own history. The late physicist Gerard O'Neill said, "Advanced Western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization."
If the aliens come visiting, we're the primitive civilization.
How much energy and money does it take to actually have a plan to negotiate with an advanced species?
If we want humanity to last forever, we have to colonize the Milky Way.
Number eight: the ecosystem collapses.
Last July, in Science, the journal Science, 19 oceanographers published a very, very unusual article.
Many other ecosystems on Earth are in real, real danger.
We're living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000.
We have lost 25 percent of the unique species in Hawaii in the last 20 years.
California is expected to lose 25 percent of its species in the next 40 years.
And when that ecosystem collapses, it could take a major ecosystem with it, like our atmosphere. So, what do we do about this? What are the solutions?
There is some modeling of ecosystems going on now.
The problem with ecosystems is that we understand them so poorly, that we don't know they're really in trouble until it's almost too late.
National Science Foundation needs to say -- you know, almost all the money that's spent on science in this country comes from the federal government, one way or another.
Secondly, we need to create huge biodiversity reserves on the planet, and start moving them around.
(Applause) Number seven: particle accelerator mishap.
You all remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber?
But there's talk of building very big accelerators.
We need to -- we need the advice of particle physicists to talk about particle physics and what should be done in particle physics, but we need some outside thinking and watchdogging of what's going on with these experiments.
We have an electromagnetic field around the Earth, and it's constantly bombarded by high-energy particles, like protons.
And in my opinion, we don't spend enough time looking at that natural laboratory and figuring out first what's safe to do on Earth.
Now, corn originated, we think, in Mexico.
We treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants.
It's been 780,000 years since this happened.
So, it should have happened about 480,000 years ago.
Scientists think now our magnetic field may be diminished by about five percent.
So, maybe we're in the throes of it.
One of the problems of trying to figure out how healthy the Earth is, is that we have -- you know, we don't have good weather data from 60 years ago, much less data on things like the ozone layer.
So, there's a fairly simple solution to this.
It's not hard: it's just three oxygen atoms.
You don't need that much up there.
We need to learn how to repair and replenish the Earth's ozone layer.
(Applause) Number four: giant solar flares.
Solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the Sun that bombard the Earth with high-speed subatomic particles.
So far, our atmosphere has done, and our magnetic field has done pretty well protecting us from this.
Occasionally, we get a flare from the Sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth, and electricity.
But the alarming thing is that astronomers recently have been studying stars that are similar to our Sun, and they've found that a number of them, when they're about the age of our Sun, brighten by a factor of as much as 20. Doesn't last for very long.
One percent doesn't sound like a lot, but it would cause one hell of an ice age here.
I wrote a story about this in Life magazine in 1993.
The problem is it takes 300 years to terraform Mars, minimum.
In 1918, we had a flu epidemic in the United States that killed 20 million people.
That was back when the population was around 100 million people.
The bubonic plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages, killed one out of four Europeans.
It is nuts. We give antibiotics -- (Applause) -- every cow, every lamb, every chicken, they get antibiotics every day, all.
We have a real, major outbreak of disease in the United States, we are not prepared to cope with it.
We think that there are about 10 million dead stars in the Milky Way alone, our galaxy.
But galaxies are very violent places, and things can be spun out of orbit.
And finally, number one: biggest danger to life as we know it, I think, a really big asteroid heads for Earth.
In 1908, just a 200-foot piece of a comet exploded over Siberia and flattened forests for maybe 100 miles.
Nothing to worry about, right?
A small asteroid, say a half mile wide, would touch off firestorms followed by severe global cooling from the debris kicked up -- Carl Sagan's nuclear winter thing.
Where are they? There's something called the Kuiper belt, which -- some people think Pluto's not a planet, that's where Pluto is, it's in the Kuiper belt.
There's also something a little farther out, called the Oort cloud.
The folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey told us last fall -- they're making the first map of the universe, three-dimensional map of the universe -- that there are probably 700,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter that are a half a mile big or bigger.
You'll notice that the chance of an asteroid-slash-comet impact killing you is about one in 20,000, according to the work they've done.
NASA's spending three million dollars a year, three million bucks -- that is like pocket change -- to search for asteroids.
We don't really have the technology to predict comet trajectories, or when one with our name on it might arrive.
You'll notice that a lot of comets are named after people you never heard of, amateur astronomers? That's because nobody's looking for them, except amateurs.
We need a dedicated observatory that looks for comets.
Part two of the solutions: we need to figure out how to blow up an asteroid, or alter its trajectory. Now, a year ago, we did an amazing thing.
And then, of course, you know, they pulled one of those sneaky NASA things, where they had extra batteries and extra gas aboard and everything, and then, at the last minute, they landed.
This is just a matter of finding 'em, going there, and doing something about it.
The thing, I think, to remember, is September 11.
Science has the power to predict the future in many cases now.
Knowledge is power.
The worst thing we can do is say, jeez, I got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid. (Laughter) That's a mistake that could literally cost us our future.
Thank you.
The global economic financial crisis has reignited public interest in something that's actually one of the oldest questions in economics, dating back to at least before Adam Smith.
Let's start by thinking about the member countries of the OECD, or the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
So all the way over on the left of this graph, what you see is many OECD countries saving over a quarter of their GDP every year, and some OECD countries saving over a third of their GDP per year.
Now that we see these huge differences in savings rates, how is it possible that language might have something to do with these differences?
I grew up in the Midwest of the United States.
So for example, if I'm speaking in English, I have to speak grammatically differently if I'm talking about past rain, "It rained yesterday," current rain, "It is raining now," or future rain, "It will rain tomorrow."
This led me, as a behavioral economist, to an intriguing hypothesis.
Just to give you a hint of that, let's look back at that OECD graph that we were talking about.
So for example, there is the Survey of Health, [Aging] and Retirement in Europe.
(Laughter) Combine that with a Demographic and Health Survey collected by USAID in developing countries in Africa, for example, which that survey actually can go so far as to directly measure the HIV status of families living in, for example, rural Nigeria.
And most granularly, I break them down by religion where there are 72 categories of religions in the world -- so an extreme level of granularity.
Well, think about smoking, for example.
Smoking is in some deep sense negative savings.
If savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure, smoking is just the opposite.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I always tell the students that we could also call neuroscientists some sort of astronomer, because we are dealing with a system that is only comparable in terms of number of cells to the number of galaxies that we have in the universe.
This is a brain.
And that's exactly what we did 10 years ago.
Well, while Aurora was playing this game, as you saw, and doing a thousand trials a day and getting 97 percent correct and 350 milliliters of orange juice, we are recording the brainstorms that are produced in her head and sending them to a robotic arm that was learning to reproduce the movements that Aurora was making.
Because the idea was to actually turn on this brain-machine interface and have Aurora play the game just by thinking, without interference of her body.
The robotic arm that you see moving here 30 days later, after the first video that I showed to you, is under the control of Aurora's brain and is moving the cursor to get to the target.
And Aurora now knows that she can play the game with this robotic arm, but she has not lost the ability to use her biological arms to do what she pleases.
And what we did basically was to train the animals to learn how to control these avatars and explore objects that appear in the virtual world.
And these objects are visually identical, but when the avatar crosses the surface of these objects, they send an electrical message that is proportional to the microtactile texture of the object that goes back directly to the monkey's brain, informing the brain what it is the avatar is touching.
And in just four weeks, the brain learns to process this new sensation and acquires a new sensory pathway -- like a new sense.
And the feedback that comes from the avatar is being processed directly by the brain without the interference of the skin.
The animal is controlling the avatar to touch the targets.
What happens here is that the brain activity that generated the movements in the monkey was transmitted to Japan and made this robot walk while footage of this walking was sent back to Duke, so that the monkey could see the legs of this robot walking in front of her.
The monkey was moving a robot that was six times bigger, across the planet.
This is one of the experiments in which that robot was able to walk autonomously.
And I can only tell you that as a scientist, I grew up in southern Brazil in the mid-'60s watching a few crazy guys telling [us] that they would go to the Moon.
Thank you.
(Applause)
The Maasais, the boys are brought up to be warriors.
The girls are brought up to be mothers.
My day started at 5 in the morning, milking the cows, sweeping the house, cooking for my siblings, collecting water, firewood.
I went to school not because the Maasais' women or girls were going to school.
My mother worked hard in the farm to grow crops so that we can eat.
But when my father came, he would sell the cows, he would sell the products we had, and he went and drank with his friends in the bars.
When I went to school, I had a dream.
I wanted to become a teacher.
Well, my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass.
They were all in a circle.
I was the first. There were my sisters and a couple of other girls, and as I approached her, she looked at me, and I sat down.
As I opened my leg, another woman came, and this woman was carrying a knife.
I was lucky because one, also, my mom did something that most women don't do.
I was so determined to be a teacher now so that I could make a difference in my family.
Well, while I was in high school, something happened.
I met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the University of Oregon.
This man was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, camera, white sneakers -- and I'm talking about white sneakers.
And he told me, "Well, what do you mean, you want to go?
Don't you have a husband waiting for you?"
This gentleman, he helped me.
While I was in high school also, my dad was sick.
So the news came, I applied to school and I was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I couldn't come without the support of the village, because I needed to raise money to buy the air ticket.
So I went to him very early in the morning, as the sun rose.
I learned that my mom had a right to own property.
I wanted to do something.
I had to do something.
If she got pregnant before she got married, the mother is blamed for that, and she's punished.
I want you to meet one of the girls in that school.
That's Sharon. That's five years later.
As a new dawn is happening in my school, a new beginning is happening.
You are somebody who wants to make a difference.
And we will live in a very peaceful world. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And corruption is defined as the abuse of a position of trust for the benefit of yourself -- or, in the case of our context, your friends, your family or your financiers.
Today, I'm focusing on public sector corruption, which the private sector also participates in.
The second important myth to understand -- because we have to destroy these myths, dismantle them and destroy them and ridicule them -- the second important myth to understand is the one that says that in fact corruption is only a small problem -- if it is a problem, it's only a small problem, that in fact it's only a little 10 or 15 percent, it's been going on forever, it probably will continue forever, and there's no point passing any laws, because there's little we can do about it.
You see, history's rich in irony.
Now, the previous two examples I gave were to do with construction sector corruption, okay?
And I made a Freedom of Information application in May this year to the Ministry of Finance.
That is the law since 1999.
We had the journalist [Heather] Brooke speaking about her battle against government corruption, and she introduced me to this website, Alaveteli.com.
It's a huge problem. It's an economic crime.
I grew up watching Star Trek. I love Star Trek.
I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life.
(Laughter) Now, David and Hidehiko and Ketaki gave a very compelling story about the similarities between fruit flies and humans, and there are many similarities, and so you might think that if humans are similar to fruit flies, the favorite behavior of a fruit fly might be this, for example -- (Laughter) but in my talk, I don't want to emphasize on the similarities between humans and fruit flies, but rather the differences, and focus on the behaviors that I think fruit flies excel at doing.
The fly is going to sense this predator.
I think this is a fascinating behavior that shows how fast the fly's brain can process information.
Now, flight -- what does it take to fly?
Now, how does this compare to a fly?
And it turns out that the insects flap their wings in a very clever way, at a very high angle of attack that creates a structure at the leading edge of the wing, a little tornado-like structure called a leading edge vortex, and it's that vortex that actually enables the wings to make enough force for the animal to stay in the air.
Now, what about the engine?
And of course, the role of the nervous system is to control all this.
So let's look at the controller.
They have a sophisticated eye which is the fastest visual system on the planet.
They have sensors on their wing.
Their wing is covered with sensors, including sensors that sense deformation of the wing.
They can even taste with their wings.
But all of this sensory information has to be processed by a brain, and yes, indeed, flies have a brain, a brain of about 100,000 neurons.
Now several people at this conference have already suggested that fruit flies could serve neuroscience because they're a simple model of brain function.
When we think of brain, we of course imagine our own brain.
So let's sort of think about this. I think we have to compare -- (Laughter) — we have to compare the size of the brain with what the brain can do.
I would posit that one frontier in neuroscience is to figure out how the brain of that thing works.
And I think, from an engineering perspective, you think of multiplexing.
I grew up in Baltimore, and I chew crabs very, very well.
Crab chewing is actually really fascinating.
Imagine a network of neurons with one neuromodulator.
Well, for many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world, we've been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators.
Here's a fly and a large infrared view of the fly in the flight simulator, and this is a game the flies love to play.
So this is the preparation that one of my former post-docs, Gaby Maimon, who's now at Rockefeller, developed, and it's basically a flight simulator but under conditions where you actually can stick an electrode in the brain of the fly and record from a genetically identified neuron in the fly's brain.
And this is what one of these experiments looks like.
So here's a picture of the octopamine system.
Octopamine is a neuromodulator that seems to play an important role in flight and other behaviors.
But this is just one of many neuromodulators that's in the fly's brain.
But non-spiking neurons are actually quite complicated because they can have input synapses and output synapses all interdigitated, and there's no single action potential that drives all the outputs at the same time.
(Applause)
Now, here's the bad news.
David is a software engineer. Eleanor takes care of their four children, ages 10 to 15.
One has Asperger syndrome. One has ADHD.
David said when they brought this system into their home, the family meetings in particular increased communication, decreased stress, and made everybody happier to be part of the family team.
When my wife and I adopted these family meetings and other techniques into the lives of our then-five-year-old twin daughters, it was the biggest single change we made since our daughters were born.
In Sutherland's system, companies don't use large, massive projects that take two years.
Sutherland said it was the best Thanksgiving ever.
So I turned to David: "So why does it work?"
You know, the key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves, and it works in software and it turns out that it works with kids.
The word "agile" entered the lexicon in 2001 when Jeff Sutherland and a group of designers met in Utah and wrote a 12-point Agile Manifesto.
Parents can learn a lot from that.
I met a celebrity chef in New Orleans who said, "No problem, I'll just time-shift family dinner.
And the truth is, recent research backs him up.
If you're sitting on a cushioned chair, you'll be more open."
The point is there are all these new ideas out there.
Be flexible, be open-minded, let the best ideas win.
If we get 15 minutes of overreaction time, that's the limit.
The other one said, "Overreaction! Overreaction!"
(Laughter) (Applause) And by the way, research backs this up too.
Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives.
We had a pajama party.
And we had this great conversation, like, what's important to us?
The children who scored highest on this "do you know" scale had the highest self-esteem and a greater sense they could control their lives.
Of course all happy families aren't alike."
Is it possible, all these years later, to say Tolstoy was right?
The answer, I believe, is yes.
If the stick were ever found, all humankind would be happy.
You just need to take small steps, accumulate small wins, keep reaching for that green stick.
What's the secret to a happy family? Try.
(Applause)
(Mechanical noises) (Music) (Applause)
What is going to be the future of learning?
It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine.
The Victorians were great engineers.
At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, "You know, my son, I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers.
And I said, "Yeah, it's, I don't know."
(Laughter) They said, "Why have you put it there?"
On your right is an eight-year-old.
To his left is his student. She's six.
There's one community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad, and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs.
I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis.
(Laughter) (Applause) So I tested them.
It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens.
Encouragement seems to be the key.
Because it was needed.
"Shhh."
(Children talking) This one is in England.
The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons in the ion minus the number of electrons.
The way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say, "If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth, how would you figure out if it was going to or not?"
And just one last thing.
(Laughter) (Applause) I think it was good advice.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Wow. (Applause)
There is a course offered at nearly every university, and it's called Organic Chemistry, and it is a grueling, heavy introduction to the subject, a flood of content that overwhelms students, and you have to ace it if you want to become a doctor or a dentist or a veterinarian.
It's not good for science, and it's not good for society, and I don't think it has to be this way.
So I'm here today because I believe that a basic knowledge of organic chemistry is valuable, and I think that it can be made accessible to everybody, and I'd like to prove that to you today.
(Laughter) Here I have one of these overpriced EpiPens.
Inside it is a drug called epinephrine.
Epinephrine can restart the beat of my heart, or it could stop a life-threatening allergic reaction.
Epinephrine has been the difference between life and death for many people.
Here is the chemical structure of epinephrine.
This is what organic chemistry looks like.
It looks like lines and letters ...
We call this a compound or a molecule, and it is 26 atoms that are stitched together by atomic bonds.
Maybe 400 billion stars in our galaxy?
We know it is made of four different types of atoms, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen.
Everything in our universe is made of little spheres that we call atoms.
And there are four atoms in particular that stand apart from the rest as the main building blocks of life, and they are the same ones that are found in epinephrine: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.
When these atoms connect to form molecules, they follow a set of rules.
Hydrogen makes one bond, oxygen always makes two, nitrogen makes three and carbon makes four.
Let's start with epinephrine.
Now, these bonds between atoms, they're made of electrons.
Atoms use electrons like arms to reach out and hold their neighbors.
Two electrons in each bond, like a handshake, and like a handshake, they are not permanent.
That's what we call a chemical reaction, when atoms exchange partners and make new molecules.
The backbone of epinephrine is made mostly of carbon atoms, and that's common.
That's why we define organic chemistry as the study of carbon molecules.
Now, if we build the smallest molecules we can think of that follow our rules, they highlight our rules, and they have familiar names: water, ammonia and methane, H20 and NH3 and CH4.
The words "hydrogen," "oxygen" and "nitrogen" -- we use the same words to name these three molecules that have two atoms each.
That's why oxygen gets called O2.
Here's carbon dioxide, CO2.
That's why we call them hydrocarbons. We're very creative.
(Laughter) So when these crash into molecules of oxygen, as they do in your engine or in your barbecues, they release energy and they reassemble, and every carbon atom ends up at the center of a CO2 molecule, holding on to two oxygens, and all the hydrogens end up as parts of waters, and everybody follows the rules.
We don't actually draw these carbons.
They're represented by corners between the bonds, and we also hide every hydrogen that's bonded to a carbon.
It takes a little bit of practice, but I think everyone here could do it, but for today, this is epinephrine.
This is also called adrenaline. They're one and the same.
It's made by your adrenal glands.
(Laughter) We can extract epinephrine from the adrenal glands of sheep or cattle, but that's not where this stuff comes from.
We make this epinephrine in a factory by stitching together smaller molecules that come mostly from petroleum.
A car can have a scratch on it, and you can't scratch an atom.
And a molecule of epinephrine ...
Before there was life on earth, all the molecules were small, simple: carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen, just simple things.
Life brought biosynthetic factories that are powered by sunlight, and inside these factories, small molecules crash into each other and become large ones: carbohydrates, proteins, nucleic acids, multitudes of spectacular creations.
Nature is the original organic chemist, and her construction also fills our sky with the oxygen gas we breathe, this high-energy oxygen.
So nature is made of chemicals.
The word "natural" doesn't mean "safe," and you all know that.
Plenty of nature's chemicals are quite toxic, and others are delicious, and some are both ...
So nature's molecules are everywhere, including the ones that have decomposed into these black mixtures that we call petroleum.
Maybe knowing this chemistry will make that reality easier to accept for some people, I don't know, but these molecules are not just fossil fuels.
They're also the cheapest available raw materials for doing something that we call synthesis.
I have done a lot of this myself, and I still think it's amazing it's even possible.
What we do is kind of like assembling LEGO by dumping boxes of it into washing machines, but it works.
We can make molecules that are exact copies of nature, like epinephrine, or we can make creations of our own from scratch, like these two.
This is called vancomycin.
We found vancomycin in a puddle of mud in a jungle in Borneo in 1953.
It's too complicated for us, but we can harvest it from its natural source, and we do, because this is one of our most powerful antibiotics.
And new molecules are reported in our literature every day.
(Laughter) to cure deadly infections and everything else.
So let's not forget the role of the blacksmith in this picture, because without the blacksmith, things would look a little different ...
(Laughter) But this science is bigger than medicine.
It is oils and solvents and flavors, fabrics, all plastics, the cushions that you're sitting on right now -- they're all manufactured, and they're mostly carbon, so that makes all of it organic chemistry.
He's an undergraduate student in chemistry, and he also happens to be pretty good with computer graphics.
(Laughter) So Weston designed all the moving molecules that you saw today.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Well, I was introduced as the former Governor of Michigan, but actually I'm a scientist.
The first problem that not just Michigan, but every state, faces is, how do you create good jobs in America in a global economy?
I was elected in 2002 and, at the end of my first year in office in 2003, I got a call from one of my staff members, who said, "Gov, we have a big problem.
And he looked at his daughters, and he puts his hand on his chest, and he says, "So, Gov, tell me, who is ever going to hire me?
Forty-eight governors competed, convincing 48 state legislatures to essentially raise standards for high schoolers so that they all take a college prep curriculum.
In fact, I was in China to see what they were doing, and they were putting on a dog-and-pony show for the group that I was with, and I was standing in the back of the room during one of the demonstrations and standing next to one of the Chinese officials, and we were watching, and he says, "So, Gov, when do you think the U.S. is going to get national energy policy?"
You might take states like Iowa and Ohio -- two very important political states, by the way -- those two governors, and they would say, we're going to lead the nation in producing the wind turbines and the wind energy.
And it fosters innovation at the state level in these laboratories of democracy.
Thank you all so much. (Applause)
I have 18 minutes to tell you what happened over the past six million years.
And I say that not because I am African, but it's in Africa that you find the earliest evidence for human ancestors, upright walking traces, even the first technologies in the form of stone tools.
So we all are Africans, and welcome home.
She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis.
You don't need to remember that.
That's the Lucy species, and was found by my research team in December of 2000 in an area called Dikika.
It's in the northeastern part of Ethiopia.
And DNA analysis of living humans and chimpanzees teaches us today that we diverged sometime around seven million years ago and that these two species share over 98 percent of the same genetic material.
So, for us, paleoanthropologists, our job is to find the hard evidence, the fossil evidence, to fill in this gap and see the different stages of development.
But finding the hard evidence is a very complicated endeavor.
With the help of the locals and using just shovels and picks, I made my way.
You find elephants, rhinos, monkeys, pigs, etc.
But you could ask, how could these large mammals live in this desert environment?
I would say, "No, that's an elephant."
Let's go somewhere else."
Here is a close-up of the fossil, after five years of cleaning, preparation and description, which was very long, as I had to expose the bones from the sandstone block I just showed you in the previous slide.
It took five years.
And in the middle is the minister of Ethiopian tourism, who came to visit the National Museum of Ethiopia while I was working there.
But in addition, if you compare the skull with a comparably aged chimpanzee and little George Bush here, you see that you have vertical forehead.
How?
So, this girl died when she was about three, 3.3 million years ago.
What do we actually know about our ancestors?
We want to know how they looked like, how they behaved, how they walked around, and how they lived and grew up.
And that's very characteristic of humans and it's called childhood, which is this extended dependence of human children on their family or parents.
This is called the hyoid bone. It's a bone which is right here.
When we did the analysis of this bone, it was clear that it looked very chimp-like, chimpanzee-like.
Of course, in addition to extracting this huge amount of scientific information as to what makes us human, you know, the many human ancestors that have existed over the past six million years -- and there are more than 10 -- they did not have the knowledge, the technology and sophistications that we, Homo sapiens, have today.
But if this species, ancient species, would travel in time and see us today, they would very much be very proud of their legacy, because they became the ancestors of the most successful species in the universe.
Now the question is, we Homo sapiens today are in a position to decide about the future of our planet, possibly more.
So the question is, are we up to the challenge?
And can we really do better than these primitive, small-brained ancestors?
Among the most pressing challenges that our species is faced with today are the chronic problems of Africa.
Still, in my opinion, we have two choices.
And the key is to promote a positive African attitude towards Africa.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This was me on piano, a genius drummer.
This is a library in Auckland.
And our music is a cross between punk and cabaret.
So I fought my way off my label, and for my next project with my new band, the Grand Theft Orchestra, I turned to crowdfunding.
It's about 25,000 people.
This is my Kickstarter backer party in Berlin.
I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, "How do we make people pay for music?"
Thank you.
(Applause)
Now, this perfect storm that we are facing is the result of our rising population, rising towards 10 billion people, land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change.
But fossil fuels, carbon -- coal and gas -- are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change.
Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare and giving off methane.
We were once just as certain that the world was flat.
This picture is a typical seasonal grassland.
Now let's go to our land nearby on the same day, with the same rainfall, and look at that.
And again, watch the change just using livestock to mimic nature.
(Applause) I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s turn the desert that you see on the right there back to grassland, and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land with hope for the future.
The vast grasslands of Patagonia are turning to desert as you see here.
And if this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing, even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels.
Thank you.
How do you start?
(Applause)
The Kraken, a beast so terrifying it was said to devour men and ships and whales, and so enormous it could be mistaken for an island.
The other two are Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera and Dr. Steve O'Shea.
In 2010, there was a TED event called Mission Blue held aboard the Lindblad Explorer in the Galapagos as part of the fulfillment of Sylvia Earle's TED wish.
I spoke about a new way of exploring the ocean, one that focuses on attracting animals instead of scaring them away.
Mike deGruy was also invited, and he spoke with great passion about his love of the ocean, and he also talked to me about applying my approach to something he's been involved with for a very long time, which is the hunt for the giant squid.
It was Mike that got me invited to the squid summit, a gathering of squid experts at the Discovery Channel that summer during Shark Week. (Laughter) I gave a talk on unobtrusive viewing and optical luring of deep sea squid in which I emphasized the importance of using quiet, unobtrusive platforms for exploration.
But I also felt like I saw more animals working with the Tiburon than the Ventana, two vehicles with the same field of view but different propulsion systems.
The reason that the electronic jellyfish worked as a lure is not because giant squid eat jellyfish, but it's because this jellyfish only resorts to producing this light when it's being chewed on by a predator and its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of a larger predator that will attack its attacker and thereby afford it an opportunity for escape.
It's a scream for help, a last-ditch attempt for escape, and a common form of defense in the deep sea.
Yet we have spent only a tiny fraction of the money on ocean exploration that we've spent on space exploration.
We need a NASA-like organization for ocean exploration, because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on Earth.
We need — thank you. (Applause) Exploration is the engine that drives innovation.
Innovation drives economic growth.
(Applause)
I live in South Central.
This is South Los Angeles. (Laughter) Liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots.
Just like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert, South Central Los Angeles, home of the drive-thru and the drive-by.
For instance, the obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times higher than, say, Beverly Hills, which is probably eight, 10 miles away.
And I was wondering, how would you feel if you had no access to healthy food, if every time you walk out your door you see the ill effects that the present food system has on your neighborhood?
I see wheelchairs bought and sold like used cars.
Plus I got tired of driving 45 minutes round trip to get an apple that wasn't impregnated with pesticides.
So what I did, I planted a food forest in front of my house.
That's 20 Central Parks.
That's enough space to plant 725 million tomato plants.
See, I'm an artist.
Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art.
Just like a graffiti artist, where they beautify walls, me, I beautify lawns, parkways.
So what happened?
To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil.
Plus you get strawberries.
If kids grow kale, kids eat kale.
but if we don't change the composition of the soil, we will never do this.
Now don't get me wrong.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
(Laughter) When I was a kid, I hid my heart under the bed, because my mother said, "If you're not careful, someday someone's going to break it."
And that's hard to do if you don't know who you are.
We were kids.
Now, not so much.
(Laughter) When I was eight, I wanted to be a marine biologist.
But I kept dreaming.
I was going to be The Garbage Man.
When I was 19, I wrote, "I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean toward the opposite."
Standing up for yourself doesn't have to mean embracing violence.
(Laughter) (Applause) This is who I am.
When I was a kid, I used to think that pork chops and karate chops were the same thing.
I thought they were both pork chops.
To this day, I hate pork chops.
She was eight years old, our first day of grade three when she got called ugly.
To this day, despite a loving husband, she doesn't think she's beautiful, because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half her face.
As if depression is something that could be remedied by any of the contents found in a first-aid kit.
You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself, "They were wrong."
Why else would we still be here?
(Applause)
I happen to have triplets.
Now, I also happen to be gay.
Being gay and fathering triplets is by far the most socially innovative, socially entrepreneurial thing I have ever done.
But before I do that, I want to ask if we even believe that the nonprofit sector has any serious role to play in changing the world.
But it always leaves behind that 10 percent or more that is most disadvantaged or unlucky.
I sit on the board of a center for the developmentally disabled, and these people want laughter and compassion and they want love.
And that's where the nonprofit sector and philanthropy come in.
And so if we really want, like Buckminster Fuller said, a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation.
Why have our breast cancer charities not come close to finding a cure for breast cancer, or our homeless charities not come close to ending homelessness in any major city?
And the median compensation for a Stanford MBA, with bonus, at the age of 38, was 400,000 dollars.
Some people say, "Well, that's just because those MBA types are greedy."
The second area of discrimination is advertising and marketing.
That's an important fact, because it tells us that in 40 years, the nonprofit sector has not been able to wrestle any market share away from the for-profit sector.
The third area of discrimination is the taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue.
So nonprofits are really reluctant to attempt any brave, daring, giant-scale new fundraising endeavors, for fear that if the thing fails, their reputations will be dragged through the mud.
The Puritans came here for religious reasons, or so they said, but they also came here because they wanted to make a lot of money.
They were pious people, but they were also really aggressive capitalists, and they were accused of extreme forms of profit-making tendencies, compared to the other colonists.
But at the same time, the Puritans were Calvinists, so they were taught literally to hate themselves.
Well, charity became their answer.
I'll give you two examples.
Now, if you were a philanthropist really interested in breast cancer, what would make more sense: go out and find the most innovative researcher in the world and give her 350,000 dollars for research, or give her fundraising department the 350,000 dollars to multiply it into 194 million dollars for breast cancer research?
If we can have that kind of generosity -- a generosity of thought -- then the non-profit sector can play a massive role in changing the world for all those citizens most desperately in need of it to change.
(Applause) Thank you.
So raise your hand if you know someone in your immediate family or circle of friends who suffers from some form of mental illness.
These drugs have so many side effects because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block.
But we know much less about the circuit basis of psychiatric disorders because of the overwhelming dominance of this chemical imbalance hypothesis.
Now, it's not that chemicals are not important in psychiatric disorders.
Rather, they're released in very specific locations and they act on specific synapses to change the flow of information in the brain.
So if we ever really want to understand the biological basis of psychiatric disorders, we need to pinpoint these locations in the brain where these chemicals act.
Otherwise, we're going to keep pouring oil all over our mental engines and suffering the consequences.
Moreover, once we can do that, we can actually activate specific neurons or we can destroy or inhibit the activity of those neurons.
So if we inhibit a particular type of neuron, and we find that a behavior is blocked, we can conclude that those neurons are necessary for that behavior.
On the other hand, if we activate a group of neurons and we find that that produces the behavior, we can conclude that those neurons are sufficient for the behavior.
So in this way, by doing this kind of test, we can draw cause and effect relationships between the activity of specific neurons in particular circuits and particular behaviors, something that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do right now in humans.
Charles Darwin believed that insects have emotion and express them in their behaviors, as he wrote in his 1872 monograph on the expression of the emotions in man and animals.
Seymour recruited me to CalTech in the late 1980s.
He was my Jedi and my rabbi while he was here, and Seymour taught me both to love flies and also to play with science.
It's one thing to believe that flies have emotion-like states, but how do we actually find out whether that's true or not?
Now, in humans we often infer emotional states, as you'll hear later today, from facial expressions.
However, it's a little difficult to do that in fruit flies.
(Laughter) It's kind of like landing on Mars and looking out the window of your spaceship at all the little green men who are surrounding it and trying to figure out, "How do I find out if they have emotions or not?"
Well, one of the ways that we can start is to try to come up with some general characteristics or properties of emotion-like states such as arousal, and see if we can identify any fly behaviors that might exhibit some of those properties.
We all know that the stimulus that triggers an emotion causes that emotion to last long after the stimulus is gone.
So we built a device, which we call a puff-o-mat, in which we could deliver little brief air puffs to fruit flies in these plastic tubes in our laboratory bench and blow them away.
So we quantified this behavior using custom locomotor tracking software developed with my collaborator Pietro Perona, who's in the electrical engineering division here at CalTech.
So now we wanted to try to understand something about what controls the duration of this state.
And this is one of the great things about fruit flies.
That's right -- flies, like people, have dopamine, and it acts on their brains and on their synapses through the same dopamine receptor molecules that you and I have.
Dopamine plays a number of important functions in the brain, including in attention, arousal, reward, and disorders of the dopamine system have been linked to a number of mental disorders including drug abuse, Parkinson's disease, and ADHD.
Now, in genetics, it's a little counterintuitive.
So when we take away the dopamine receptor and the flies take longer to calm down, from that we infer that the normal function of this receptor and dopamine is to cause the flies to calm down faster after the puff.
And that's a bit reminiscent of ADHD, which has been linked to disorders of the dopamine system in humans.
Now, how far does this analogy go?
As many of you know, individuals afflicted with ADHD also have learning disabilities.
Is that true of our dopamine receptor mutant flies?
As Seymour showed back in the 1970s, flies, like songbirds, as you just heard, are capable of learning.
Well, if you do this test on dopamine receptor mutant flies, they don't learn. Their learning score is zero.
So that means that these flies have two abnormalities, or phenotypes, as we geneticists call them, that one finds in ADHD: hyperactivity and learning disability.
Now what's the causal relationship, if anything, between these phenotypes?
In ADHD, it's often assumed that the hyperactivity causes the learning disability.
But it could equally be the case that it's the learning disabilities that cause the hyperactivity.
And a final possibility is that there's no relationship at all between learning disabilities and hyperactivity, but that they are caused by a common underlying mechanism in ADHD.
We take our dopamine receptor mutant flies and we genetically restore, or cure, the dopamine receptor by putting a good copy of the dopamine receptor gene back into the fly brain.
If we put a good copy of the dopamine receptor back in this elliptical structure called the central complex, the flies are no longer hyperactive, but they still can't learn.
On the other hand, if we put the receptor back in a different structure called the mushroom body, the learning deficit is rescued, the flies learn well, but they're still hyperactive.
What that tells us is that dopamine is not bathing the brain of these flies like soup.
Whether the same thing is true in ADHD in humans we don't know, but these kinds of results should at least cause us to consider that possibility.
So these results make me and my colleagues more convinced than ever that the brain is not a bag of chemical soup, and it's a mistake to try to treat complex psychiatric disorders just by changing the flavor of the soup.
What we need to do is to use our ingenuity and our scientific knowledge to try to design a new generation of treatments that are targeted to specific neurons and specific regions of the brain that are affected in particular psychiatric disorders.
We didn't really realize that until 1914, when the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati zoo.
This had been the most abundant bird in the world that'd been in North America for six million years.
Aldo Leopold said this was a biological storm, a feathered tempest.
And the aurochs was like the bison.
The documentation of this animal goes back to the Lascaux cave paintings.
There was a marvelous animal, a marsupial wolf called the thylacine in Tasmania, south of Australia, called the Tasmanian tiger.
The passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome.
So this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome of an extinct species with the genome of its closest living relative.
Now along the way, George points out that his technology, the technology of synthetic biology, is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law.
Now, this photograph I took of him last year at the Smithsonian, he's looking down at Martha, the last passenger pigeon alive.
The third result of the Boston meeting was the realization that there are scientists all over the world working on various forms of de-extinction, but they'd never met each other.
So they hosted and funded this meeting. And 35 scientists, they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists, basically meeting to see if they had work to do together.
The aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle, and so basically its genome is alive, it's just unevenly distributed.
The last bucardo was a female named Celia who was still alive, but then they captured her, they got a little bit of tissue from her ear, they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen, released her back into the wild, but a few months later, she was found dead under a fallen tree.
They took the DNA from that ear, they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat, the pregnancy came to term, and a live baby bucardo was born.
(Applause) It was short-lived.
So now we go to Mike McGrew who is a scientist at Roslin Institute in Scotland, and Mike's doing miracles with birds.
There were some conservationists, really famous conservationists like Stanley Temple, who is one of the founders of conservation biology, and Kate Jones from the IUCN, which does the Red List.
And so the Red List is really important, keep track of what's endangered and critically endangered, and so on.
The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987.
Another success story is the mountain gorilla in Central Africa.
Do you want extinct species back?
(Applause) Tinker Bell is going to come fluttering down.
They're going to work on the genomes of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon.
You can do the same thing, as the costs come down, for the Carolina parakeet, for the great auk, for the heath hen, for the ivory-billed woodpecker, for the Eskimo curlew, for the Caribbean monk seal, for the woolly mammoth.
Because the fact is, humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years.
We have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.
Thank you.
Let's go back before Christ, three millennia, to a time when, at least in my head, the journey for justice, the march against inequality and poverty really began.
Three thousand years ago, civilization just getting started on the banks of the Nile, some slaves, Jewish shepherds in this instance, smelling of sheep shit, I guess, proclaimed to the Pharaoh, sitting high on his throne, "We, your majesty-ness, are equal to you."
Cut to our century, same country, same pyramids, another people spreading the same idea of equality with a different book.
Crowds are gathered in Tahrir Square.
Enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist.
Since the year 2000, since the turn of the millennium, there are eight million more AIDS patients getting life-saving antiretroviral drugs.
Malaria: There are eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have their death rates cut by 75 percent.
That's a rate of 7,256 children's lives saved each day.
Seven thousand kids a day. Here's two of them.
This is Michael and Benedicta, and they're alive thanks in large part to Dr. Patricia Asamoah -- she's amazing -- and the Global Fund, which all of you financially support, whether you know it or not.
And the Global Fund provides antiretroviral drugs that stop mothers from passing HIV to their kids.
This fantastic news didn't happen by itself.
Now I know that some of you think this progress is all in Asia or Latin America or model countries like Brazil -- and who doesn't love a Brazilian model? -- but look at sub-Saharan Africa.
You can join the One Campaign, and leaders like Mo Ibrahim, the telecom entrepreneur.
But there's a vaccine for that too.
2030? By 2030, robots, not just serving us Guinness, but drinking it.
So I'm here to -- I guess we're here to try and infect you with this virtuous, data-based virus, the one we call factivism.
In fact, it could save countless lives.
Could we really be the great generation that Mandela asked us to be?
Because as is obvious, factivists have feelings too.
We are going to win because we have dreams, and we're willing to stand up for those dreams."
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you so much. (Applause)
Chris Anderson: I have been long so fascinated and amazed by so many aspects of Netflix.
You're full of surprises, if I may say so.
Reed Hastings: Well, cable networks from all time have started on other people's content and then grown into doing their own originals.
And then, as you said, in 2011, Ted Sarandos, my partner at Netflix who runs content, got very excited about "House of Cards."
And at that time, it was 100 million dollars, it was a fantastic investment, and it was in competition with HBO.
And it's not enough.
There are so many great shows on other networks.
It's like, as if Blockbuster one day said, "We're going to make Blockbuster videos," and then, six years later, was as big as Disney.
CA: I mean, there must be something unusual about Netflix's culture that allowed you to take such bold -- I won't say "reckless" -- bold, well thought-through decisions.
It looks like Netflix employees, compared to your peers', are basically the highest paid for equivalent jobs.
Then, of course, the market shifted -- in that case, it was C++ to Java.
If so, we'll pay you a million dollars."
You paid someone a million dollars, because it was like 10 percent better than yours.
"Mudbound" was Oscar-nominated, it's a great, very intensive film.
And so, we have some candy, too, but we have lots of broccoli.
But isn't it the case that algorithms tend to point you away from the broccoli and towards the candy, if you're not careful?
I'm the child of a missionary, I don't even think about these things.
But -- (Laughter) But I mean, it's possible, right?
CA: But how -- John Doerr just talked about measuring what matters.
Are subscribers grown only by the more time they spend watching Netflix, that is what will make them re-subscribe?
You can watch linear TV, you can do video games, you can do YouTube, or you can watch Netflix.
So think of it as this multiple measures of success.
CA: So, speaking of algorithms that have raised questions: You were on the board of Facebook, and I think Mark Zuckerberg -- you've done some mentoring for him.
And you know, all new technologies -- when television was first popular in the 1960s in the US, it was called a "vast wasteland," and that television was going to rot the minds of everybody.
So when I later went into business and became a philanthropist, I think I gravitated towards education and trying to make a difference there.
And the main thing I noticed is, you know, educators want to work with other great educators and to create many unique environments for kids.
And we need a lot more variety in the system than we have, and a lot more educator-centric organizations.
And so the tricky thing is, right now in the US, most schools are run by a local school board.
So in the US there's a form of public school called charter public schools, that are run by nonprofits.
And that's the big emphasis for me, is if you can have schools run by nonprofits, they are more mission-focused, they support the educators well.
I'm on the board of KIPP charter schools, which is one of the larger networks.
But they should be very educator-centric and curious and stimulating and all of those things.
But what these innovative, nonprofit schools are doing is pushing the bounds, letting kids try new things.
CA: And sometimes the criticism is put that charter schools, intentionally or unintentionally, suck resources away from the public school system.
And low-income families generally don't have those choices.
Can I cheekily ask how much you've invested in education in the last few years?
CA: Reed, you're a remarkable person, you've changed all of our lives and the lives of many kids.
Thank you so much for coming to TED.
(Applause)
I have a friend in Portugal whose grandfather built a vehicle out of a bicycle and a washing machine so he could transport his family.
There was a time when we understood how things worked and how they were made, so we could build and repair them, or at the very least make informed decisions about what to buy.
Many of these do-it-yourself practices were lost in the second half of the 20th century.
But now, the maker community and the open-source model are bringing this kind of knowledge about how things work and what they're made of back into our lives, and I believe we need to take them to the next level, to the components things are made of.
But now we have these amazing, futuristic composites -- plastics that change shape, paints that conduct electricity, pigments that change color, fabrics that light up.
Let me show you some examples.
So conductive ink allows us to paint circuits instead of using the traditional printed circuit boards or wires.
Conductive ink has been used by artists, but recent developments indicate that we will soon be able to use it in laser printers and pens.
Two of the known applications for this material include interior design and multi-touch systems.
And thermochromic pigments change color at a given temperature.
So these are just a few of what are commonly known as smart materials.
In a few years, they will be in many of the objects and technologies we use on a daily basis.
We may not yet have the flying cars science fiction promised us, but we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch.
Smart materials are hard to obtain in small quantities.
So a little over three years ago, Kirsty Boyle and I started a project we called Open Materials.
The objects we use, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, all have a profound impact on our behavior, health and quality of life.
So if we are to live in a world made of smart materials, we should know and understand them.
The biggest challenge is that material science is complex and requires expensive equipment.
Two scientists at University of Illinois understood this when they published a paper on a simpler method for making conductive ink.
So Jordan's main form of innovation was to take an experiment created in a well-equipped lab at the university and recreate it in a garage in Chicago using only cheap materials and tools he made himself.
So amongst Hannah's many impressive experiments, this is one of my favorites.
["Paper speakers"] What we're seeing here is just a piece of paper with some copper tape on it connected to an mp3 player and a magnet.
(Music: "Happy Together") So based on the research by Marcelo Coelho from MIT, Hannah created a series of paper speakers out of a wide range of materials from simple copper tape to conductive fabric and ink.
But paper electronics is one of the most promising branches of material science in that it allows us to create cheaper and flexible electronics.
So Hannah's artisanal work, and the fact that she shared her findings, opens the doors to a series of new possibilities that are both aesthetically appealing and innovative.
We often tackle problems from unconventional angles, and, in the process, end up discovering alternatives or even better ways to do things.
So I feel a bit as Ted Nelson must have when, in the early 1970s, he wrote, "You must understand computers now."
Thank you.
(Applause)
We didn't all know each other, but we all kind of trusted each other, and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network, and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things.
It was actually interesting that such a communist principle was the basis of a system developed during the Cold War by the Defense Department, but it obviously worked really well, and we all saw what happened with the Internet.
So the fact is that there's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days, and so we dealt with that by making walled communities, secure subnetworks, VPNs, little things that aren't really the Internet but are made out of the same building blocks, but we're still basically building it out of those same building blocks with those same assumptions of trust.
And that means that it's vulnerable to certain kinds of mistakes that can happen, or certain kinds of deliberate attacks, but even the mistakes can be bad.
So, for instance, in all of Asia recently, it was impossible to get YouTube for a little while because Pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network.
Now, China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake, and it is actually possible that it was, the way things work, but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to, and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes.
Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks.
So if somebody really wanted to attack the United States or Western civilization these days, they're not going to do it with tanks.
Now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refinery or a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant.
And the way the Internet works is the routers are basically exchanging information about how they can get messages to places, and this one processor, because of a broken card, decided it could actually get a message to some place in negative time.
What's happening increasingly, though, is these systems are beginning to use the Internet.
Nobody really knows what the Internet is right now because it's different than it was an hour ago.
And so right now, I think it's literally true that we don't know what the consequences of an effective denial-of-service attack on the Internet would be, and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year, and worse next year, and so on.
This doesn't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project.
So there's been plenty of people, plenty of us have been quietly arguing that we should have this independent system for years, but it's very hard to get people focused on plan B when plan A seems to be working so well.
It's not that hard a problem.
And so I think that this is actually, of all the problems you're going to hear about at the conference, this is probably one of the very easiest to fix.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet.
And I grew up singing a song called "Nothing To Envy."
And I was very proud.
In school, we spent a lot of time studying the history of Kim Il-Sung, but we never learned much about the outside world, except that America, South Korea, Japan are the enemies.
When I was seven years old, I saw my first public execution.
But one day, in 1995, my mom brought home a letter from a coworker's sister.
I was so shocked.
Soon after, when I was walking past a train station, I saw something terrible that to this day I can't erase from my memory.
A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother's face.
A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s.
This is a satellite picture showing North Korea at night, compared to neighbors.
This is the Amnok River, which serves as a part of the border between North Korea and China.
As you can see, the river can be very narrow at certain points, allowing North Koreans to secretly cross.
But many die.
But I only thought that I would be separated from my family for a short time.
One day, my worst nightmare came true, when I was caught by the Chinese police, and brought to the police station for interrogation.
I thought my heart was going to explode.
These girls were so lucky.
Even though they were caught, they were eventually released, after heavy international pressure.
Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China and repatriated to North Korea, where they can be tortured, imprisoned, or publicly executed.
Even after learning a new language and getting a job, their whole world can be turned upside down in an instant.
That's why, after 10 years of hiding my identity, I decided to risk going to South Korea.
English was so important in South Korea, so I had to start learning my third language.
We are all Korean, but inside, we have become very different, due to 67 years of division.
Even though adjusting to life in South Korea was not easy, I made a plan -- I started studying for the university entrance exam.
Just as I was starting to get used to my new life, I received a shocking phone call.
The North Korean authorities intercepted some money that I sent to my family, and, as a punishment, my family was going to be forcibly removed to a desolate location in the countryside.
North Koreans have to travel incredible distances on the path to freedom.
It's almost impossible to cross the border between North Korea and South Korea.
Since my family couldn't speak Chinese, I had to guide them somehow through more than 2,000 miles in China, and then into Southeast Asia.
Since my family couldn't understand Chinese, I thought my family was going to be arrested.
But even after we got past the border, my family was arrested and jailed for illegal border crossing.
I did everything to get my family to freedom, and we came so close, but my family was thrown in jail, just a short distance from the South Korean embassy.
I went back and forth between the immigration office and the police station, desperately trying to get my family out.
At that moment, I heard one man's voice ask me, "What's wrong?"
In my broken English, and with a dictionary, I explained the situation, and without hesitating, the man went to the ATM, and he paid the rest of the money for my family, and two other North Koreans to get out of jail.
I thanked him with all my heart, and I asked him, "Why are you helping me?"
"I'm helping the North Korean people."
Eventually, after our long journey, my family and I were reunited in South Korea.
Many North Koreans are separated from their families, and when they arrive in a new country, they start with little or no money.
We can also act as a bridge between the people inside North Korea and the outside world.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car?
I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity?
CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels.
One is that, even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off.
So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency.
If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency.
And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation.
EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport, and I should say that I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets.
The question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport?
And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with a really energy efficient car, so that means making it incredibly light, and so what you're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America.
And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size.
EM: Yeah. The goal of Tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process, where version one was an expensive car at low volume, version two is medium priced and medium volume, and then version three would be low price, high volume.
So we had a $100,000 sports car, which was the Roadster.
And our third generation car, which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $30,000 car.
CA: I mean, right now, if you've got a short commute, you can drive, you can get back, you can charge it at home.
EM: There actually are far more charging stations than people realize, and at Tesla we developed something called a Supercharging technology, and we're offering that if you buy a Model S for free, forever.
By the end of this year, you'll be able to drive from L.A. to New York just using the Supercharger network, which charges at five times the rate of anything else.
And the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop, to stop time, of about six or seven.
EM: Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption, so I'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar.
We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization.
What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already.
The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.
What are you doing?
And we've made huge progress in that direction, and that's why I'm confident we'll actually beat natural gas.
You will then pay, how long is a typical lease?
Google is one of our big partners here.
With that capital, SolarCity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment, which is less than the utility bill.
CA: So you've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent, depending on how you calculate it.
But the big innovation is still ahead, and you're working on it now. Tell us about this.
The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight.
So the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight.
So it's possible to achieve, let's say, roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket.
Every mode of transport that we use, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses, is reusable, but not rockets.
So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization.
EM: We're actually, we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the Grasshopper Test Project, where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight, the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky.
You've never seen this before. A rocket blasting off and then -- EM: Yeah, so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building.
(Rocket launch) So now it's hovering at about 40 meters, and it's constantly adjusting the angle, the pitch and yaw of the main engine, and maintaining roll with cold gas thrusters.
You bet your fortune on it, and you seem to have done that multiple times.
It is truly amazing what you've done.
Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations.
But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach.
Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics.
So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends.
Thank you so much.
Well, congratulations, because if you look at this particular slide of U.S. life expectancy, you are now in excess of the average life span of somebody who was born in 1900.
Now, that's the good news.
Turns out it's about 4,000, which is pretty amazing, because most of those molecular discoveries have just happened in the last little while.
Only about 250.
Well, wouldn't it be nice if it was that easy?
What's a drug? A drug is made up of a small molecule of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few other atoms all cobbled together in a shape, and it's those shapes that determine whether, in fact, that particular drug is going to hit its target.
Now what you need to do, if you're trying to develop a new treatment for autism or Alzheimer's disease or cancer is to find the right shape in that mix that will ultimately provide benefit and will be safe.
Cystic fibrosis had its molecular cause discovered in 1989 by my group working with another group in Toronto, discovering what the mutation was in a particular gene on chromosome 7.
That's Danny Bessette, 23 years later, because this is the year, and it's also the year where Danny got married, where we have, for the first time, the approval by the FDA of a drug that precisely targets the defect in cystic fibrosis based upon all this molecular understanding.
That's the good news.
The bad news is, this drug doesn't actually treat all cases of cystic fibrosis, and it won't work for Danny, and we're still waiting for that next generation to help him.
It's called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, and it is the most dramatic form of premature aging.
Only about one in every four million kids has this disease, and in a simple way, what happens is, because of a mutation in a particular gene, a protein is made that's toxic to the cell and it causes these individuals to age at about seven times the normal rate.
A progeria cell, on the other hand, because of this toxic protein called progerin, has these lumps and bumps in it.
In an experiment done in cell culture and shown here in a cartoon, if you take that particular compound and you add it to that cell that has progeria, and you watch to see what happened, in just 72 hours, that cell becomes, for all purposes that we can determine, almost like a normal cell.
(Applause) Francis Collins: So what would you like to say to researchers here in the auditorium and others listening to this?
SB: Well, research on progeria has come so far in less than 15 years, and that just shows the drive that researchers can have to get this far, and it really means a lot to myself and other kids with progeria, and it shows that if that drive exists, anybody can cure any disease, and hopefully progeria can be cured in the near future, and so we can eliminate those 4,000 diseases that Francis was talking about.
Please join me in thanking and welcoming Sam.
It's such a rare disease, it would be hard for a company to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to generate a drug.
This is a drug that was developed for cancer.
There are quite a number of success stories one can point to about how this has led to major advances.
It was developed for cancer. It was AZT.
At NIH, we have started this new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
It just started last December, and this is one of its goals.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to a test a drug to see if it's effective and safe without having to put patients at risk, because that first time you're never quite sure?
How do we know, for instance, whether drugs are safe before we give them to people? We test them on animals.
And it's not all that reliable, and it's costly, and it's time-consuming.
Here you see a picture of a lung on a chip.
You can do this same kind of chip technology for kidneys, for hearts, for muscles, all the places where you want to see whether a drug is going to be a problem, for the liver.
This is research that's high-risk, sometimes high-cost.
The payoff is enormous, both in terms of health and in terms of economic growth. We need to support that.
Second, we need new kinds of partnerships between academia and government and the private sector and patient organizations, just like the one I've been describing here, in terms of the way in which we could go after repurposing new compounds.
We need the best and the brightest from many different disciplines to come and join this effort -- all ages, all different groups -- because this is the time, folks.
This is the 21st-century biology that you've been waiting for, and we have the chance to take that and turn it into something which will, in fact, knock out disease. That's my goal.
I hope that's your goal.
If you don't believe me, just ask Sam.
(Applause)
In 1991 I had maybe the most profound and transformative experience of my life.
And I was on a college choir tour up in Northern California, and we had stopped for the day after all day on the bus, and we were relaxing next to this beautiful idyllic lake in the mountains.
Now fast forward to just three years ago.
(Music) And we released to YouTube this, the Virtual Choir Project, 185 singers from 12 different countries.
And then just last spring we released Virtual Choir 3, "Water Night," another piece that I had written, this time nearly 4,000 singers from 73 different countries.
Could we do this all in real time?
(Applause) Thank you.
Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi.
Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, and these creatures define who we are.
The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods.
The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system.
If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings, this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways.
I get asked all of the time from people, "Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?"
From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, broke them open, and compared their gene sequences.
This means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project.
If you look inside the restrooms, they all have really similar ecosystems, and if you were to look inside the classrooms, those also have similar ecosystems.
I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest.
I told Tim, "If you could just see the microbes, it's kind of like being in Costa Rica. Kind of."
And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland.
Another facet of how microbes get around is by people, and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people, or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices.
Given that microbes travel around with people, you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes.
A lot of buildings are operated this way, probably where you work, and companies do this to save money on their energy bill.
What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant until Saturday, when we opened the vents up again.
He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape.
Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone.
There's a new microbe, I just discovered it.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones?
Thank you.
(Applause)
This is where I live. I live in Kenya, at the south parts of the Nairobi National Park.
Those are my dad's cows at the back, and behind the cows, that's the Nairobi National Park.
It's one of the six lions which were killed in Nairobi.
And I think this is why the Nairobi National Park lions are few.
And the first idea I got was to use fire, because I thought lions were scared of fire.
And a second idea I got was to use a scarecrow.
And I discovered that lions are afraid of a moving light.
As you can see, the solar panel charges the battery, and the battery supplies the power to the small indicator box. I call it a transformer.
The lights flash and trick the lions into thinking I was walking around the cowshed, but I was sleeping in my bed.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thanks.
So I put the lights. You can see at the back, those are the lion lights.
And my idea is also being used now all over Kenya for scaring other predators like hyenas, leopards, and it's also being used to scare elephants away from people's farms.
Because of this invention, I was lucky to get a scholarship in one of the best schools in Kenya, Brookhouse International School, and I'm really excited about this.
So one year ago, I was just a boy in the savanna grassland herding my father's cows, and I used to see planes flying over, and I told myself that one day, I'll be there inside.
So my big dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when I grow up.
I've actually been waiting by the phone for a call from TED for years.
And in fact, in 2000, I was ready to talk about eBay, but no call.
(Laughter) When I first moved to Hollywood from Silicon Valley, I had some misgivings.
And I also found that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a lot more in common than I would have dreamed.
Hollywood has its sex symbols, and the Valley has its sex symbols.
Hollywood gathers around power tables, and the Valley gathers around power tables.
So it turned out there was a lot more in common than I would have dreamed.
And what really drives me is a vision of the future that I think we all share.
One is the gap in opportunity -- this gap that President Clinton last night called uneven, unfair and unsustainable -- and, out of that, comes poverty and illiteracy and disease and all these evils that we see around us.
But perhaps the other, bigger gap is what we call the hope gap.
And so chapter one really begins today, with all of us, because within each of us is the power to equal those opportunity gaps and to close the hope gaps.
And so I used to read authors like James Michener and James Clavell and Ayn Rand.
And it struck me that if I could write stories that were about this world as being small and interconnected, that maybe I could get people interested in the issues that affected us all, and maybe engage them to make a difference.
I didn't think that was necessarily the best way to make a living, so I decided to go on a path to become financially independent, so I could write these stories as quickly as I could.
And my dad came home one day and announced that he had cancer, and it looked pretty bad.
I started a couple of businesses that I thought would be the ticket to financial freedom.
One of those businesses was a computer rental business called Micros on the Move, which is very well named, because people kept stealing the computers.
(Laughter) So I figured I needed to learn a little bit more about business, so I went to Stanford Business School and studied there.
And while I was there, I made friends with a fellow named Pierre Omidyar, who is here today. And Pierre, I apologize for this. This is a photo from the old days.
And just after I'd graduated, Pierre came to me with this idea to help people buy and sell things online with each other.
(Laughter) But right after that, Pierre -- in '96, Pierre and I left our full-time jobs to build eBay as a company. And the rest of that story, you know.
The company went public two years later and is today one of the best known companies in the world.
And around that time, I met John Gardner, who is a remarkable man.
He was the architect of the Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.
Bet on good people doing good things."
These leading, innovative, nonprofit folks, who are using business skills in a very leveraged way to solve social problems.
People today we call social entrepreneurs.
And to put a face on it, people like Muhammad Yunus, who started the Grameen Bank, has lifted 100 million people plus out of poverty around the world, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
And somebody like Dr. Victoria Hale, who started the world's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever.
It's what we call, "Invest, connect and celebrate."
And invest: if you see good people doing good things, invest in them. Invest in their organizations, or in business. Invest in these folks.
Connecting them together through conferences -- like a TED -- brings so many powerful connections, or through the World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship that my foundation does at Oxford every year.
And celebrate them: tell their stories, because not only are there good people doing good work, but their stories can help close these gaps of hope.
And I thought about the films that inspired me, films like "Gandhi" and "Schindler's List."
So, in 2003, I started to make my way around Los Angeles to talk about the idea of a pro-social media company and I was met with a lot of encouragement.
(Laughter) Undeterred, in January of 2004, I started Participant Productions with the vision to be a global media company focused on the public interest.
Perhaps more importantly, tens of thousands of people joined the advocacy programs and the activism programs that we created to go around the movies.
But it was a film that starred Charlize Theron and it was about women's rights, women's empowerment, domestic violence and so on.
And we released the film at the same time that the Congress was debating the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.
And after we saw his slide show, it became clear that it was much more urgent.
And so right afterwards, I met backstage with Al, and with Lawrence Bender, who was there, and Laurie David, and Davis Guggenheim, who was running documentaries for Participant at the time.
And you know, there's another adage in Hollywood, that nobody knows nothing about anything.
We've sent 50,000 DVDs to high school teachers in the U.S.
We now call Al the George Clooney of global warming.
We premiered a film called "The Chicago 10" at Sundance this year.
And a documentary that we're doing on Jimmy Carter and his Mid-East peace efforts over the years.
In closing, I'd like to say that everybody has the opportunity to make change in their own way.
And all the people in this room have done so through their business lives, or their philanthropic work, or their other interests.
And I believe if we do these things, we can close the opportunity gaps, we can close the hope gaps.
(Laughter) And finally, an eBay listing for one well-traveled slide show, now obsolete, museum piece. Please contact Al Gore.
And I believe that, working together, we can make all of these things happen.
It's been a real honor. Thank you.
(Applause) Oh, thank you.
So what's superhydrophobic?
Superhydrophobic is how we measure a drop of water on a surface.
A windshield coating is going to give you about 110 degrees.
But what you're seeing here is 160 to 175 degrees, and anything over 150 is superhydrophobic.
So as part of the demonstration, what I have is a pair of gloves, and we've coated one of the gloves with the nanotechnology coating, and let's see if you can tell which one, and I'll give you a hint.
So very small, but very useful.
It's a lot of water-based materials like concrete, water-based paint, mud, and also some refined oils as well.
You can see the difference.
No water, no corrosion.
So imagine how something like this could help revolutionize your field of work.
(Applause)
So game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else.
That's a lot of things: competition, cooperation, bargaining, games like hide-and-seek, and poker.
Here's a simple game to get us started.
Everyone chooses a number from zero to 100, we're going to compute the average of those numbers, and whoever's closest to two-thirds of the average wins a fixed prize.
A lot of people say, "I really don't know what people are going to pick, so I think the average will be 50."
This is called a cognitive hierarchy theory, by the way.
A very different theory, a much more popular one, and an older one, due largely to John Nash of "A Beautiful Mind" fame, is what's called equilibrium analysis.
An equilibrium is a mathematical state in which everybody has figured out exactly what everyone else will do.
Let's see what happens. This experiment's been done many, many times.
This is a beautiful data set of 9,000 people who wrote in to three newspapers and magazines that had a contest.
They don't necessarily pick exactly 33 and 22.
So they're smart, but poor.
(Laughter) Where are these things happening in the brain?
One study by Coricelli and Nagel gives a really sharp, interesting answer.
Now if you were to step back and say, "What can we do with this information?"
you might be able to look at brain activity and say, "This person's going to be a good poker player," or, "This person's socially naive," and we might also be able to study things like development of adolescent brains once we have an idea of where this circuitry exists.
And the way they bargain is to point on a number line that goes from zero to six dollars, and they're bargaining over how much the uninformed player gets, and the informed player's going to get the rest.
That's an interesting difference, as you might imagine.
It's good for them. They make a lot of money.
Now I'm going to show you the results from the EEG recording.
Remember that we scanned both brains at the same time, so we can ask about time-synced activity in similar or different areas simultaneously, just like if you wanted to study a conversation and you were scanning two people talking to each other and you'd expect common activity in language regions when they're actually kind of listening and communicating.
So in this case, if you look carefully, most of the arrows flow from right to left.
You can see it looks different than the one before.
That means that the brains are synced up more closely in terms of simultaneous activity, and the arrows flow clearly from left to right.
Charles Darwin and I and you broke off from the family tree from chimpanzees about five million years ago.
We share more genes with them than zebras do with horses.
So how humans and chimpanzees behave differently might tell us a lot about brain evolution.
So this is an amazing memory test from Nagoya, Japan, Primate Research Institute, where they've done a lot of this research.
This goes back quite a ways. They're interested in working memory.
And they're highly experienced, so they've done this thousands and thousands of time.
So here's how game theorists look at these data.
And as you can see, their behavior moves up in the direction of this change in the Nash equilibrium.
They're actually closer than any species we've observed.
What about humans? You think you're smarter than a chimpanzee?
Here's two human groups in green and blue.
The chimps are playing better than the humans, better in the sense of adhering to game theory.
People seem to do a limited amount of strategic thinking using theory of mind.
We have some preliminary evidence from bargaining that early warning signs in the brain might be used to predict whether there will be a bad disagreement that costs money, and chimps are better competitors than humans, as judged by game theory.
Thank you.
(Applause)
One is called the general election.
You don't necessarily have to win. There is Jerry Brown.
Now you say, really?
Really .05 percent?
Now, what can we say about this democracy in USA-land?
Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, "Always lean to the green."
Now, by corruption I don't mean brown paper bag cash secreted among members of Congress.
The corruption I'm talking about is perfectly legal.
This is a corruption.
Now, there's good news and bad news about this corruption.
One bit of good news is that it's bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption.
When Al Gore was Vice President, his team had an idea for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry.
Henry David Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
You focus on the possible problems, like eradicating polio from the world, or taking an image of every single street across the globe, or building the first real universal translator, or building a fusion factory in your garage.
But we cannot ignore this corruption anymore.
If you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century, issues like racism, or sexism, or the issue that we've been fighting in this century, homophobia, those are hard issues.
You don't wake up one day no longer a racist.
And I imagined a doctor coming to me and saying, "Your son has terminal brain cancer, and there's nothing you can do.
We lose something dear, something everyone in this room loves and cherishes, if we lose this republic, and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong.
Do you have that love?
We have lost that republic.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm a 26-year-old British Asian woman working in media and living in a South West postcode in London.
I have previously lived at two addresses in Sussex, and two others in North East London.
They mostly did their shopping online at Ocado, gave money to charities and read the Financial Times.
I'm interested in movies and startups, and I have taken five holidays in the past 12 months, mostly to visit friends abroad.
I don't own a TV or watch any scheduled programming, but I do enjoy on-demand services such as Netflix or Now TV.
I cook a little, but I tend to eat out or get takeaways often.
My favourite cuisines are Thai and Mexican food.
On weeknights, I tend to spend the evenings with my university friends having dinner.
On Fridays, you'll find me at the pub after work.
I like the idea of living abroad someday.
I prefer to work as a team than on my own.
I'm rarely swayed by others' views.
My journey to uncover what data companies knew began in 2014, when I became curious about the murky world of data brokers, a multi-billion-pound industry of companies that collect, package, and sell detailed profiles of individuals based on their online and offline behaviours.
I decided to write about it for Wired Magazine.
I already knew about my daily records being collected by services such as Google Maps, Search, Facebook, or contactless credit card transactions.
Ultimately, you are the product.
Ostensibly, we're all protected by data protection laws.
In the UK, the law states that any personal data set has to be stripped of identifiers such as your name or your National Insurance number.
About a decade ago, Latanya Sweeney, a professor of privacy at Harvard University proved that about 87% of US citizens could be uniquely identified by just three facts about them: their zip code, their date of birth, and their gender.
Professor Sweeney proved this in a rather cheeky way when William Weld, a former governor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the US decided to support the commercial release of 135,000 state employee health records along with their families, including his own.
For $20, Professor Sweeney purchased the voter records for Cambridge, Massachusetts, containing the names, zip codes, dates of birth, and gender for every voter in the area, and then cross-referenced this with their health records.
Three of them were men.
(Laughter) Every day, we hear about new examples of companies digging ever deeper into our personal lives.
In the November US presidential election, a little-known British company known as Cambridge Analytica was tasked with winning the election for a certain candidate: Donald Trump, using data analytics.
The company employed cookies online to track people around the web, logging every website visited, every search term typed, and every video watched.
Researchers have called them a propaganda machine.
It's not just large companies digging into your life; it's free apps and small startups as well.
I realised on my phone that every time I logged fitness data into the app Endomondo, it was sharing my details including my location and gender with third-party advertisers.
WebMD, a symptom checkers app, was sharing even more sensitive information including the symptoms, procedures, and drugs viewed by users within its app with its third parties.
Fitbit was sharing data with Yahoo.
A pregnancy tracking app was selling on information about its users' ovulation cycles and fertility cycles with people or advertisers like InMobi.
As long as my phone is turned on, my location can be tracked, not just by the obvious apps like Google Maps, but a whole host of unrelated services from Uber to Twitter, Photos, Snapchat, TripAdvisor, and others.
In 2015, Samsung was found to be recording people in the homes in which their TVs had been sold using their voice recognition systems.
Even services like Google and Facebook, trusted and used by billions around the world, have been accused of crossing the line.
A few weeks ago, my husband and I were driving home from work and discussing where we should have dinner.
I suggested a restaurant that I knew was somewhere on our way back and then opened up Google Maps to plot it.
There have been several anecdotal reports of people being shown adverts based on things and conversations they were having in real life, prompting concerns that Facebook and Google are eavesdropping on people via their personal devices.
(Laughter) They don't know my name, but they know more about me than my neighbours do.
Eyeota also buys information from third parties such as the credit rating agency Experian, which amasses a massive database of 15 different demographic types and 66 lifestyles, all based on people's post codes.
(Laughter) It can then sell this information on to the highest bidder.
But most of this information being collected is sustained by advertisers and traded commercially.
In fact, eMarketer has predicted that the online advertising industry, which is based almost completely on data targeting and tracking, will hit an all-time high of 77 billion dollars this year.
Of course, this resulted in an increase in health insurance premiums.
As the amount of data that is collected increases exponentially, it becomes much easier to identify you.
For example, your Fitbit measures our heart rate or your gait patterns and these can be used to estimate things like your height, your weight, or even your gender.
The more the companies know about you - where you live, how many children you have, what your medical ailments are, what you buy - your anonymity becomes irrelevant.
What's more, you lose your right to free choice, as companies make decisions on your behalf without your knowledge.
I immediately wrote to my local council and asked them to make my voter records private.
I made up a fake email address, and I started registering with a fake age and gender.
I turned off targeted advertising, and I asked Facebook to send me all the information that they held on me, including things I had deleted, and spent hours poring over it obsessively.
For example, I stopped signing up to supposedly free services, for example, a VIP card at my local hairdresser or a discount coupon at your supermarket.
This means it will become too expensive for companies, governments, and non-profits to recklessly mine and hold our data, and sell it on indiscriminately But until the data economy matures, and power moves back from the corporation to the individual, I have lost more than my anonymity.
I have given up my right to self-determination and free choice.
All I have left is my name.
Thank you.
(Applause)
This is the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, where I work as a curator.
Back in 1995, we got a new wing next to the museum.
And it was on June 5, 1995, that I heard a loud bang against the glass that changed my life and ended that of a duck.
Both are of the male sex.
Well, I'm a biologist. I'm an ornithologist.
I said, "Something's wrong here."
One is dead, one is alive. That must be necrophilia.
I look. Both are of the male sex.
Homosexual necrophilia.
So I -- (Laughter) I took my camera, I took my notebook, took a chair, and started to observe this behavior.
After 75 minutes — (Laughter) — I had seen enough, and I got hungry, and I wanted to go home.
And here's a rare picture of a duck's penis, so it was indeed of the male sex.
It's a rare picture because there are 10,000 species of birds and only 300 possess a penis.
So after six years, my friends and colleagues urged me to publish, so I published "The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard."
I got a phone call from a person called Marc Abrahams, and he told me, "You've won a prize with your duck paper: the Ig Nobel Prize."
And the Ig Nobel Prize — (Laughter) (Applause) — the Ig Nobel Prize honors research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think, with the ultimate goal to make more people interested in science.
(Laughter) So here's my one minute of fame, my acceptance speech, and here's the duck.
(Laughter) This is a moose.
This is a frog that tries to copulate with a goldfish.
These are cane toads in Australia.
Please note that this is necrophilia.
The missionary position is very rare in the animal kingdom.
These are pigeons in Rotterdam.
This is a turkey in Wisconsin on the premises of the Ethan Allen juvenile correctional institution.
I mean, the question I ask myself, why does this happen in nature?
So I'll conclude to invite you all to Dead Duck Day.
That's on June 5 every year.
At five minutes to six in the afternoon, we come together at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, the duck comes out of the museum, and we try to discuss new ways to prevent birds from colliding with windows.
In the U.S. alone, a billion birds die in collision with glass buildings.
Thank you.
(Applause) Oh, sorry.
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.
Today I'm going to show you an electric vehicle that weighs less than a bicycle, that you can carry with you anywhere, that you can charge off a normal wall outlet in 15 minutes, and you can run it for 1,000 kilometers on about a dollar of electricity.
But when I say the word electric vehicle, people think about vehicles. They think about cars and motorcycles and bicycles, and the vehicles that you use every day.
But if you come about it from a different perspective, you can create some more interesting, more novel concepts.
It's really maneuverable. You have a hand-held remote, so you can pretty easily control acceleration, braking, go in reverse if you like, also have braking.
So next time you think about a vehicle, I hope, like us, you're thinking about something new.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and my favorite hobby is photography.
And as I travel around the world, I love taking photographs like these, so I can remember all the beautiful and interesting things that I've seen.
So the sense of touch is actually pretty interesting.
The first is tactile sensations, things you feel in your skin.
This has to do with the position of your body and how it's moving, and the forces you encounter.
And I'm intrigued and curious about whether we could make technology better by doing a better job at leveraging the human capability with the sense of touch.
So here are three examples and these are all done from research in my lab at Penn.
So the way we solve this problem is by creating a hand-held tool that has many different sensors inside.
Part of her job is to teach dental students how to tell where in a patient's mouth there are cavities.
What they're feeling for is if the tooth is really hard, then it's healthy, but if it's kind of soft and sticky, that's a signal that the enamel is starting to decay.
These types of judgments are hard for a new dental student to make, because they haven't touched a lot of teeth yet.
You might be thinking, "We should definitely put a filling in this tooth."
But if you pay attention to how it feels, all the surfaces of this tooth are hard and healthy, so this patient does not need a filling.
The last example I want to tell you about is again about human movement.
We developed this system for use in stroke rehabilitation, but I think there are a lot of applications, like maybe dance training or all sorts of sports training as well.
So now you know a little bit about the field of haptics, which I think you'll hear more about in the coming years.
I've shown you three examples.
(Applause)
This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways.
It suggests that there's all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me.
This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus.
And he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation.
And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos.
And people said yes, and they built with these Legos.
Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions?
Now we had another version of this experiment.
In this other version of the experiment, we didn't put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be.
What happened?
So people understand that meaning is important, they just don't understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it's important.
If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don't.
There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle.
And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project.
And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to.
And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment.
And everybody raised their hand.
The next experiment was slightly different.
But I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated.
Now there's good news and bad news here.
So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA.
And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.
So when they started cake mixes in the '40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and -- voila -- you had cake.
We asked people to build some origami.
Or "I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?"
Which one of those two is correct?
Imagine I asked you, "How much would you sell your kids for?"
By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.
(Laughter) By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on.
If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency.
He gave an example of a pin factory.
And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency.
Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing.
I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx.
But the reality is that we've switched, and now we're in the knowledge economy.
You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy?
Is efficiency still more important than meaning?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
This is me building a prototype for six hours straight.
This is what the DIY and maker movements really look like.
But there is another world.
Today at the micro- and nanoscales, there's an unprecedented revolution happening.
There's even a software called cadnano that allows us to design three-dimensional shapes like nano robots or drug delivery systems and use DNA to self-assemble those functional structures.
But if we look at the human scale, there's massive problems that aren't being addressed by those nanoscale technologies.
In water pipes, we have fixed-capacity water pipes that have fixed flow rates, except for expensive pumps and valves.
So I'd like to propose that we can combine those two worlds, that we can combine the world of the nanoscale programmable adaptive materials and the built environment.
We need a few simple ingredients.
So in one-dimensional systems -- this is a project called the self-folding proteins.
And we're also translating that into two-dimensional systems -- so flat sheets that can self-fold into three-dimensional structures.
And we built 500 of these glass beakers.
And so these became intuitive models to understand how molecular self-assembly works at the human scale.
This is the polio virus.
You shake it hard and it breaks apart.
We even demonstrated that we can do this at a much larger scale.
The idea was, could we self-assemble furniture-scale objects?
So today for the first time, we're unveiling a new project, which is a collaboration with Stratasys, and it's called 4D printing.
The idea behind 4D printing is that you take multi-material 3D printing -- so you can deposit multiple materials -- and you add a new capability, which is transformation, that right off the bed, the parts can transform from one shape to another shape directly on their own.
And this is like robotics without wires or motors.
We also worked with Autodesk on a software they're developing called Project Cyborg.
And this allows us to simulate this self-assembly behavior and try to optimize which parts are folding when.
I'm biased.
And space is a great example of that.
Imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate, or maybe even undulate like peristaltics to move the water themselves.
So this isn't expensive pumps or valves.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And later, in the mid-'80s, when "Jeopardy" came back on the air, I remember running home from school every day to watch the show.
And of course I said yes, for several reasons.
I had taken some artificial intelligence classes.
Watson's actually huge.
It's thousands of processors, a terabyte of memory, trillions of bytes of memory.
There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage.
I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the '80s seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line.
I'm not an economist myself.
And as a result, a part of our brain that's supposed to do that kind of stuff gets smaller and dumber.
The more I thought about it, I realized, no, it's still important.
And it happens in real life all the time.
(Laughter) The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker, friend of Dr. Johnson, Samuel Parr once said, "It's always better to know a thing than not to know it."
This is a question of leadership, because it becomes a question of who leads the future.
For the most part, they are just normal folks who are universally interested in the world around them, curious about everything, thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject.
Thank you very much.
So we really want to build a robot that anyone can use, whether you're eight or 80.
And as it turns out, that's a really hard problem, because you have to build a small, portable robot that's not only really affordable, but it has to be something that people actually want to take home and have around their kids.
And by leveraging the power of the iPhone's processor, we can create a robot that is wi-fi enabled and computer vision-capable for 150 bucks, which is about one percent of what these kinds of robots have cost in the past.
When Romo wakes up, he's in creature mode.
So in a lot of ways, Romo is like a pet that has a mind of his own.
And if I want to explore the world -- uh-oh, Romo's tired -- if I want to explore the world with Romo, I can actually connect him from any other iOS device.
And finally, because Romo is an extension of me, I can express myself through his emotions.
Thank you, Scott.
And even cooler, you actually don't have to be in the same geographic location as the robot to control him.
So you can log in through the browser, and it's kind of like Skype on wheels.
So we were talking before about telepresence, and this is a really cool example.
You can imagine an eight-year-old girl, for example, who has an iPhone, and her mom buys her a robot.
Grandma can log into that robot and play hide-and-go-seek with her granddaughter for fifteen minutes every single night, when otherwise she might only be able to get to see her granddaughter once or twice a year.
Thanks, Scott.
(Applause) So those are a couple of the really cool things that Romo can do today.
But I just want to finish by talking about something that we're working on in the future.
It's built on top of a Google open framework called Blockly.
And you can actually simulate that behavior in the browser, which is what you see Romo doing on the left.
So all of these wi-fi–enabled robots actually learn from each other.
So we think that if you're going to have a robot in your home, that robot ought to be a manifestation of your own imagination.
The future of personal robotics is happening today, and it's going to depend on small, agile robots like Romo and the creativity of people like yourselves.
Thank you.
(Applause)
It wasn't at four in the morning, but it was closer to midnight.
Told him my idea, and you know, he is one of the bravest men in the world, as is General Blair, who, in the end, gave me permission to try this experiment.
I started with the 1607 Massachusetts Bay Colony Pequot Indian Wars.
MM: The day is here. Life will change.
He served -- (Applause) -- with the Marines, and I want to tell you a little, brief story.
We were one of the lucky ones to get in the class with the Sony cameras and the Vista software.
Right? And we started talking.
Probably 20 dead, at least 20 or 30 wounded Iraqis.
I remember giving three IVs, bandaging several wounded.
I should really thank God for saving my lucky ass.
It's a new way of trying to make a documentary.
And usually, the first questions are, "Oh, what kind of cameras did you use?"
In this film, there is a scene where an Iraqi woman is killed.
And he looked at me, and I smiled, and then I saw the tears start welling up in his eyes.
And he said, "I killed a child.
And often, I'll hear people say, who maybe know that I did this film, and they say, "Oh, you know, I'm against the war, but I support the soldiers."
Do you really care?
Thank you.
And I looked up and said, "Who is that man?"
And then all of a sudden I began thinking about the dogs and the fire hoses, and I got really scared, I really did.
And so for them, when they hear about the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, in many ways, if they see it on TV, it's like our looking at the 1863 "Lincoln" movie: It's history.
And so it is especially significant that the university I now lead, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, was founded the very year I went to jail with Dr. King, in 1963.
We married those ideas, and we created this Meyerhoff Scholars program.
And what is significant about the program is that we learned a number of things.
(Applause) You see, most people don't realize that it's not just minorities who don't do well in science and engineering.
Smart simply means you're ready to learn.
And he said, in contrast, his Jewish mother would say, "Izzy, did you ask a good question today?"
And so high expectations have to do with curiosity and encouraging young people to be curious.
And as a result of those high expectations, we began to find students we wanted to work with to see what could we do to help them, not simply to survive in science and engineering, but to become the very best, to excel.
That young man went on to graduate from UMBC, to become the first black to get the M.D./Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
She and her adviser have a patent on a second use of Viagra for diabetes patients.
So building community among those students, very important.
And so our students are working in labs regularly.
It's called academic innovation.
If you don't know it, there's been a 79-percent decline in the number of women majoring in computer science just since 2000.
And what I'm saying is that what will make the difference will be building community among students, telling young women, young minority students and students in general, you can do this work.
When I was a 12-year-old child in the jail in Birmingham, I kept thinking, "I wonder what my future could be."
I had no idea that it was possible for this little black boy in Birmingham to one day be president of a university that has students from 150 countries, where students are not there just to survive, where they love learning, where they enjoy being the best, where they will one day change the world.
Aristotle said, "Excellence is never an accident.
It is the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution.
He said, "Choice, not chance, determines your destiny."
Choice, not chance, determines your destiny, dreams and values.
(Applause)
Twenty-four years ago, I had -- a sophomore in college, I had a series of fainting spells. No alcohol was involved.
And I'm sitting in a waiting room some time later for an ultrasound, and all six of these doctors actually show up in the room at once, and I'm like, "Uh oh, this is bad news."
Now the problem with this model is that it's unsustainable globally.
We need to invent what I call a personal health system.
So what does this personal health system look like, and what new technologies and roles is it going to entail?
This is Libby, or actually, this is an ultrasound image of Libby.
(Laughter) I'm going to use a device from a company called Mobisante.
This is a portable ultrasound.
And actually, can you see Libby?
You look busy. How are you?
TB: Yeah, let's do that.
TB: Many people after a kidney transplant will develop a little fluid collection around the kidney.
I've got my six month biopsy in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to let you do that in the clinic, because I don't think I can do that one on myself.
TB: Good choice.ED: All right, thanks, Dr. Batiuk.
Now there's really three pillars of this personal health I want to talk to you about now, and it's care anywhere, care networking and care customization.
Now I personally learned that hospitals can be a very dangerous place at a young age.
Now the software is also getting smarter, right?
Now, if we've got all these networked devices that are helping us to do care anywhere, it stands to reason that we also need a team to be able to interact with all of that stuff, and that leads to the second pillar I want to talk about, care networking.
Uncoordinated care today is expensive at best, and it is deadly at worst.
Eighty percent of medical errors are actually caused by communication and coordination problems amongst medical team members.
I had my own heart scare years ago in graduate school, when we're under treatment for the kidney, and suddenly, they're like, "Oh, we think you have a heart problem."
And this happens to millions of people every year.
I should have been happy, because I was so well that I could go back to my normal doctors, but I wept because I was so actually connected to this team.
The other people in this picture are me and my wife, Ashley.
That's the only way that the model works.
My team is actually working in China on one of these self-care models for a project we called Age-Friendly Cities.
But the second example I want to give you is, I happened to be an early guinea pig, and I got very lucky to have my whole genome sequenced.
And I tell you, this kind of care customization for everything from your goals to your genetics will be the most game-changing transformation that we witness in health care during our lifetime.
So these three pillars of personal health, care anywhere, care networking, care customization, are happening in pieces now, but this vision will completely fail if we don't step up as caregivers and as patients to take on new roles.
It's what my friend Verna said: Wake up and take control of your health.
I only had one night in the hospital.
The surgery was done laparoscopically, so I have just five very small scars on my abdomen, and I had four weeks away from work and went back to doing everything I'd done before without any changes.
ED: Well, I probably will never get a chance to say this to you in such a large audience ever again.
So "thank you" feel likes a really trite word, but thank you from the bottom of my heart for saving my life.
I hope you will go out and make personal health happen for yourselves and for everyone. Thanks so much.
(Applause)
The British Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its third meeting at the University of Cambridge.
Coleridge felt that true philosophers like himself pondered the cosmos from their armchairs.
A young Cambridge scholar named William Whewell stood up and quieted the audience.
"If 'philosophers' is taken to be too wide and lofty a term," he said, "then, by analogy with 'artist,' we may form 'scientist.'" This was the first time the word scientist was uttered in public, only 179 years ago.
I mean, how could the word scientist not have existed until 1833?
Prior to this meeting, those who studied the natural world were talented amateurs.
Much of this revolution can be traced to four men who met at Cambridge University in 1812: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones and William Whewell.
Charles Babbage, I think known to most TEDsters, invented the first mechanical calculator and the first prototype of a modern computer.
John Herschel mapped the stars of the southern hemisphere, and, in his spare time, co-invented photography.
Richard Jones became an important economist who later influenced Karl Marx.
In the Cambridge winter of 1812 and 1813, the four met for what they called philosophical breakfasts.
They felt science had stagnated since the days of the scientific revolution that had happened in the 17th century.
About 200 years before, Francis Bacon and then, later, Isaac Newton, had proposed an inductive scientific method.
The problem was that an influential group at Oxford began arguing that because it worked so well in economics, this deductive method ought to be applied to the natural sciences too.
Reading one of Herschel's books was such a watershed moment for Charles Darwin that he would later say, "Scarcely anything in my life made so deep an impression on me.
[Science for the public good] Previously, it was believed that scientific knowledge ought to be used for the good of the king or queen, or for one's own personal gain.
For example, ship captains needed to know information about the tides in order to safely dock at ports.
[New scientific institutions] Founded in Bacon's time, the Royal Society of London was the foremost scientific society in England and even in the rest of the world.
These new societies required that members be active researchers publishing their results.
Occasionally, there were prizes, such as that given to John Harrison in the 18th century, for solving the so-called longitude problem, but prizes were only given after the fact, when they were given at all.
So the philosophical breakfast club helped invent the modern scientist.
and "What proportion of the Earth is covered in water?"
Thank you.
(Applause)
To go back to that toilet, it wasn't a particularly fancy toilet, it wasn't as nice as this one from the World Toilet Organization.
2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet.
Forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet.
And here's another image of diarrhea.
But she wasn't alone that day, because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea, and they do every day.
Diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide, and you've probably been asked to care about things like HIV/AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together.
It's a very potent weapon of mass destruction.
You'll have heard of cholera, but we don't hear about diarrhea.
The flush toilet was voted the best medical advance of the last 200 years by the readers of the British Medical Journal, and they were choosing over the Pill, anesthesia, and surgery.
It's a wonderful waste disposal device.
And I think that the real waste of human waste is that we are wasting it as a resource and as an incredible trigger for development, because these are a few things that toilets and poop itself can do for us.
Twenty-five percent of girls in India drop out of school because they have no adequate sanitation.
Poop can cook your dinner.
It's not just in the poor world that poop can save lives.
She's been suffering for years.
So you'd be thinking by now, okay, the solution's simple, we give everyone a toilet.
It's been done for decades. The soap companies did it in the early 20th century.
(Laughter) And in case you think that poster's just propaganda, here's Priyanka, 23 years old.
I met her last October in India, and she grew up in a conservative environment.
She grew up in a rural village in a poor area of India, and she was engaged at 14, and then at 21 or so, she moved into her in-law's house.
After three days, she did an unthinkable thing.
It's what I call social contagion, and it's really powerful and really exciting.
Kids were dying of diarrhea and cholera.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Let's start with leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL, the most common cancer of children.
Today, some 25, 30 years later, we're talking about a mortality rate that's reduced by 85 percent.
Heart disease used to be the biggest killer, particularly for men in their 40s.
AIDS, incredibly, has just been named, in the past month, a chronic disease, meaning that a 20-year-old who becomes infected with HIV is expected not to live weeks, months, or a couple of years, as we said only a decade ago, but is thought to live decades, probably to die in his '60s or '70s from other causes altogether.
Unfortunately, the news is not all good.
What you may not realize is just how prevalent it is.
There are 38,000 suicides each year in the United States.
Third most common cause of death amongst people between the ages of 15 and 25.
Well, there are probably three reasons.
But what really drives these numbers, this high morbidity, and to some extent the high mortality, is the fact that these start very early in life.
This is the part of it that is perhaps most difficult, and in a sense this is a kind of confession for me.
These are scans from Judy Rapoport and her colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in which they studied children with very early onset schizophrenia, and you can see already in the top there's areas that are red or orange, yellow, are places where there's less gray matter, and as they followed them over five years, comparing them to age match controls, you can see that, particularly in areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the superior temporal gyrus, there's a profound loss of gray matter.
But look at this closely and you can see that actually they've crossed a different threshold.
The tools that we have now allow us to detect these brain changes much earlier, long before the symptoms emerge.
The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention.
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10." -- Bill Gates.
(Applause)
One year ago, I rented a car in Jerusalem to go find a man I'd never met but who had changed my life.
I was then 19 years old.
College ended and I returned to Jerusalem for a year.
It was then I read the testimony that Abed gave the morning after the crash, of driving down the right lane of a highway toward Jerusalem.
I walked with my cane and my ankle brace and a backpack on trips in six continents.
I pitched overhand in a weekly softball game that I started in Central Park, and home in New York, I became a journalist and an author, typing hundreds of thousands of words with one finger.
Who was I?
But Chopin was on the radio, seven beautiful mazurkas, and I pulled into a lot by a gas station to listen and to calm.
He listened to me.
And as I sat contemplating what to say, a woman approached in a black shawl and black robe.
He wore black and white: slippers over socks, pilling sweatpants, a piebald sweater, a striped ski cap pulled down to his forehead.
"Um, Abed," I said, "I thought you had a few driving issues before the crash."
It was then I understood that Abed would never apologize.
Abed and I sat with our coffee.
With a nod to Jewish custom, he told me that I should live to be 120 years old.
(Applause) Thanks a lot.
(Applause)
It's been around for about 7,000 years.
In Mesoamerica, there used to be neurosurgery, and there were these neurosurgeons that used to treat patients.
There were some sites where one percent of all the skulls have these holes, and so you can see that neurologic and psychiatric disease is quite common, and it was also quite common about 7,000 years ago.
So there are areas of the brain that are dedicated to controlling your movement or your vision or your memory or your appetite, and so on.
When the malfunction is in a circuit that regulates your mood, you get things like depression, and when it is in a circuit that controls your memory and cognitive function, then you get things like Alzheimer's disease.
And this is accomplished using this kind of device, and this is called deep brain stimulation.
Now, about a hundred thousand patients in the world have received deep brain stimulation, and I'm going to show you some examples of using deep brain stimulation to treat disorders of movement, disorders of mood and disorders of cognition.
You see the electrode going through the skull into the brain and resting there, and we can place this really anywhere in the brain.
I tell my friends that no neuron is safe from a neurosurgeon, because we can really reach just about anywhere in the brain quite safely now.
Now the first example I'm going to show you is a patient with Parkinson's disease, and this lady has Parkinson's disease, and she has these electrodes in her brain, and I'm going to show you what she's like when the electrodes are turned off and she has her Parkinson's symptoms, and then we're going to turn it on.
So dystonia is a disorder affecting children.
So back in 1997, I was asked to see this young boy, perfectly normal. He has this genetic form of dystonia.
There are eight children in the family.
Five of them have dystonia.
So here he is now, back in Israel where he lives, three months after the procedure, and here he is.
(Applause) On the basis of this result, this is now a procedure that's done throughout the world, and there have been hundreds of children that have been helped with this kind of surgery.
This boy is now in university and leads quite a normal life.
(Applause) We realized that perhaps we could use this technology not only in circuits that control your movement but also circuits that control other things, and the next thing that we took on was circuits that control your mood.
If I make any of you sad, for example, I make you remember the last time you saw your parent before they died or a friend before they died, this area of the brain lights up.
It is the sadness center of the brain.
We're able to drive down area 25, down to a more normal level, and we're able to turn back online the frontal lobes of the brain, and indeed we're seeing very striking results in these patients with severe depression.
I've shown you that we can use deep brain stimulation to treat the motor system in cases of Parkinson's disease and dystonia.
Can we use deep brain stimulation to make you smarter?
Now it turns out that in Alzheimer's disease, there's a huge deficit in glucose utilization in the brain.
The brain is a bit of a hog when it comes to using glucose.
Twenty percent of all the glucose in your body is used by the brain, and as you go from being normal to having mild cognitive impairment, which is a precursor for Alzheimer's, all the way to Alzheimer's disease, then there are areas of the brain that stop using glucose.
So the lights are out in parts of the brain in patients with Alzheimer's disease, and the question is, are the lights out forever, or can we turn the lights back on?
Can we get those areas of the brain to use glucose once again?
We then put in the DBS electrodes and we wait for a month or a year, and the areas in red represent the areas where we increase glucose utilization.
(Applause) So the message I want to leave you with today is that, indeed, there are several circuits in the brain that are malfunctioning across various disease states, whether we're talking about Parkinson's disease, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's.
We're going to see electrodes being placed for many disorders of the brain.
Thank you very much.
The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today.
Basically, if we think about language, language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked.
Ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours.
And in order to understand it, what we want to see is the way, in this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up.
Now LOL, we generally think of as meaning "laughing out loud."
But if you text now, or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become, you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore.
Julie: "lol thanks gmail is being slow right now" Now if you think about it, that's not funny.
So Julie says, "I just sent you an email."
We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles.
Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today.
Jake: "Haha. Slash I'm watching this video with suns players trying to shoot with one eye."
It's not as sophisticated as the language of The Wall Street Journal.
Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial.
So in closing, if I could go into the future, if I could go into 2033, the first thing I would ask is whether David Simon had done a sequel to "The Wire." I would want to know.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
That horse is pulling it along at one percent of the speed of sound, and the rutted dirt road turns into a quagmire of mud anytime it rains.
That's a Boeing 707.
There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face.
And here's my theme: Because of the headwinds, if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years, growth is cut in half.
If innovation is less powerful, invents less great, wonderful things, then growth is going to be even lower than half of history.
You'll notice that, for the first four centuries, there's hardly any growth at all, just 0.2 percent.
That is a forecast that I made six years ago that growth would slow down to 1.3 percent.
You'll notice that in 1891, over on the left, we were at about 5,000 dollars.
Two-percent growth quadruples your standard of living in 70 years.
The next headwind is education.
We have in higher education a trillion dollars of student debt, and our college completion rate is 15 points, 15 percentage points below Canada.
And then we have inequality.
Over the 15 years before the financial crisis, the growth rate of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution was half a point slower than the averages we've been talking about before.
Are we going to grow at 0.8?
If so, that's going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years.
If you wanted to read in 1875 at night, you needed to have an oil or a gas lamp.
By 1929, electric light was everywhere.
And then, in addition to that, at the same time, hand tools were replaced by massive electric tools and hand-powered electric tools, all achieved by electricity.
Electricity was also very helpful in liberating women.
Women, back in the late 19th century, spent two days a week doing the laundry.
But the women still had to shop every day, but no they didn't, because electricity brought us the electric refrigerator.
Back in the late 19th century, the only source of heat in most homes was a big fireplace in the kitchen that was used for cooking and heating.
But by 1929, certainly by 1950, we had central heating everywhere.
What about the internal combustion engine, which was invented in 1879?
Those horses also ate up fully one quarter of American agricultural land.
That's the percentage of American agricultural land it took to feed the horses.
And here's an interesting ratio: Starting from zero in 1900, only 30 years later, the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households in the United States reached 90 percent in just 30 years.
Back before the turn of the century, women had another problem.
All the water for cooking, cleaning and bathing had to be carried in buckets and pails in from the outside.
It's a historical fact that in 1885, the average North Carolina housewife walked 148 miles a year carrying 35 tons of water.
They had put in underground sewer pipes, and as a result, one of the great scourges of the late 19th century, waterborne diseases like cholera, began to disappear.
And an amazing fact for techno-optimists is that in the first half of the 20th century, the rate of improvement of life expectancy was three times faster than it was in the second half of the 19th century.
We went from one percent to 90 percent of the speed of sound.
Electrification, central heat, ownership of motor cars, they all went from zero to 100 percent.
Urban environments make people more productive than on the farm.
Here's an early computer.
The earliest cell phones, the earliest personal computers were invented in the 1970s.
The 1980s brought us Bill Gates, DOS, ATM machines to replace bank tellers, bar code scanning to cut down on labor in the retail sector.
Fast forward through the '90s, we had the dotcom revolution and a temporary rise in productivity growth.
(Applause)
But I really like that, so I wrote a book called "The Laws of Simplicity."
I was in Milan last week, for the Italian launch.
It's kind of a book about questions, questions about simplicity.
Is it good? Is it bad? Is complexity better? I'm not sure.
After I wrote "The Laws of Simplicity," I was very tired of simplicity, as you can imagine.
(Laughter) I opened up a magazine, and Visa's branding was, "Business Takes Simplicity."
I develop photographs, and Kodak said, "Keep It Simple."
So, I turned on the TV, and I don't watch TV very much, but you know this person? This is Paris Hilton, apparently.
And she has this show, "The Simple Life."
So, I opened up this TV Guide thing, and on the E! channel, this "Simple Life" show is very popular.
And when you drive, these signs are very important.
It's a very simple sign, it says, "road" and "road approaching."
(Laughter) So, I thought complexity was attacking me suddenly, so I thought, "Ah, simplicity. Very important."
What if the sky was 41 percent gray? Wouldn't that be the perfect sky?"
But in reality, the sky looked like this. It was a beautiful, complex sky.
Maybe some of you guys have heard of this place.
It's designed by I. M. Pei, one of the premier modernist architects.
Modernism means white box, and it's a perfect white box.
(Laughter) And some of you guys are entrepreneurs, etc., whatever.
See, in academia, we get titles, lots of titles.
This year at TED, I'm happy to report that I have new titles, in addition to my previous titles.
(Laughter) That's my baby Reina. (Applause) Thank you.
Many of you may not like tofu because you haven't had good tofu, but tofu's a good food. It's a very simple kind of food.
It's very hard work to make tofu.
So often, seven days a week. Family business equals child labor.
We were a great model. So, I loved going to school.
School was great, and maybe going to school helped me get to this Media Lab place, I'm not sure.
(Laughter) Thank you.
But the Media Lab is an interesting place, and it's important to me because as a student, I was a computer science undergrad, and I discovered design later on in my life.
And there was this person, Muriel Cooper.
It was the best advice I ever got. So I went to art school, because of her.
This amazing person, Muriel Cooper.
Some of you guys know Paul Rand, the greatest graphic designer -- I'm sorry -- out there.
The great graphic designer Paul Rand designed the IBM logo, the Westinghouse logo.
He basically said, "I've designed everything."
And also Ikko Tanaka was a very important mentor in my life -- the Paul Rand of Japan. He designed most of the major icons of Japan, like Issey Miyake's brand and also Muji.
When you have mentors -- and yesterday, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar talked about mentors, these people in your life -- the problem with mentors is that they all die.
And I'm grateful for my mentors, and I'm sure all of you are too.
The T doesn't stand for "human," it stands for "technology."
So, I've always been Googling this word, "human," to find out how many hits I get.
So if you compare complexities to simplicity, it's also catching up in a way, too.
So, somehow humans and simplicity are intertwined, I think.
I wrote computer programs to make complex graphics like this.
I did this series of calendars for Shiseido.
This is a floral theme calendar in 1997, and this is a firework calendar. So, you launch the number into space, because the Japanese believe that when you see fireworks, you're cooler for some reason.
A very extreme culture.
She has this show right now at MoMA, where some of these early works are here on display at MoMA, on the walls.
If you're in New York, please go and see that.
So, I say, "No, I make eye meat," instead.
Computer programs are essentially trees, and when you make art with a computer program, there's kind of a problem.
So, to get off the tree, I began to use my old computers.
I took these to Tokyo in 2001 to make computer objects.
(Laughter) Shortly after this, 9/11 happened, and I was very depressed.
If you dry them quick, you can make, like, elephants and steers and stuff, and my wife didn't like these, because they mold, so I had to stop that.
And as a child, I'd hear that song, you know, "Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain," so I made this amber waves image.
It's sort of a Midwest cornfield out of french fries.
And also, as a child, I was the fattest kid in class, so I used to love Cheetos. Oh, I love Cheetos, yummy.
So, I wanted to play with Cheetos in some way.
Cheeto paint is a very simple way to paint with Cheetos.
(Laughter) I discovered that Cheetos are good, expressive material.
And with these Cheetos, I began to think, "What can I make with these Cheetos?"
People ask me how they make the antenna.
Sometimes, they find a hair in the food. That's my hair.
My hair's clean -- it's okay.
I'm a tenured professor, which means, basically, I don't have to work anymore.
It's a strange business model. I can come into work everyday and staple five pieces of paper and just stare at it with my latte.
(Laughter) So, I was in the Cape one time, and I typed the word "simplicity," and I discovered, in this weird, M. Night Shyamalan way, that I discovered [the] letters, M, I, T. You know the word?
And I wrote this book, "The Laws of Simplicity."
It's a very short, simple book. There are ten laws and three keys.
So enjoy your sushi meal later, with the laws of simplicity.
Anyone who has kids knows that if you offer a kid a big cookie or a small cookie, which cookie are they going to take? The big cookie.
But if you offer kids two piles of laundry to fold, the small pile or the big pile, which will they choose?
You know, when you want more, it's because you want to enjoy it.
When you want less, it's because it's about work.
And so, to boil it all down, simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain.
I love life. I love being alive. I like to see things.
And I just love to see the world. The world is an amazing place.
By being at TED, we see so many things at one time.
And I can't help but enjoy looking at everything in the world.
He's an expert in aging. This horizontal axis is how old you are -- twelve years old, twenty-four years old, seventy-four, ninety-six years old -- and this is some medical data. So, brain strength increases up to 60, and then after 60, it sort of goes down. Kind of depressing in a way.
You know, I have a lot of cocky freshmen at MIT, so I tell them, "Oh, your bodies are really getting stronger and stronger, but in your late twenties and mid-thirties, cells, they die."
So, as you get older, you may, like, have kids, whatever.
And I'm so glad to be here, and I'm very grateful to be here, Chris.
Growth is not dead.
(Applause) Let's start the story 120 years ago, when American factories began to electrify their operations, igniting the Second Industrial Revolution.
Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it.
But technology alone is not enough.
As we'll see in a moment, productivity is actually doing all right, but it has become decoupled from jobs, and the income of the typical worker is stagnating.
Let's look at some data.
So maybe "history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes."
Today, productivity is at an all-time high, and despite the Great Recession, it grew faster in the 2000s than it did in the 1990s, the roaring 1990s, and that was faster than the '70s or '80s.
It's growing faster than it did during the Second Industrial Revolution.
If anything, all these numbers actually understate our progress, because the new machine age is more about knowledge creation than just physical production.
According to the numbers, the music industry is half the size that it was 10 years ago, but I'm listening to more and better music than ever.
Now let's look to the future.
There are some super smart people who are arguing that we've reached the end of growth, but to understand the future of growth, we need to make predictions about the underlying drivers of growth.
I'm optimistic, because the new machine age is digital, exponential and combinatorial.
In the age of big data, we can measure the world in ways we never could before.
Secondly, the new machine age is exponential.
A child's Playstation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996.
Here's an example. In just a matter of a few weeks, an undergraduate student of mine built an app that ultimately reached 1.3 million users.
Put them together, and we're seeing a wave of astonishing breakthroughs, like robots that do factory work or run as fast as a cheetah or leap tall buildings in a single bound.
(Laughter) But perhaps the most important invention, the most important invention is machine learning.
At first, Watson wasn't very good, but it improved at a rate faster than any human could, and shortly after Dave Ferrucci showed this chart to my class at MIT, Watson beat the world "Jeopardy" champion.
Damn. (Laughter) But you know, Watson is growing up fast.
Isn't it ironic that at the very moment we are building intelligent machines, perhaps the most important invention in human history, some people are arguing that innovation is stagnating?
Like the first two industrial revolutions, the full implications of the new machine age are going to take at least a century to fully play out, but they are staggering.
Productivity is at an all time high, but fewer people now have jobs.
Technology is racing ahead, but it's leaving more and more people behind.
That is a microcosm of what's happening, not just in software and services, but in media and music, in finance and manufacturing, in retailing and trade -- in short, in every industry.
People are racing against the machine, and many of them are losing that race.
The new machine age can be dated to a day 15 years ago when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, played Deep Blue, a supercomputer.
The machine won that day, and today, a chess program running on a cell phone can beat a human grandmaster.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Interpreter: By making myself invisible, I try to explore and question the contradictory and often inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development.
LB: This is my first work, created in November 2005.
It refers to those people who lost their jobs during China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy.
From 1998 to 2000, 21.37 million people lost their jobs in China.
On the wall behind them is the slogan of the Cultural Revolution: "The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party."
This spring, I happened to have an opportunity during my solo exhibition in Paris to shoot a work in the news studio of France 3 -- I picked the news photos of the day.
This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR.
Interpreter: This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR.
(Applause) LB: I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR only uses models with big eyes.
This is an aircraft carrier moored alongside the Hudson River.
Kenny Scharf's graffiti.
(Laughter) This is Venice, Italy.
This is the ancient city of Pompeii.
Interpreter: This is the ancient city of Pompeii.
For instance, why would I make myself invisible?
Interpreter: This is the suit I [was] wearing when I did the supermarket shoot.
I think that in art, an artist's attitude is the most important element.
Thank you. (Applause)
I'm actually here in front of you guys, we're all here together.
But this speech is being recorded and it will become a video that people can access all over the world on computers, mobile devices, televisions.
How much will the video weigh?
And I research and write and produce and host and edit and upload and run the social media all by myself, but it's not lonely, because Vsauce has more than 2 million subscribers, and every month, my videos are seen by more than 20 million people.
(Applause) It's very exciting.
Well, so far, 7.6 million people have watched this five-minute video about what color a mirror is.
Okay, spoiler alert: mirrors are not clear, they are not silvery, like they're often illustrated.
You can demonstrate this by putting two mirrors next to each other, facing so they reflect back and forth forever.
But it takes energy to store them in one place, and, thanks to our friend Albert Einstein, we know that energy and mass are related.
Okay, so here's the thing: let's say you're watching a YouTube video at a really nice resolution, 720p.
Assuming a typical bit rate, we can figure that a minute of YouTube video is going to need to involve about 10 million electrons on your device.
Plugging all those electrons and the energy it takes to hold them in the correct place for you to see the video, into that formula, we can figure out that one minute of YouTube video increases the mass of your computer by about 10 to the negative 19th grams.
So, we can't measure it, but we can, like we just did, calculate it.
And that's really cool because when I was a kid, my school had two shelves of science books.
Right now, on YouTube, there is an explosion of content like this happening.
It's even a great way for brands and companies to build trust.
So, calculating the weight of a video is kind of a funny question, but I cannot wait to see what we ask and answer next.
(Applause)
My relationship with the internet reminds me of the setup to a clichéd horror movie.
When I started working at Google in 2006, Facebook was just a two-year-old, and Twitter hadn't yet been born.
And I was in absolute awe of the internet and all of its promise to make us closer and smarter and more free.
But as we were doing the inspiring work of building search engines and video-sharing sites and social networks, criminals, dictators and terrorists were figuring out how to use those same platforms against us.
And in response, Google supported a few colleagues and me to set up a new group called Jigsaw, with a mandate to make people safer from threats like violent extremism, censorship, persecution -- threats that feel very personal to me because I was born in Iran, and I left in the aftermath of a violent revolution.
The first is terrorism.
So in order to understand the radicalization process, we met with dozens of former members of violent extremist groups.
One was a British schoolgirl, who had been taken off of a plane at London Heathrow as she was trying to make her way to Syria to join ISIS.
They make pamphlets, radio shows and videos in not just English and Arabic, but German, Russian, French, Turkish, Kurdish, Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese.
I've even seen an ISIS-produced video in sign language.
So we went to Iraq to speak to young men who'd bought into ISIS's promise of heroism and righteousness, who'd taken up arms to fight for them and then who'd defected after they witnessed the brutality of ISIS's rule.
And I'm sitting there in this makeshift prison in the north of Iraq with this 23-year-old who had actually trained as a suicide bomber before defecting.
And he says, "I arrived in Syria full of hope, and immediately, I had two of my prized possessions confiscated: my passport and my mobile phone."
And I was wondering: What, if anything, could have changed his mind the day that he left home?
And he said, "Yes."
Radicalization isn't this yes-or-no choice.
There are locals who've uploaded cell phone footage of what life is really like in the caliphate under ISIS's rule.
There are clerics who are sharing peaceful interpretations of Islam.
During our eight-week pilot in English and Arabic, we reached over 300,000 people who had expressed an interest in or sympathy towards a jihadi group.
And because violent extremism isn't confined to any one language, religion or ideology, the Redirect Method is now being deployed globally to protect people being courted online by violent ideologues, whether they're Islamists, white supremacists or other violent extremists, with the goal of giving them the chance to hear from someone on the other side of that journey; to give them the chance to choose a different path.
It turns out that often the bad guys are good at exploiting the internet, not because they're some kind of technological geniuses, but because they understand what makes people tick.
I want to give you a second example: online harassment.
Imagine this: you're a woman, you're married, you have a kid.
But that enables the spread of disinformation; that facilitates polarization.
This was the question that motivated our partnership with Google's Counter Abuse team, Wikipedia and newspapers like the New York Times.
(Laughter) You are human, that's why that's an obvious difference to you, even though the words are pretty much the same.
With the help of Perspective, the New York Times, for example, has increased spaces online for conversation.
With the help of machine learning, they have that number up to 30 percent.
Imagine if machine learning could give commenters, as they're typing, real-time feedback about how their words might land, just like facial expressions do in a face-to-face conversation.
Machine learning isn't perfect, and it still makes plenty of mistakes.
But if we can build technology that understands the emotional impact of language, we can build empathy.
That means that we can have dialogue between people with different politics, different worldviews, different values.
When people use technology to exploit and harm others, they're preying on our human fears and vulnerabilities.
If we want today to build technology that can overcome the challenges that we face, we have to throw our entire selves into understanding the issues and into building solutions that are as human as the problems they aim to solve.
Let's make that happen.
(Applause)
In 1982, I was in a mountain-climbing accident, and both of my legs had to be amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite.
Here, you can see my legs: 24 sensors, six microprocessors and muscle-tendon-like actuators.
But with this advanced bionic technology, I can skip, dance and run.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) I'm a bionic man, but I'm not yet a cyborg.
When I think about moving my legs, neural signals from my central nervous system pass through my nerves and activate muscles within my residual limbs.
Artificial electrodes sense these signals, and small computers in the bionic limb decode my nerve pulses into my intended movement patterns.
However, those computers can't input information into my nervous system.
If I were a cyborg and could feel my legs via small computers inputting information into my nervous system, it would fundamentally change, I believe, my relationship to my synthetic body.
Today, I can't feel my legs, and because of that, my legs are separate tools from my mind and my body.
I believe that if I were a cyborg and could feel my legs, they would become part of me, part of self.
In this design process, designers contemplate a future in which technology no longer compromises separate, lifeless tools from our minds and our bodies, a future in which technology has been carefully integrated within our nature, a world in which what is biological and what is not, what is human and what is not, what is nature and what is not will be forever blurred.
That future will provide humanity new bodies.
What is proprioception?
The opposite happens when you extend your ankle.
When these muscles flex and extend, biological sensors within the muscle tendons send information through nerves to the brain.
The current amputation paradigm breaks these dynamic muscle relationships, and in so doing eliminates normal proprioceptive sensations.
Consequently, a standard artificial limb cannot feed back information into the nervous system about where the prosthesis is in space.
The patient therefore cannot sense and feel the positions and movements of the prosthetic joint without seeing it with their eyes.
The AMI is a method to connect nerves within the residuum to an external, bionic prosthesis.
This is how muscle tendon proprioception works, and it's the primary way we, as humans, can feel and sense the positions, movements and forces on our limbs.
When a limb is amputated, the surgeon connects these opposing muscles within the residuum to create an AMI.
Now, multiple AMI constructs can be created for the control and sensation of multiple prosthetic joints.
Artificial electrodes are then placed on each AMI muscle, and small computers within the bionic limb decode those signals to control powerful motors on the bionic limb.
When the bionic limb moves, the AMI muscles move back and forth, sending signals through the nerve to the brain, enabling a person wearing the prosthesis to experience natural sensations of positions and movements of the prosthesis.
Can these tissue-design principles be used in an actual human being?
A few years ago, my good friend Jim Ewing -- of 34 years -- reached out to me for help.
After his accident, he dreamed of returning to his chosen sport of mountain climbing, but how might this be possible?
The answer was Team Cyborg, a team of surgeons, scientists and engineers assembled at MIT to rebuild Jim back to his former climbing prowess.
Team member Dr. Matthew Carty amputated Jim's badly damaged leg at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, using the AMI surgical procedure.
When Jim moves his phantom limb, the reconnected muscles move in dynamic pairs, causing signals of proprioception to pass through nerves to the brain, so Jim experiences normal sensations with ankle-foot positions and movements, even when blindfolded.
Here's Jim at the MIT laboratory after his surgeries.
We electrically linked Jim's AMI muscles, via the electrodes, to a bionic limb, and Jim quickly learned how to move the bionic limb in four distinct ankle-foot movement directions.
We were excited by these results, but then Jim stood up, and what occurred was truly remarkable.
For example, one day in the lab, he accidentally stepped on a roll of electrical tape.
Now, what do you do when something's stuck to your shoe?
He said, "The robot became part of me."
(Applause) By connecting Jim's nervous system bidirectionally to his synthetic limb, neurological embodiment was achieved.
He feels like he just has his leg back, that he has his body back.
The truth is, I'm hesitant to become a cyborg.
Before my legs were amputated, I was a terrible student.
Then, after my limbs were amputated, I suddenly became an MIT professor.
In this 21st century, designers will extend the nervous system into powerfully strong exoskeletons that humans can control and feel with their minds.
Muscles within the body can be reconfigured for the control of powerful motors, and to feel and sense exoskeletal movements, augmenting humans' strength, jumping height and running speed.
In this 21st century, I believe humans will become superheroes.
Humans may also extend their bodies into non-anthropomorphic structures, such as wings, controlling and feeling each wing movement within the nervous system.
Leonardo da Vinci said, "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return."
Jim Ewing fell to earth and was badly broken, but his eyes turned skyward, where he always longed to return.
At MIT, Team Cyborg built Jim a specialized limb for the vertical world, a brain-controlled leg with full position and movement sensations.
Using this technology, Jim returned to the Cayman Islands, the site of his accident, rebuilt as a cyborg to climb skyward once again.
(Crashing waves) (Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, Jim Ewing, the first cyborg rock climber.
(Applause)
What happens when technology knows more about us than we do?
A computer now can detect our slightest facial microexpressions and be able to tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one.
That's only the beginning.
And while that might sound scary, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
I've spent a lot of time studying the circuits in the brain that create the unique perceptual realities that we each have.
And now I bring that together with the capabilities of current technology to create new technology that does make us better, feel more, connect more.
The spider's responding to its external world in a way that we get to see and know what's happening to its internal world.
But us, humans -- we're different.
(Two overlapping voices talking) (Single voice) Intelligent technology depends on personal data.
When your brain's having to work harder, your autonomic nervous system drives your pupil to dilate.
Groups have shown that changes in the statistics of our language paired with machine learning can predict the likelihood someone will develop psychosis.
Dementia, diabetes can alter the spectral coloration of our voice.
Changes in our language associated with Alzheimer's can sometimes show up more than 10 years before clinical diagnosis.
(Laughter) I'm actually tracking the carbon dioxide you exhale in the room right now.
Changing the music and the sound effects completely alter the emotional impact of that scene.
It is the end of the poker face.
If we recognize the power of becoming technological empaths, we get this opportunity where technology can help us bridge the emotional and cognitive divide.
Imagine a high school counselor being able to realize that an outwardly cheery student really was having a deeply hard time, where reaching out can make a crucial, positive difference.
Today's artists can know what we're feeling.
Anytime we talk to someone, look at someone or choose not to look, data is exchanged, given away, that people use to learn, make decisions about their lives and about ours.
I'm not looking to create a world where our inner lives are ripped open and our personal data and our privacy given away to people and entities where we don't want to see it go.
And we can have richer experiences from our technology.
Any technology can be used for good or bad.
But the benefits that "empathetic technology" can bring to our lives are worth solving the problems that make us uncomfortable.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Let's face it: Driving is dangerous.
It's one of the things that we don't like to think about, but the fact that religious icons and good luck charms show up on dashboards around the world betrays the fact that we know this to be true.
Car accidents are the leading cause of death in people ages 16 to 19 in the United States -- leading cause of death -- and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol.
No one can say for sure, but I remember my first accident.
I was a young driver out on the highway, and the car in front of me, I saw the brake lights go on.
I slammed on the brakes.
What's more important?
But the technology exists now that can help us improve that.
In the future, with cars exchanging data with each other, we will be able to see not just three cars ahead and three cars behind, to the right and left, all at the same time, bird's eye view, we will actually be able to see into those cars.
And with computation and algorithms and predictive models, we will be able to see the future.
How can you predict the future? That's really hard.
Actually, no. With cars, it's not impossible.
Cars are three-dimensional objects that have a fixed position and velocity.
You can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave.
With computer vision, I can estimate where the cars around me are, sort of, and where they're going.
And same with the other cars.
What happens if two cars share that data, if they talk to each other?
We also attach a discrete short-range communication radio, and the robots talk to each other.
When these robots come at each other, they track each other's position precisely, and they can avoid each other.
Well, it depends on two things: one, the ability of the car, and second the ability of the driver.
And now, using a series of three cameras, we can detect if a driver is looking forward, looking away, looking down, on the phone, or having a cup of coffee.
We can predict the accident and we can predict who, which cars, are in the best position to move out of the way to calculate the safest route for everyone.
By sharing our data willingly, we can do what's best for everyone.
So let your car gossip about you.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Something must be dead."
The two types of vultures that live in Louisiana are the turkey vulture and black vulture.
It's not that simple.
Once death has been detected, the turkey vulture lands and quickly scavenges.
Why?
Let's get back to the importance of the kidnapping case.
The feathers were next to a bloody pine cone.
Indeed, the feather by the pine cone was consistent with the turkey vulture.
I presented this information to the detectives and learned that they suspected the victim had been incapacitated by blunt force trauma to the head.
The detectives also sent me this photo.
As a forensic scientist, you have to think about the whole picture.
We zoom in, we see a white down feather, which is characteristic of the turkey vulture.
The kidnapping case was a death penalty case.
And the defendant was found guilty.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I've noticed something interesting about society and culture.
You don't even have to click anything.
Again, you don't have to click one of the results.
And finally, it often happens that you're giving a talk, and for some reason, the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you!
(Applause)
Nowadays people are sitting 9.3 hours a day, which is more than we're sleeping, at 7.7 hours.
Things like breast cancer and colon cancer are directly tied to our lack of physical [activity], Ten percent in fact, on both of those.
Six percent for heart disease, seven percent for type 2 diabetes, which is what my father died of.
So instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings, I ask people to go on a walking meeting, to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week.
It's changed my life.
So now, several hundred of these walking meetings later, I've learned a few things.
You'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking, and in the way that you do, you'll bring into your life an entirely new set of ideas.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Well, I have a big announcement to make today, and I'm really excited about this.
I've really tried to solve some big problems: counterterrorism, nuclear terrorism, and health care and diagnosing and treating cancer, but I started thinking about all these problems, and I realized that the really biggest problem we face, what all these other problems come down to, is energy, is electricity, the flow of electrons.
And this probably is not what you're expecting.
Let's talk a little bit about how nuclear fission works.
In a nuclear power plant, you have a big pot of water that's under high pressure, and you have some fuel rods, and these fuel rods are encased in zirconium, and they're little pellets of uranium dioxide fuel, and a fission reaction is controlled and maintained at a proper level, and that reaction heats up water, the water turns to steam, steam turns the turbine, and you produce electricity from it.
This is the same way we've been producing electricity, the steam turbine idea, for 100 years, and nuclear was a really big advancement in a way to heat the water, but you still boil water and that turns to steam and turns the turbine.
And I thought, you know, is this the best way to do it?
This is a small modular reactor.
So it's not as big as the reactor you see in the diagram here.
This is between 50 and 100 megawatts.
So they're modular reactors that are built essentially on an assembly line, and they're trucked anywhere in the world, you plop them down, and they produce electricity.
But I'm not really concerned about the fuel.
So it's a molten salt reactor. It has a core, and it has a heat exchanger from the hot salt, the radioactive salt, to a cold salt which isn't radioactive.
And then that's a heat exchanger to what makes this design really, really interesting, and that's a heat exchanger to a gas.
And this reactor doesn't use water. It uses gas, so supercritical CO2 or helium, and that goes into a turbine, and this is called the Brayton cycle.
This is the thermodynamic cycle that produces electricity, and this makes this almost 50 percent efficient, between 45 and 50 percent efficiency.
And the problem with a traditional nuclear power plant like this is, you've got these rods that are clad in zirconium, and inside them are uranium dioxide fuel pellets.
Well, uranium dioxide's a ceramic, and ceramic doesn't like releasing what's inside of it.
So you have what's called the xenon pit, and so some of these fission products love neutrons.
So these reactors run for 30 years without refueling, which is, in my opinion, very, very amazing, because it means it's a sealed system.
So traditional reactors like a pressurized water reactor or boiling water reactor, they're very, very hot water at very high pressures, and this means, essentially, in the event of an accident, if you had any kind of breach of this stainless steel pressure vessel, the coolant would leave the core.
The fuel, like I said, is ceramic inside zirconium fuel rods, and in the event of an accident in one of these type of reactors, Fukushima and Three Mile Island -- looking back at Three Mile Island, we didn't really see this for a while — but these zirconium claddings on these fuel rods, what happens is, when they see high pressure water, steam, in an oxidizing environment, they'll actually produce hydrogen, and that hydrogen has this explosive capability to release fission products.
Carbon-free electricity.
And it's an amazing technology because not only does it combat climate change, but it's an innovation.
It's a way to bring power to the developing world, because it's produced in a factory and it's cheap.
As a kid, I was obsessed with space.
That is the rocket designer's dream.
You know, rocket designers who use solar panels or fuel cells, I mean a few watts or kilowatts -- wow, that's a lot of power.
I mean, now we're talking about 100 megawatts.
So I'm really excited.
And I think, I think, that looking at the technology, this will be cheaper than or the same price as natural gas, and you don't have to refuel it for 30 years, which is an advantage for the developing world.
But I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors.
(Applause)
It was, of course, a very partial and flawed democracy, but the idea that power should stem from the consent of the governed, that power should flow from below to above, not the other way around, was born in that decade.
And in that same decade, somebody -- legend has it, somebody named Thespis -- invented the idea of dialogue.
Well, we know that the Festival of Dionysus gathered the entire citizenry of Athens on the side of the Acropolis, and they would listen to music, they would watch dancing, and they would have stories told as part of the Festival of Dionysus.
But what happens if, instead of me talking to you -- and Thespis thought of this -- I just shift 90 degrees to the left, and I talk to another person onstage with me?
That other person has an opinion too, and it's drama, remember, conflict -- they disagree with me.
There's a conflict between two points of view.
But that's the basic thesis of democracy, that the conflict of different points of views leads to the truth.
I'm not asking you to sit back and listen to me.
And the idea that truth comes from the collision of different ideas and the emotional muscle of empathy are the necessary tools for democratic citizenship.
What else happens?
That's built into the DNA of my art form.
And Free Shakespeare in the Park is based on a very simple idea, the idea that the best theater, the best art that we can produce, should go to everybody and belong to everybody, and to this day, every summer night in Central Park, 2,000 people are lining up to see the best theater we can provide for free.
And so in 1967, Joe opened the Public Theater downtown on Astor Place, and the first show he ever produced was the world premiere of "Hair."
(Laughter) (Applause) And what the Public Theater did over the next years with amazing shows like "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf," "A Chorus Line," and -- here's the most extraordinary example I can think of: Larry Kramer's savage cry of rage about the AIDS crisis, "The Normal Heart."
Because when Joe produced that play in 1985, there was more information about AIDS in Frank Rich's review in the New York Times than the New York Times had published in the previous four years.
Larry was actually changing the dialogue about AIDS through writing this play, and Joe was by producing it.
(Applause) When I took over Joe's old job at the Public in 2005, I realized one of the problems we had was a victim of our own success, which is: Shakespeare in the Park had been founded as a program for access, and it was now the hardest ticket to get in New York City.
And under the guidance of the amazing Lear deBessonet, we started the Public Works program, which now every summer produces these immense Shakespearean musical pageants, where Tony Award-winning actors and musicians are side by side with nannies and domestic workers and military veterans and recently incarcerated prisoners, amateurs and professionals, performing together on the same stage.
And it's not just a great social program, it's the best art that we do.
And when he came in, some of my fellow New Yorkers booed him.
I looked at that boycott and I said, we're getting something wrong here.
We're taking that play and we're touring it to rural counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
That's what the theater is supposed to do, and that's what we need to try to do as well as we can.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Laughter) Both my parents were educators, my maternal grandparents were educators, and for the past 40 years, I've done the same thing.
George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships.
Well, I said to her, "You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like."
And it was difficult, it was awfully hard.
I am powerful, and I am strong.
Teaching and learning should bring joy.
But it is not impossible.
We can do this. We're educators.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
I was born in 1944 in Brazil, in the times that Brazil was not yet a market economy.
I was born on a farm, a farm that was more than 50 percent rainforest [still].
I lived with incredible birds, incredible animals, I swam in our small rivers with our caimans.
Brazil was starting to urbanize, industrialize, and I knew the politics. I became a little bit radical, I was a member of leftist parties, and I became an activist.
I [did] a master's degree in economics.
And the most important thing in my life also happened in this time.
I met an incredible girl who became my lifelong best friend, and my associate in everything that I have done till now, my wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado.
I worked after for an investment bank.
I became a photographer, abandoned everything and became a photographer, and I started to do the photography that was important for me.
But I did much more than that.
But during the time that I was photographing this, I lived through a very hard moment in my life, mostly in Rwanda.
I went to see a friend's doctor in Paris, told him that I was completely sick.
He made a long examination, and told me, "Sebastian, you are not sick, your prostate is perfect.
And I made the decision to stop.
I was really upset with photography, with everything in the world, and I made the decision to go back to where I was born.
It was the moment that my parents became very old.
Let's build the paradise again.
It became a national park.
We created an institution called Instituto Terra, and we built a big environmental project to raise money everywhere.
We raised money in Spain, in Italy, a lot in Brazil.
We must protect the forest in this sense.
We tried to do a new presentation of the planet, and I want to show you now just a few pictures of this project, please.
Well, this — (Applause) — Thank you. Thank you very much.
For the water system, the trees are essential.
When you have rain in a place that has no trees, in just a few minutes, the water arrives in the stream, brings soil, destroying our water source, destroying the rivers, and no humidity to retain.
When you have trees, the root system holds the water.
This is the most important thing, when we imagine that we need water for every activity in life.
You remember that I told you, when I received the farm from my parents that was my paradise, that was the farm.
But you can see in this picture, we were starting to construct an educational center that became quite a large environmental center in Brazil.
(Applause) I told you in the beginning that it was necessary for us to plant about 2.5 million trees of about 200 different species in order to rebuild the ecosystem.
We are doing the sequestration of about 100,000 tons of carbon with these trees.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And so there's companies like face.com that now have about 18 billion faces online.
Well, the Greeks thought about what happens when gods and humans and immortality mix for a long time.
So lesson number one: Sisyphus.
Lesson number three: Atalanta.
How did Hippomenes beat her?
Last lesson, from a Latin American: This is the great poet Jorge Luis Borges.
And that, of course, is what we are all now threatened with today because of electronic tattoos.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I teach chemistry.
So more than just explosions, chemistry is everywhere.
Some people nodding yes.
Recently, I showed this to my students, and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened.
But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity took her to a new level.
If you look inside that beaker, you might see a candle.
You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education.
But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions.
For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing.
So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside, the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now, and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning, not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information.
In May of 2010, at 35 years old, with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way, I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta.
This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email from my doctor right there.
Rule number one: Curiosity comes first.
We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly.
Our students our worth it.
So these are my daughters.
And, on the left, Riley.
I could teach this kid anything because she is curious about everything.
But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
It is absolutely possible.
Who created that business model? Right?
You know why? Because they didn't care.
So technology has changed. Things have changed.
Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now?
You know, I always wonder, who makes up those rules?
(Laughter) With our first kids, we did not know the science about brain development.
Wealthy people know. Educated people know.
And their kids have an advantage.
Poor people don't know, and we're not doing anything to help them at all.
The testing that we do -- we're going to have our test in New York next week — is in April.
You know when we're going to get the results back?
Maybe July, maybe June.
You go on vacation. (Laughter) You come back from vacation.
I need that data in September.
Right? Because that's not the way the world works.
(Applause) John Legend: So what is the high school dropout rate at Harlem Children's Zone?
(Applause)
When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching.
What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students.
After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective.
So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist.
I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why?
My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy.
We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out.
It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ.
A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools.
To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.
In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.
So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset."
Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.
Thank you.
(Applause)
My dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets.
Like, I remember one day I found my dad convulsing, foaming at the mouth, OD-ing on the bathroom floor.
And eventually, I ended up at a school where there was a mixture.
I was accepted to Pepperdine University, and I came back to the same school that I attended to be a special ed assistant.
And then I told them, "I want to be a teacher."
So we created a new school.
Our community deserved a new way of doing things.
Our state test scores have gone up more than 80 points since we've become our own school.
Because it's time that kids like me stop being the exception, and we become the norm.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In this talk today, I want to present a different idea for why investing in early childhood education makes sense as a public investment.
And that's actually crucial because if we're going to get increased investment in early childhood programs, we need to interest state governments in this.
So we have to appeal to them, the legislators in the state government, and turn to something they understand, that they have to promote the economic development of their state economy.
All I mean is, is that early childhood education can bring more and better jobs to a state and can thereby promote higher per capita earnings for the state's residents.
I've talked to a lot of directors of state economic development agencies about these issues, a lot of legislators about these issues.
My argument is essentially that early childhood programs can do exactly the same thing, create more and better jobs, but in a different way.
Now, let me turn to some numbers on this.
So for example, numerous research studies have shown if you look at what really drives the growth rate of metropolitan areas, it's not so much low taxes, low cost, low wages; it's the skills of the area. Particularly, the proxy for skills that people use is percentage of college graduates in the area.
So when you look, for example, at metropolitan areas such as the Boston area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Silicon Valley, these areas are not doing well economically because they're low-cost.
One of the very interesting facts is that, in addition, we find that even once we hold constant, statistically, the effect of your own education, the education of everyone else in your metropolitan area also affects your wages.
In fact, this effect is so strong that when someone gets a college degree, the spillover effects of this on the wages of others in the metropolitan area are actually greater than the direct effects.
So if someone gets a college degree, their lifetime earnings go up by a huge amount, over 700,000 dollars.
That's actually greater than the direct benefits of the person choosing to get education.
I can be the most skilled person in the world, but if everyone else at my firm lacks skills, my employer is going to find it more difficult to introduce new technology, new production techniques.
So clearly the productivity of firms in Silicon Valley has a lot to do with the skills not only of the workers at their firm, but the workers at all the other firms in the metro area.
The data is that over 60 percent of Americans spend most of their working careers in the state they were born in, over 60 percent.
That percentage does not vary much from state to state.
Well, one obvious barrier is cost.
So, 30 billion dollars is a lot of money.
On the other hand, if you reflect on that the U.S.'s population is over 300 million, we're talking about an amount of money that amounts to 100 dollars per capita.
So this is an investment that pays off in very concrete terms for a broad range of income groups in the state's population and produces large and tangible benefits.
I mean, I'm an economist, but this is ultimately not an economic question, it's a moral question: Are we willing, as Americans, are we as a society still capable of making the political choice to sacrifice now by paying more taxes in order to improve the long-term future of not only our kids, but our community?
And that's something that each and every citizen and voter needs to ask themselves.
That is the notion of investment.
So I think the research evidence on the benefits of early childhood programs for the local economy is extremely strong.
However, the moral and political choice is still up to us, as citizens and as voters.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters.
Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language.
Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so.
You are ready?
Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square.
This is a person going for a walk.
This is a tree.
This is a mountain.
The moon.
I call these eight characters radicals.
For us, the sun is the source of prosperity.
The sun is coming up above the horizon. Sunrise.
This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading.
On the left, we have a woman.
Two women together, they have an argument.
(Laughter) Three women together, be careful, it's adultery.
We know Japan is the land of the rising sun.
A mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit.
(Applause)
This is a training ground.
I hear education systems are failing, but I believe they're succeeding at what they're built to do -- to train you, to keep you on track, to track down an American dream that has failed so many of us all.
(Applause)
Thank you very much.
(Laughter) In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school.
But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg.
America spends more money on education than most other countries.
Class sizes are smaller than in many countries.
And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education.
An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you -- (Applause) One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder.
If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often.
Children are natural learners.
Curiosity is the engine of achievement.
But teaching is a creative profession.
Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage.
If there's no learning going on, there's no education going on.
And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing.
(Applause) If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests.
It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic.
And your dog may get depressed.
(Laughter) "Would you like to come for a walk?"
"No, I'm fine."
That's one of the problems of the test.
They have a very broad approach to education, which includes humanities, physical education, the arts.
Why would you drop out?
No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland.
Many states in America have fewer people in them than that.
They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity.
It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai.
The point is that education is not a mechanical system.
What's interesting to me is, these are called "alternative education."
Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley.
Hence, Death Valley.
In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley.
And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon.
Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable.
The real role of leadership in education -- and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level -- is not and should not be command and control.
And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution.
And that's what we need.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
Everyone needs a coach.
(Laughter) My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else's in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go.
We all need people who will give us feedback.
Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice.
Well, unfortunately there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems.
So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve.
Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve?
The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math.
Let's look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China.
Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving.
Some teachers are far more effective than others.
So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best.
So it tells us we're asking the right questions.
I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa.
Alrighty, everybody, have a great weekend.
Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle.
If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions.
Building this system will also require a considerable investment.
Now that's a big number, but to put it in perspective, it's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries.
But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country.
I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve.
Thank you.
(Applause)
As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.
The green agenda is probably the most important agenda and issue of the day.
And I'd like to share some experience over the last 40 years -- we celebrate our fortieth anniversary this year -- and to explore and to touch on some observations about the nature of sustainability.
And I asked myself, in a way, looking back, "When did that kind of awareness of the planet and its fragility first appear?"
And I think it was July 20, 1969, when, for the first time, man could look back at planet Earth.
And, in a way, it was Buckminster Fuller who coined that phrase.
And before the kind of collapse of the communist system, I was privileged to meet a lot of cosmonauts in Space City and other places in Russia.
And interestingly, as I think back, they were the first true environmentalists.
They were filled with a kind of pioneering passion, fired about the problems of the Aral Sea.
Buckminster Fuller was the kind of green guru -- again, a word that had not been coined.
I select this one because it was 1973, and it was a master plan for one of the Canary Islands.
People who were really design conscious were inspired by the work of Dieter Rams, and the objects that he would create for the company called Braun.
In other words, as I might seek to demonstrate, if you could achieve the impossible, the equivalent of perpetual motion, you could design a carbon-free house, for example.
Unfortunately, it's not the answer.
For example, if, in that Bucky-inspired phrase, we draw back and we look at planet Earth, and we take a kind of typical, industrialized society, then the energy consumed would be split between the buildings, 44 percent, transport, 34 percent, and industry.
So the problems of sustainability cannot be separated from the nature of the cities, of which the buildings are a part.
For example, if you take, and you make a comparison between a recent kind of city, what I'll call, simplistically, a North American city -- and Detroit is not a bad example, it is very car dependent.
If you compared Detroit with a city of a Northern European example -- and Munich is not a bad example of that, with the greater dependence on walking and cycling -- then a city which is really only twice as dense, is only using one-tenth of the energy.
And Copenhagen, although it's a dense city, is not dense compared with the really dense cities.
In the year 2000, a rather interesting thing happened.
You had for the first time mega-cities, [of] 5 million or more, which were occurring in the developing world.
In other words, if you put onto the roads, as is currently happening, 1,000 new cars every day -- statistically, it's the biggest booming auto market in the world -- and the half a billion bicycles serving one and a third billion people are reducing.
And that urbanization is extraordinary, accelerated pace.
So, if we think of the transition in our society of the movement from the land to the cities, which took 200 years, then that same process is happening in 20 years.
And quite interestingly, over something like a 60-year period, we're seeing the doubling in life expectancy, over that period where the urbanization has trebled.
How does it affect the design of buildings?
And particularly, how can it lead to the creation of buildings which consume less energy, create less pollution and are more socially responsible?
That story, in terms of buildings, started in the late '60s, early '70s.
And here, the first thing you can see is that this building, the roof is a very warm kind of overcoat blanket, a kind of insulating garden, which is also about the celebration of public space.
In other words, for this community, they have this garden in the sky.
And symbolically, the colors of the interior are green and yellow.
In 2001, this building received an award.
So, in 1975, the image there is of typewriters.
And when the photograph was taken, it's word processors.
We were fortunate, because in a way our building was future-proofed.
And I was saying, and I wrote, "But we don't have the time, and we really don't have the immediate expertise at a technical level."
Notwithstanding the fact that the building, as a green building, is very much a pioneering building.
And you can measure the performance, in terms of energy consumption, of that building against a typical library.
I mean, you know, what was life like before the mobile phone, the things that you take for granted?
I mean, this is a glimpse of the interior of our Hong Kong bank of 1979, which opened in 1985, with the ability to be able to reflect sunlight deep into the heart of this space here.
So for example, we would put models under an artificial sky.
And the turning point was probably, in our terms, when we had the first computer.
And that was at the time that we sought to redesign, reinvent the airport.
This is Terminal Four at Heathrow, typical of any terminal -- big, heavy roof, blocking out the sunlight, lots of machinery, big pipes, whirring machinery.
Going back in time, there was a lady called Valerie Larkin, and in 1987, she had all our information on one disk.
Now, every week, we have the equivalent of 84 million disks, which record our archival information on past, current and future projects.
I mean, a 94 percent reduction -- virtually clean.
And again, we can measure the reduction in terms of energy consumption.
But what it shows first, which I think is quite interesting, is that here you see the circle, you see the public space around it.
And I'm just going to give two images out of a kind of company research project.
It's been well known that the Dead Sea is dying.
So there has been a project which rescues the Dead Sea by creating a pipeline, a pipe, sometimes above the surface, sometimes buried, that will redress that, and will feed from the Gulf of Aqaba into the Dead Sea.
In other words, water is the lifeblood.
Infrastructure at that large scale is also inseparable from communication.
250 -- excuse me, 50,000 people working 24 hours, seven days.
And the challenge here is a building that will be green, that is compact despite its size and is about the human experience of travel, is about friendly, is coming back to that starting point, is very, very much about the lifestyle.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client.
I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley.
That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20.
There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States right now.
We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first.
We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35.
We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn.
We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30.
We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35.
So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain.
It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a sibling.
She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, "Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck?
Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?"
But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared.
So over the next weeks and months, I told Emma three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear.
I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital.
That's procrastination.
So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed.
Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends.
Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you.
So what happened to Emma?
So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know.
Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do.
You're deciding your life right now.
Thank you.
(Applause)
You have heard that phrase uttered by your friends, family, schools and the media for decades.
It's a norm. It's a social norm.
The question isn't whether or not I know you.
The question is, what can I do with you?
What can I learn with you?
I spend a lot of time thinking about how the social landscape is changing, how new technologies create new constraints and new opportunities for people.
The most important changes facing us today have to do with data and what data is doing to shape the kinds of digital relations that will be possible for us in the future.
The economies of the future depend on that.
Now, 20th-century psychologists and sociologists were thinking about strangers, but they weren't thinking so dynamically about human relations, and they were thinking about strangers in the context of influencing practices.
Mark Granovetter, Stanford sociologist, in 1973 in his seminal essay "The Strength of Weak Ties," made the point that these weak ties that are a part of our networks, these strangers, are actually more effective at diffusing information to us than are our strong ties, the people closest to us.
He makes an additional indictment of our strong ties when he says that these people who are so close to us, these strong ties in our lives, actually have a homogenizing effect on us.
My colleagues and I at Intel have spent the last few years looking at the ways in which digital platforms are reshaping our everyday lives, what kinds of new routines are possible.
Whether it's our clothes, whether it's our cars, whether it's our bikes, whether it's our books or music, we are able to take our possessions now and make them available to people we've never met.
People are always a combination of the two, and that combination is constantly changing.
What if technologies could intervene to help me find the person that I need right now?
We have to change the norms.
We have to change the norms in order to enable new kinds of technologies as a basis for new kinds of businesses.
Thank you.
(Applause)
It sounds silly, but I thought, okay, the way the world works can be changed, and it can be changed by me in these small ways.
And so I had to start studying, who is it that's making these decisions?
Because this is how reality is created.
So I started right away. I was at MIT Media Lab, and I was studying the maker movement and makers and creativity.
A leaf tied to a stick with a blade of grass.
And he's like, "I don't know, but I can show you."
So his hands know and his intuition knows, but sometimes what we know gets in the way of what could be, especially when it comes to the human-made, human-built world.
I'm a good hippie dad, so I'm like, "Okay, you're going to learn to love the moon.
What's awesome is what happens when you give the piano circuit to people.
That's a wire running down the middle, and not only is it a wire, if you take that piano circuit, you can thumbtack into the middle of a pencil, and you can lay out wire on the page, too, and get electrical current to run through it.
And the electricity runs through your body too.
And this young woman, she made what she called a hula-looper, and as the hula hoop traveled around her body, she has a circuit taped to her shirt right there.
In Taiwan, at an art museum, this 12-year-old girl made a mushroom organ out of some mushrooms that were from Taiwan and some electrical tape and hot glue.
And so we're like, "We gotta put a video out about this."
Well, I think it's cool, but we should be doing that stuff ourselves.
We should all be participating in changing the way the world works together.
Hover the mouse over the "take a photo" button, and you've got a little cat photo booth.
And so we put it up on Kickstarter, and hundreds of people bought it in the first day.
And this guy rounded up his dogs and he made a dog piano.
Like this dad who wrote us, his son has cerebral palsy and he can't use a normal keyboard.
And a huge eruption of discussion around accessibility came, and we're really excited about that.
And I love the carrot on the turntable.
And I also put this little surprise. When you open the lid of the box, it says, "The world is a construction kit."
And so next time you're on an escalator and you drop an M&M by accident, you know, maybe that's an M&M surfboard, not an escalator, so don't pick it up right away.
I used to want to design a utopian society or a perfect world or something like that.
And that's the world I really want to live in.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'm not a geriatrician.
What I know about this topic comes from a qualitative study with a sample size of two.
This was their dream.
I met Jim and Shirley in their 80s.
As we became friends, I became their trustee and their medical advocate, but more importantly, I became the person who managed their end-of-life experiences.
In their final years, Jim and Shirley faced cancers, fractures, infections, neurological illness.
This gave them the peace of mind to move forward.
From this experience I'm going to share five practices.
Most people say, "I'd like to die at home."
Eighty percent of Americans die in a hospital or a nursing home.
This is not a plan either; this is illegal.
(Laughter) A plan involves answering straightforward questions about the end you want.
You want someone who has the time and proximity to do this job well, and you want someone who can work with people under the pressure of an ever-changing situation.
Put this in a really bright envelope with copies of your insurance cards, your power of attorney, and your do-not-resuscitate order.
What I've learned is if we put some time into planning our end of life, we have the best chance of maintaining our quality of life.
And here's Shirley just a few days before she died being read an article in that day's paper about the significance of the wildlife refuge at the Modini ranch.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Okay, it's great to be back at TED.
Child: Whoa! Look at that snake!
Man 7: After this bridge, first exit.
(Music) Man 10: It's beautiful.
(Applause) Sergey Brin: Oh, sorry, I just got this message from a Nigerian prince.
In addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you're out and about looking at your phone, it's kind of, is this what you're meant to do with your body?
But we've come a long way.
And the other really unexpected surprise was the camera.
(Applause)
Within two minutes, three people pass two-year-old Wang Yue by.
UNICEF reports that in 2011, 6.9 million children under five died from preventable, poverty-related diseases.
UNICEF thinks that that's good news because the figure has been steadily coming down from 12 million in 1990. That is good.
But still, 6.9 million is 19,000 children dying every day.
What is really important is, can we reduce that death toll? Can we save some of those 19,000 children dying every day?
Fortunately, more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement: effective altruism.
And I think that's why many of the most significant people in effective altruism have been people who have had backgrounds in philosophy or economics or math.
This is the website of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side, it says, "All lives have equal value."
According to one estimate, the Gates Foundation has already saved 5.8 million lives and many millions more, people, getting diseases that would have made them very sick, even if eventually they survived.
But you don't have to be a billionaire.
This is Toby Ord. He's a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford.
So Toby founded an organization called Giving What We Can to spread this information, to unite people who want to share some of their income, and to ask people to pledge to give 10 percent of what they earn over their lifetime to fighting global poverty.
And yes, Toby is married and he does have a mortgage.
He's a graduate student in philosophy, and he's set up a website called 80,000 Hours, the number of hours he estimates most people spend on their career, to advise people on how to have the best, most effective career.
So let's talk about effectiveness.
Toby Ord is very concerned about this, and he's calculated that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others, so it's very important to find the effective ones.
You could provide one guide dog for one blind American, or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness.
GiveWell exists to really assess the impact of charities, not just whether they're well-run, and it's screened hundreds of charities and currently is recommending only three, of which the Against Malaria Foundation is number one.
So they're looking at ways to reduce the risk of extinction.
There's many possibilities.
Charlie Bresler said to me that he's not an altruist.
He thinks that the life he's saving is his own.
And Holly Morgan told me that she used to battle depression until she got involved with effective altruism, and now is one of the happiest people she knows.
Becoming an effective altruist gives you that meaning and fulfillment.
This is a picture of him showing him recovering from surgery.
The email began, "Last Tuesday, I anonymously donated my right kidney to a stranger.
There's about 100 people each year in the U.S.
And that did make me feel a little bit better, because I have given more than 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation and to various other effective charities.
Thank you.
(Applause)
And after spending all my life wanting to do art, I left art school, and then I left art completely.
At the time, I was finishing up school, and I was so excited to get a real job and finally afford new art supplies.
So I got out of school, I got a job, I got a paycheck, I got myself to the art store, and I just went nuts buying supplies.
At this point, I was spending a lot of my evenings in -- well, I guess I still spend a lot of my evenings in Starbucks — but I know you can ask for an extra cup if you want one, so I decided to ask for 50.
So I painted 30 images, one layer at a time, one on top of another, with each picture representing an influence in my life.
Or what if, instead of painting with a brush, I could only paint with karate chops? (Laughter) So I'd dip my hands in paint, and I just attacked the canvas, and I actually hit so hard that I bruised a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks.
So for six days, I lived in front of a webcam.
The last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that didn't actually exist in the first place.
So I organized candles on a table, I lit them, and then blew them out, then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles, then assembled the videos into the larger image.
Looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life.
(Laughter) One of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that I've learned into something others can replicate.
Thank you.
(Applause)
When we use the word "architect" or "designer," what we usually mean is a professional, someone who gets paid, and we tend to assume that it's those professionals who are going to be the ones to help us solve the really big, systemic design challenges that we face like climate change, urbanization and social inequality.
In 2008, I was just about to graduate from architecture school after several years, and go out and get a job, and this happened.
One, don't listen to career advisers.
The uncomfortable fact is that actually almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world's population, and it always has been.
The first is, I think we need to question this idea that architecture is about making buildings.
Actually, a building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to almost any given problem.
Architects are actually really, really good at this kind of resourceful, strategic thinking.
The second idea worth questioning is this 20th-century thing that mass architecture is about big -- big buildings and big finance.
And it raises really interesting questions about, how will we plan cities? How will finance development?
And in a way it should be kind of obvious, right, that in the 21st century, maybe cities can be developed by citizens.
And thirdly, we need to remember that, from a strictly economic point of view, design shares a category with sex and care of the elderly -- mostly it's done by amateurs.
And that began with open-source software.
And that's where 3D printing gets really, really interesting.
Or the same idea here, which is for a CNC machine, which is like a large printer that can cut sheets of plywood.
We're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere, and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone.
So about a year and a half ago, we started working on a project called WikiHouse, and WikiHouse is an open-source construction system.
And a team of about two or three people, working together, can build this.
They don't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that, and they can build a small house of about this size in about a day.
With the CNC machine, you can make new parts for it over its life or even use it to make the house next door.
So we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source, citizen-led urban development model, potentially.
But the principles of openness go right down into the really mundane, physical details.
Take what already works, and adapt it for your own needs.
We shared the whole of WikiHouse under a Creative Commons license, and now what's just beginning to happen is that groups around the world are beginning to take it and use it and hack it and tinker with it, and it's amazing.
There's a cool group over in Christchurch in New Zealand looking at post-earthquake development housing, and thanks to the TED city Prize, we're working with an awesome group in one of Rio's favelas to set up a kind of community factory and micro-university.
How much would that change the rules?
And I think the technology's on our side.
(Applause)
I have a tough job to do.
Whenever you go to a teacher and show them some technology, the teacher's first reaction is, you cannot replace a teacher with a machine -- it's impossible.
I'm going to talk about children and self-organization, and a set of experiments which sort of led to this idea of what might an alternative education be like.
(Laughter) So it was a warm day, and the hole in the wall was on that decrepit old building. This is the first kid who came there; he later on turned out to be a 13-year-old school dropout.
Very quickly, he noticed that when he moves his finger on the touchpad something moves on the screen -- and later on he told me, "I have never seen a television where you can do something."
And by the evening of that day, 70 children were all browsing.
And as soon as they saw me they said, "We need a faster processor and a better mouse."
(Laughter) I was real surprised.
Basic Windows functions, browsing, painting, chatting and email, games and educational material, music downloads, playing video.
And over 300 children will become computer literate and be able to do all of these things in six months with one computer.
If you test them, all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them.
The third piece was on values, and again, to put it very briefly, I conducted a test over 500 children spread across all over India, and asked them -- I gave them about 68 different values-oriented questions and simply asked them their opinions.
But other examples are traffic jams, stock market, society and disaster recovery, terrorism and insurgency.
Remoteness affects the quality of education.
Educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first, and other areas later.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Music) (Applause) Thank you.
I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair.
The violin, which meant everything to me, became a grave burden on me.
Although many people tried to comfort and encourage me, their words sounded like meaningless noise.
When I was just about to give everything up after years of suffering, I started to rediscover the true power of music.
(Music) In the midst of hardship, it was the music that gave me -- that restored my soul.
(Music) (Applause) Thank you.
I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few.
I think, while I'm enjoying my life as a happy musician, I'm earning a lot more recognition than I've ever imagined.
Changing your perspectives will not only transform you but also the whole world.
Just play your life with all you have, and share it with the world.
(Music) (Applause)
When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house.
Maybe it's because elephants share many things in common with us.
And there they survive on the mainland until about 10,000 years ago, and actually, surprisingly, on the small islands off of Siberia and Alaska until about 3,000 years ago.
So if we were to go deep now within the bones and the teeth that actually survived the fossilization process, the DNA which was once intact, tightly wrapped around histone proteins, is now under attack by the bacteria that lived symbiotically with the mammoth for years during its lifetime.
But we've come up with very clever ways that we can actually discriminate, capture and discriminate, the mammoth from the non-mammoth DNA, and with the advances in high-throughput sequencing, we can actually pull out and bioinformatically re-jig all these small mammoth fragments and place them onto a backbone of an Asian or African elephant chromosome.
So a hominid genome is about three billion base pairs, but an elephant and mammoth genome is about two billion base pairs larger, and most of that is composed of small, repetitive DNAs that make it very difficult to actually re-jig the entire structure of the genome.
So having this information allows us to answer one of the interesting relationship questions between mammoths and their living relatives, the African and the Asian elephant, all of which shared an ancestor seven million years ago, but the genome of the mammoth shows it to share a most recent common ancestor with Asian elephants about six million years ago, so slightly closer to the Asian elephant.
And that this is not an uncommon feature in Proboscideans, because it turns out that large savanna male elephants will outcompete the smaller forest elephants for their females.
Well, that's not actually the case.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Ryan Phelan: Don't go away.
So I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression.
That's why I'm talking to you today about the age of design, and the age of design is the age in which design is still cute furniture, is still posters, is still fast cars, what you see at MoMA today.
"Sorry, MoMA, video games are not art."
And here, look, the above question is put bluntly: "Are video games art? No. Video games aren't art because they are quite thoroughly something else: code."
Oh, so Picasso is not art because it's oil paint. Right?
And the same with, for instance, Tetris, original version, the Soviet one.
I also talk about the MetroCard vending machine, which I consider a masterpiece of interaction.
It was a PlayStation game, but mostly for Japan.
And it was one of the first video games in which you could choose your own music.
And I was just recently at the Eve Online fan festival in Reykjavík that was quite amazing.
Of course, there are games that are even more educational.
And I was like, "Why?"
So when you see a gun, it's an instrument for killing in the design collection.
So it's very interesting.
It's very hard to get, of course.
And one day, we'll get that code. (Laughter) But I want to explain to you the criteria that we chose for interaction design. Aesthetics are really important.
And I'm showing you Core War here, which is an early game that takes advantage aesthetically of the limitations of the processor.
Time. The way we experience time in video games, as in other forms of interaction design, is really quite amazing.
So time, space, aesthetics, and then, most important, behavior.
The real core issue of interaction design is behavior.
Designers that deal with interaction design behaviors that go to influence the rest of our lives.
In a way, you can see how video games are the purest aspect of interaction design and are very useful to explain what interaction is.
I would like to do the same with video games.
And in a way, the video games, the fonts and everything else lead us to make people understand a wider meaning for design.
So it's an acquisition where MoMA makes an arrangement with an airline and keeps the Boeing 747 flying.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
A lot of people, when they hear the word "sexual orientation" think it means gay, lesbian, bisexual.
And a lot of people, when they hear the word "gender," think it means women.
It starts with a very basic English sentence: "John beat Mary."
"Mary was beaten by John."
Why is domestic violence still a big problem in the US and all over the world?
Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and boys?
The sexual abuse of children.
What is going on with men?
What about all the young men and boys who have been traumatized by adult men's violence?
So there's so many reasons why we need men to speak out.
Now, the nature of the work that I do and my colleagues do in the sports culture and the US military, in schools, we pioneered this approach called the bystander approach to gender-violence prevention.
But how do we not remain silent in the face of abuse?
Just like with heterosexism, if you're a heterosexual person and you yourself don't enact harassing or abusive behaviors towards people of varying sexual orientations, if you don't say something in the face of other heterosexual people doing that, then, in a sense, isn't your silence a form of consent and complicity?
And all I'm saying is that we need to break that silence, and we need more men to do that.
We need leadership training, because, for example, when a professional coach or a manager of a baseball team or a football team -- and I work extensively in that realm as well -- makes a sexist comment, makes a homophobic statement, makes a racist comment, there will be discussions on the sports blogs and in sports talk radio.
There are constraints within peer cultures on men, which is why we need to encourage men to break through those pressures.
I know this, I work with men, and I've been working with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men for many decades now.
We need more men with the guts, with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity to break our complicit silence and challenge each other and stand with women and not against them.
How many of you have checked your email today?
The woman in the photo with me is Harriet.
This is coal, the most common source of electricity on the planet, and there's enough energy in this coal to light this bulb for more than a year.
In fact, only 10 percent ends up as light.
If you wanted to light this bulb for a year, you'd need this much coal.
The answer comes from a behavioral science experiment that was run one hot summer, 10 years ago, and only 90 miles from here, in San Marcos, California.
The people who received this message showed a marked decrease in energy consumption simply by being told what their neighbors were doing.
Inspired by this insight, my friend Dan Yates and I started a company called Opower.
We started with paper, we moved to a mobile application, web, and now even a controllable thermostat, and for the last five years we've been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world.
Ordinary homeowners and renters have saved more than 250 million dollars on their energy bills, and we're just getting started.
This year alone, in partnership with more than 80 utilities in six countries, we're going to generate another two terawatt hours of electricity savings.
Now, the energy geeks in the room know two terawatt hours, but for the rest of us, two terawatt hours is more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City combined for more than a year.
Two terawatt hours, it's roughly half what the U.S. solar industry produced last year.
Twenty percent of the electricity in homes is wasted, and when I say wasted, I don't mean that people have inefficient lightbulbs. They may.
That's 40 billion dollars a year wasted on electricity that does not contribute to our well-being but does contribute to climate change.
Now thankfully, some of the world's best material scientists are looking to replace coal with sustainable resources like these, and this is both fantastic and essential.
Well, in most places, utility regulation hasn't changed much since Thomas Edison.
But this story is much more than about household energy use.
Take a look at the Prius.
It's efficient not only because Toyota invested in material science but because they invested in behavioral science.
The dashboard that shows drivers how much energy they're saving in real time makes former speed demons drive more like cautious grandmothers.
Which brings us back to Harriet.
We met her on our first family vacation.
She came over to meet my young daughter, and she was tickled to learn that my daughter's name is also Harriet.
You see, two weeks ago, my husband and I got a letter in the mail from our utility.
It told us we were using twice as much energy as our neighbors."
Thank you.
(Applause)
So I was trained to become a gymnast for two years in Hunan, China in the 1970s.
My parents wanted me to become an engineer like them.
After surviving the Cultural Revolution, they firmly believed there's only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job.
But my dream was to become a Chinese opera singer.
I was afraid that for the rest of my life some second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for.
I turned to books.
Encountering a new culture also started my habit of comparative reading.
It had never occurred to me, China doesn't have to be at the center of the world.
It's a standard practice in the academic world.
There are even research fields such as comparative religion and comparative literature.
["Personal History" by Katharine Graham]["The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," by Alice Schroeder] I also compare the same stories in different genres -- (Laughter) [Holy Bible: King James Version]["Lamb" by Chrisopher Moore] -- or similar stories from different cultures, as Joseph Campbell did in his wonderful book.["The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell] For example, both the Christ and the Buddha went through three temptations.
For the Christ, the temptations are economic, political and spiritual.
For example, it's through translation that I realized "happiness" in Chinese literally means "fast joy." Huh!
"Bride" in Chinese literally means "new mother." Uh-oh.
Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
"Even in purely nonreligious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty.
And last year, the president of the United States came out in favor of gay marriage.
When I was perhaps six years old, I went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother.
My brother wanted a red balloon, and I wanted a pink balloon.
(Laughter) (Applause) When I was little, my mother used to say, "The love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world.
About 20 years ago, I was asked by my editors at the "New York Times Magazine" to write a piece about Deaf culture.
And then I went out into the Deaf world.
I went to Deaf clubs.
(Laughter) And as I plunged deeper and deeper into the Deaf world, I became convinced that Deafness was a culture and that the people in the Deaf world who said, "We don't lack hearing; we have membership in a culture," were saying something that was viable.
And I suddenly thought, "Most deaf children are born to hearing parents.
Most gay people are born to straight parents.
Those straight parents often want them to function in what they think of as the mainstream world, and those gay people have to discover identity later on.
And here was this friend of mine, looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter.
There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally from parent to child.
There's self-acceptance, there's family acceptance, and there's social acceptance.
But acceptance is something that takes time.
And in the course of his childhood, he had 30 major surgical procedures.
He was the first one in his family, in fact, to go to college, where he lived on campus and drove a specially fitted car that accommodated his unusual body.
I'm going to quote from another magazine of the '60s.
This one is from 1968 -- "The Atlantic Monthly," voice of liberal America -- written by an important bioethicist.
But we forget how we used to see people who had other differences, how we used to see people who were disabled, how inhuman we held people to be.
One of the families I interviewed, Tom and Karen Robards, were taken aback when, as young and successful New Yorkers, their first child was diagnosed with Down syndrome.
In the time since that "Atlantic Monthly" story ran, the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome has tripled.
The experience of Down syndrome people includes those who are actors, those who are writers, some who are able to live fully independently in adulthood.
Do you wish your child didn't have Down syndrome?
And interestingly, his father said, "Well, for David, our son, I regret it, because for David, it's a difficult way to be in the world, and I'd like to give David an easier life.
Most deaf infants born in the United States now will receive cochlear implants, which are put into the brain and connected to a receiver, and which allow them to acquire a facsimile of hearing and to use oral speech.
A compound that has been tested in mice, BMN-111, is useful in preventing the action of the achondroplasia gene.
Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism, and mice who have been given that substance and who have the achondroplasia gene grow to full size.
I believe the social progress is fantastic and meaningful and wonderful, and I think the same thing about the medical progress.
Jim Sinclair, a prominent autism activist, said, "When parents say, 'I wish my child did not have autism,' what they're really saying is, 'I wish the child I have did not exist and I had a different, nonautistic child instead.' Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence.
One of the families I interviewed for this project was the family of Dylan Klebold, who was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre.
It took a long time to persuade them to talk to me, and once they agreed, they were so full of their story that they couldn't stop telling it, and the first weekend I spent with them, the first of many, I recorded more than 20 hours of conversation.
And on Sunday night, we were all exhausted.
We were sitting in the kitchen. Sue Klebold was fixing dinner.
And I said, "If Dylan were here now, do you have a sense of what you'd want to ask him?"
And Sue looked at the floor, and she thought for a minute.
And then she looked back up and said, "I would ask him to forgive me for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head."
If I hadn't gone to Ohio State and crossed paths with Tom, this child wouldn't have existed, and this terrible thing wouldn't have happened.
But I've come to feel that I love the children I had so much that I don't want to imagine a life without them.
"So while I recognize that it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born, I've decided that it would not have been better for me."
I decided to have children while I was working on this project.
I thought a lot about the mother of one disabled child I had seen, a severely disabled child who died through caregiver neglect.
And when his ashes were interred, his mother said, "I pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed: once of the child I wanted, and once of the son I loved."
So, my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in Minneapolis.
I had a close friend from college who'd gone through a divorce and wanted to have children.
And so she and I have a daughter, and mother and daughter live in Texas.
(Laughter) So -- (Applause) The shorthand is: five parents of four children in three states.
And there are people who think that families like mine shouldn't be allowed to exist.
And I believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness.
The day after our son was born, the pediatrician came into the hospital room and said she was concerned.
She said that might mean that he had brain damage.
And he had a very large head, which she thought might indicate hydrocephalus.
And like all parents since the dawn of time, I wanted to protect my child from illness.
And I wanted, also, to protect myself from illness.
(Laughter) But I thought -- (Laughter) I thought how my mother was right.
Thank you.
My journey started 14 years ago.
This was what many call immersion journalism, or undercover journalism.
I am an undercover journalist.
Journalism is about results.
I have worked on this for over 14 years, and I can tell you, the results are very good.
In their bids to kill, I got the police on standby, and they came that fateful morning to come and kill the child.
I am glad today the Tanzanian government has taken action, but the key issue is that the Tanzanian government could only take action because the evidence was available.
If I say you have stolen, I show you the evidence that you have stolen.
I show you how you stole it and when, or what you used what you had stolen to do.
My kind of journalism is a product of my society.
I know that sometimes people have their own criticisms about undercover journalism.
(Video) Official: He brought out some money from his pockets and put it on the table, so that we should not be afraid.
But my colleagues didn't know.
So after collecting the money, when he left, we were waiting for him to bring the goods.
Immediately after he left, I told my colleagues that since I was the leader of the group, I told my colleagues that if they come, we will arrest them.
My kind of journalism might not fit in other continents or other countries, but I can tell you, it works in my part of the continent of Africa, because usually, when people talk about corruption, they ask, "Where is the evidence?
Show me the evidence."
By the end of it, a lot more bad guys on our continent will be put behind bars.
Thank you very much.
CA: So someone sued you in court, and they took you there, and you were in remand custody for part of it, and you did that deliberately.
CA: Talk to me just about fear and how you manage that, because you're regularly putting your life at risk.
If you don't, you will end up losing your life.
Well, now we're going to the Bahamas to meet a remarkable group of dolphins that I've been working with in the wild for the last 28 years.
So decades ago, not years ago, I set out to find a place in the world where I could observe dolphins underwater to try to crack the code of their communication system.
Now in most parts of the world, the water's pretty murky, so it's very hard to observe animals underwater, but I found a community of dolphins that live in these beautiful, clear, shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas which are just east of Florida.
Now, young dolphins learn a lot as they're growing up, and they use their teenage years to practice social skills, and at about the age of nine, the females become sexually mature, so they can get pregnant, and the males mature quite a bit later, at around 15 years of age.
This is the dolphin's sonar. (Dolphin echolocation noises) And they use these clicks to hunt and feed.
(Laughter) Don't tell anyone. It's a secret.
(Dolphin noises) And they use these burst-pulsed sounds as well as their head-to-head behaviors when they're fighting.
Now this is some video of a typical dolphin fight.
Now, in the Bahamas, we also have resident bottlenose that interact socially with the spotted dolphins.
But burst-pulsed sounds is a bit of a mystery.
Two are human words, and one is a dolphin vocalizing.
This underwater keyboard in Orlando, Florida, at the Epcot Center, was actually the most sophisticated ever two-way interface designed for humans and dolphins to work together under the water and exchange information.
So we wanted to develop an interface like this in the Bahamas, but in a more natural setting.
They were spontaneously mimicking our vocalizations and our postures, and they were also inviting us into dolphin games.
Now, dolphins are social mammals, so they love to play, and one of their favorite games is to drag seaweed, or sargassum in this case, around.
They could point at the visual object, or they could mimic the whistle.
The diver here has a rope toy, and I'm on the keyboard on the left, and I've just played the rope key, and that's the request for the toy from the human.
So I've got the rope, I'm diving down, and I'm basically trying to get the dolphin's attention, because they're kind of like little kids.
(Whistle) That's the rope whistle.
And the diver there is going to activate the scarf sound to request the scarf.
But this is the moment where everything becomes possible.
And because of this, we really decided we needed some more sophisticated technology.
I mean, imagine what it would be like to really understand the mind of another intelligent species on the planet.
Thank you.
(Applause)
He said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
In the world that we are creating very quickly, we're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction, and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs.
Which brings up a critical question: Why is this time different, if it really is?
The reason it's different is that, just in the past few years, our machines have started demonstrating skills they have never, ever had before: understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing, answering, writing, and they're still acquiring new skills.
It's a world that Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling "the new machine age."
The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news.
This is the best economic news on the planet these days.
This is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons.
The first is, technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we're on where output goes up over time, while at the same time, prices go down, and volume and quality just continue to explode.
Now, some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism, but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it.
It's a society really, that looks a lot like the TED Conference.
And there's actually a huge amount of truth here.
In a world where it is just about as easy to generate an object as it is to print a document, we have amazing new possibilities.
The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers, and they're responsible for massive amounts of innovation.
And artists who were formerly constrained can now do things that were never, ever possible for them before.
We're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges as we head deeper into the future that we're creating.
If you look over the past couple decades at the returns to capital -- in other words, corporate profits -- we see them going up, and we see that they're now at an all-time high.
To tell you the kinds of societal challenges that are going to come up in the new machine age, I want to tell a story about two stereotypical American workers.
And the first one is a college-educated professional, creative type, manager, engineer, doctor, lawyer, that kind of worker.
We're going to call him "Ted."
We're going to call that guy "Bill."
And if you go back about 50 years, Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives.
For example, in 1960 they were both very likely to have full-time jobs, working at least 40 hours a week.
But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented, as we started to automate the economy, and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses, as we started to progressively inject technology and automation and digital stuff into the economy, the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot.
So I cannot tell a happy story about these social trends, and they don't show any signs of reversing themselves.
They're living these amazingly busy, productive lives, and they've got all the benefits to show from that, while Bill is leading a very different life.
["Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." — Voltaire] So with these challenges, what do we do about them?
But over the longer term, if we are moving into an economy that's heavy on technology and light on labor, and we are, then we have to consider some more radical interventions, for example, something like a guaranteed minimum income.
I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education, and what that education taught me is that the world is an interesting place and my job is to go explore it.
We see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people, from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones.
To give just one example, there are about five million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months.
The realities of this new machine age and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known.
If we wanted to accelerate that process, we could do things like have our best economists and policymakers play "Jeopardy!" against Watson.
We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Yet this is the kind of movie that I wanted to make ever since I was a kid, really, back when I was reading some comic books and dreaming about what the future might be.
In my early 20s, I did some graphic novels, but they weren't your usual graphic novels.
And one of these actors is the great stage director and actor Robert Lepage.
And I wanted this guy to be involved in my crazy project, and he was kind enough to lend his image to the character of Eugène Spaak, who is a cosmologist and artist who seeks relation in between time, space, love, music and women.
And he was a perfect fit for the part, and Robert is actually the one who gave me my first chance.
And Robert is actually the very first example of how constraints can boost creativity.
Because this guy is the busiest man on the planet.
How do you get somebody who is too busy to star in a movie?
Here's how we did it. We shot Robert with six cameras.
Each camera was covering 60 degrees of his head, so that in post-production we could use pretty much any angle we needed, and we shot only his head.
And, you know, I woke up one morning with a pretty good idea.
(Laughter) But who on Earth would be interested by seven not-yet-built musical instruments inspired by women's bodies?
And I thought of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal, because who better to understand the kind of crazy poetry that I wanted to put on screen?
So I found my way to Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil's CEO, and I presented my crazy idea to him with sketches like this and visual references, and something pretty amazing happened.
Guy was interested by this idea not because I was asking for his money, but because I came to him with a good idea in which everybody was happy.
And it was an amazing collaboration to work with this great artist whom I admire.
So this is what happened on this movie, and that's how it got made, and we went to this very nice postproduction company in Montreal called Vision Globale, and they lent their 60 artists to work full time for six months to do this crazy film.
And you might end up doing some crazy projects, and who knows, you might even end up going to Mars.
Thank you.
(Applause)
2014, July 5, the Ukrainian army entered Sloviansk city in eastern Ukraine.
They gathered all the locals in Lenin Square.
In reality, Galina's husband was an active pro-Russia militant in Donbass.
This is just one of many examples.
Ukraine has been suffering from Russian propaganda and fake news for four years now, but Russia is not the only player in this space.
Fake news is happening all around the world.
We all know about fake news.
But the thing about fake news is that we don't always know what is fake and what is real, but we base our decisions on facts we get from the press and social media.
They easily become prey to populists in elections, or even take up arms.
Fake news is not only bad for journalism.
It's a threat for democracy and society.
Four years ago, unmarked soldiers entered the Crimean Peninsula, and at the same time, Russian media was going crazy with fake news about Ukraine.
So a group of journalists, including me, started a website to investigate this fake news.
We called it StopFake.
The idea was simple: take a piece of news, check it with verifiable proof like photos, videos and other strong evidence.
Now, StopFake is an informational hub which analyzes propaganda in all its phases.
We've identified 18 narratives created using this fake news, such as Ukraine is a fascist state, a failed state, a state run by a junta who came to power as a result of a coup d'état.
Fake news is a powerful weapon in information warfare, but there is something we can do about it.
But how can you not be a part of fake news?
The truth is boring sometimes.
This is the second point, very simple.
Look at other sites.
It's the only way to stop this culture of fake news.
Our society depends on trust: trust in our institutions, in science, trust in our leaders, trust in our news outlets.
And it's on us to find a way to rebuild trust, because fake news destroys it.
And what are you going to do about it?
Thank you.
(Applause)
If you talk to someone today in America about sexual activity, you'll find pretty soon you're not just talking about sexual activity.
Because baseball is the dominant cultural metaphor that Americans use to think about and talk about sexual activity, and we know that because there's all this language in English that seems to be talking about baseball but that's really talking about sexual activity.
A switch-hitter is a bisexual person, and we gay and lesbian folks play for the other team.
So let's do this.
Everybody knows the rules.
"Well, maybe we can go half and half."
And you also can't get to second base and say, "I like it here. I'm going to stay here."
Okay, but what about pizza?
And in this case, difference is good, because that's going to increase the chance that we're having a satisfying experience.
And lastly, what's the expected outcome of baseball?
Well, in baseball, you play to win.
There's always a winner in baseball, and that means there's always a loser in baseball.
But what about pizza?
And sometimes that can be different amounts over different times or with different people or on different days.
(Laughter) So what if we could take this pizza model and overlay it on top of sexuality education?
A lot of sexuality education that happens today is so influenced by the baseball model, and it sets up education that can't help but produce unhealthy sexuality in young people.
Pizza is the way to think about healthy, satisfying sexual activity, and good, comprehensive sexuality education.
(Applause)
Well, Arthur C. Clarke, a famous science fiction writer from the 1950s, said that, "We overestimate technology in the short term, and we underestimate it in the long term."
That we're overestimating the technology in the short term.
The librarians were afraid their jobs were going to disappear.
And I think everyone from 1957 totally underestimated the level of technology we would all carry around in our hands and in our pockets today.
By the way, the wages for librarians went up faster than the wages for other jobs in the U.S. over that same time period, because librarians became partners of computers.
Back in the old days, people used spreadsheets.
On the left there is the PackBot from iRobot.
In fact, robots have become sort of ubiquitous in our lives in many ways.
But I think when it comes to factory robots, people are sort of afraid, because factory robots are dangerous to be around.
And Baxter, I see, as a way -- a first wave of robot that ordinary people can interact with in an industrial setting.
The interesting thing is Baxter has some basic common sense.
The eyes are on the screen there.
The eyes look ahead where the robot's going to move.
And Baxter's safe to interact with.
But I think the most interesting thing about Baxter is the user interface.
This is Mildred.
One hour after she saw her first industrial robot, she had programmed it to do some tasks in the factory.
When we first went out to talk to people in factories about how we could get robots to interact with them better, one of the questions we asked them was, "Do you want your children to work in a factory?"
They're tools that they can just learn how to operate in a few minutes.
There's two great forces that are both volitional but inevitable.
That's climate change and demographics.
And it's gone down slightly over the last 40 years.
But over the next 40 years, it's going to change dramatically, even in China.
And turned up the other way, the people who are retirement age goes up very, very fast, as the baby boomers get to retirement age.
That's happening statistically right now.
And so I really think that we're going to be spending more time with robots like Baxter and working with robots like Baxter in our daily lives. And that we will -- Here, Baxter, it's good.
And that we will all come to rely on robots over the next 40 years as part of our everyday lives.
(Applause)
We are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of Long Island near the town of Southampton in New York.
When I was a little girl, my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day.
And so three days later, driving very fast, I found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell, capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes, although only two percent actually do.
There's a warm, moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth, the wheat, the grass, the charged particles.
My hair used to be straight.
(Applause)
Quads have been around for a long time.
By controlling the speeds of these four propellers, these machines can roll, pitch, yaw, and accelerate along their common orientation.
It's the magic that brings these machines to life.
We use something broadly called model-based design.
We then use a branch of mathematics called control theory to analyze these models and also to synthesize algorithms for controlling them.
In this instance, carrying a glass of water is easy.
Hexacopters and octocopters, with six and eight propellers, can provide redundancy, but quadrocopters are much more popular because they have the minimum number of fixed motor propeller pairs: four.
We relinquish control of yaw, but roll, pitch and acceleration can still be controlled with algorithms that exploit this new configuration.
Mathematical models tell us exactly when and why this is possible.
We can't help but hold our breath when we watch a diver somersaulting into the water, or when a vaulter is twisting in the air, the ground fast approaching.
How do we make a machine do what an athlete does seemingly without effort?
(Laughter) (Applause) (Applause ends) This quad has a racket strapped onto its head with a sweet spot roughly the size of an apple, so not too large.
The following calculations are made every 20 milliseconds, or 50 times per second.
(Applause) In fact, when fully extended, this is roughly five times greater than what a bungee jumper feels at the end of their launch.
What happens when we couple this machine athleticism with that of a human being?
What I have in front of me is a commercial gesture sensor mainly used in gaming.
Similar to the pointer that I used earlier, we can use this as inputs to the system.
Take this quad, for example.
We can use mathematical models to estimate the force that I'm applying to the quad.
Here, the quad is behaving as if it were in a viscous fluid.
I will use this new capability to position this camera-carrying quad to the appropriate location for filming the remainder of this demonstration.
So we can physically interact with these quads and we can change the laws of physics.
For what you will see next, these quads will initially behave as if they were on Pluto.
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Whew!
Some conjecture that the role of play in the animal kingdom is to hone skills and develop capabilities.
Similarly, we use the analogy of sports and athleticism to create new algorithms for machines to push them to their limits.
What impact will the speed of machines have on our way of life?
Like all our past creations and innovations, they may be used to improve the human condition or they may be misused and abused.
Let's make the right choice, the choice that brings out the best in the future of machines, just like athleticism in sports can bring out the best in us.
But I will in the end urge you to rethink, actually take risks, and get involved in what I see as a global evolution of democracy.
And why is our democracy not working?
I used to, to try to avoid homework, sneak down to the living room and listen to my parents and their friends debate heatedly.
Then one night, military trucks drive up to our house.
A sergeant comes up to me with a machine gun, puts it to my head, and says, "Tell me where your father is or I will kill you."
Negotiations are difficult, the tensions are high, progress is slow, and then, 10 minutes to 2, a prime minister shouts out, "We have to finish in 10 minutes."
Greece, yes, triggered the Euro crisis, and some people blame me for pulling the trigger.
Our democracies are trapped by systems too big to fail, or, more accurately, too big to control.
Our democracies are weakened in the global economy with players that can evade laws, evade taxes, evade environmental or labor standards.
It's no wonder that many political leaders, and I don't exclude myself, have lost the trust of our people.
That's why I called for a referendum to have the Greek people own and decide on the terms of the rescue package.
I said, "We need to, before we restore confidence in the markets, we need to restore confidence and trust amongst our people."
We have weathered the storm, in Greece and in Europe, but we remain challenged.
If politics is the power to imagine and use our potential, well then 60-percent youth unemployment in Greece, and in other countries, certainly is a lack of imagination if not a lack of compassion.
So let's try something else.
"Idiot" comes from the root "idio," oneself.
And participation took place in the agora, the agora having two meanings, both a marketplace and a place where there was political deliberation.
You see, markets and politics then were one, unified, accessible, transparent, because they gave power to the people.
Today we have globalized the markets but we have not globalized our democratic institutions.
So our politicians are limited to local politics, while our citizens, even though they see a great potential, are prey to forces beyond their control.
Let's see if we can't design a European agora, not simply for products and services, but for our citizens, where they can work together, deliberate, learn from each other, exchange between art and cultures, where they can come up with creative solutions.
And here's an idea: Why not have the first truly European citizens by giving our immigrants, not Greek or German or Swedish citizenship, but a European citizenship?
Europe of and by the people, a Europe, an experiment in deepening and widening democracy beyond borders.
We must revive politics as the power to imagine, reimagine, and redesign for a better world.
Thank you.
I write fiction sci-fi thrillers, so if I say "killer robots," you'd probably think something like this.
But I'm actually not here to talk about fiction.
Now, I'm not referring to Predator and Reaper drones, which have a human making targeting decisions.
I'm talking about fully autonomous robotic weapons that make lethal decisions about human beings all on their own.
Both of these machines are capable of automatically identifying a human target and firing on it, the one on the left at a distance of over a kilometer.
And it's that choice that I want to focus on, because as we migrate lethal decision-making from humans to software, we risk not only taking the humanity out of war, but also changing our social landscape entirely, far from the battlefield.
That's because the way humans resolve conflict shapes our social landscape.
For example, these were state-of-the-art weapons systems in 1400 A.D.
Gunpowder, cannon.
And pretty soon, armor and castles were obsolete, and it mattered less who you brought to the battlefield versus how many people you brought to the battlefield.
So again, the tools we use to resolve conflict shape our social landscape.
Autonomous robotic weapons are such a tool, except that, by requiring very few people to go to war, they risk re-centralizing power into very few hands, possibly reversing a five-century trend toward democracy.
Seventy nations are developing remotely-piloted combat drones of their own, and as you'll see, remotely-piloted combat drones are the precursors to autonomous robotic weapons.
That's because once you've deployed remotely-piloted drones, there are three powerful factors pushing decision-making away from humans and on to the weapon platform itself.
For example, in 2004, the U.S. drone fleet produced a grand total of 71 hours of video surveillance for analysis.
By 2011, this had gone up to 300,000 hours, outstripping human ability to review it all, but even that number is about to go up drastically.
The Pentagon's Gorgon Stare and Argus programs will put up to 65 independently operated camera eyes on each drone platform, and this would vastly outstrip human ability to review it.
And that means very soon drones will tell humans what to look at, not the other way around.
But there's a second powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto machines, and that's electromagnetic jamming, severing the connection between the drone and its operator.
Now we saw an example of this in 2011 when an American RQ-170 Sentinel drone got a bit confused over Iran due to a GPS spoofing attack, but any remotely-piloted drone is susceptible to this type of attack, and that means drones will have to shoulder more decision-making.
Now we live in a global economy.
High-tech manufacturing is occurring on most continents.
Now if responsibility and transparency are two of the cornerstones of representative government, autonomous robotic weapons could undermine both.
Now you might be thinking that citizens of high-tech nations would have the advantage in any robotic war, that citizens of those nations would be less vulnerable, particularly against developing nations.
But I think the truth is the exact opposite.
I think citizens of high-tech societies are more vulnerable to robotic weapons, and the reason can be summed up in one word: data.
Data powers high-tech societies.
Cell phone geolocation, telecom metadata, social media, email, text, financial transaction data, transportation data, it's a wealth of real-time data on the movements and social interactions of people.
Lines indicate social connectedness between individuals.
Now it's typically used to market goods and services to targeted demographics, but it's a dual-use technology, because targeting is used in another context.
These are the hubs of social networks.
These are organizers, opinion-makers, leaders, and these people also can be automatically identified from their communication patterns.
But if you're a repressive government searching for political enemies, you might instead remove them, eliminate them, disrupt their social group, and those who remain behind lose social cohesion and organization.
And this is why we need an international treaty on robotic weapons, and in particular a global ban on the development and deployment of killer robots.
But robotic weapons might be every bit as dangerous, because they will almost certainly be used, and they would also be corrosive to our democratic institutions.
This temporarily effectively banned autonomous weapons in the U.S. military, but that directive needs to be made permanent.
Because we need an international legal framework for robotic weapons.
And we need it now, before there's a devastating attack or a terrorist incident that causes nations of the world to rush to adopt these weapons before thinking through the consequences.
Autonomous robotic weapons concentrate too much power in too few hands, and they would imperil democracy itself.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think there are tons of great uses for unarmed civilian drones: environmental monitoring, search and rescue, logistics.
If we have an international treaty on robotic weapons, how do we gain the benefits of autonomous drones and vehicles while still protecting ourselves against illegal robotic weapons?
And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their presence.
But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system.
It would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.
We must ban the deployment and development of killer robots.
Autonomous robotic weapons would concentrate too much power in too few unseen hands, and that would be corrosive to representative government.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
You know that all over the world, people fight for their freedom, fight for their rights.
It was just a custom and traditions that are enshrined in rigid religious fatwas and imposed on women.
So I drove. I posted a video on YouTube.
Outside the jail, the whole country went into a frenzy, some attacking me badly, and others supportive and even collecting signatures in a petition to be sent to the king to release me.
The streets were packed with police cars and religious police cars, but some hundred brave Saudi women broke the ban and drove that day.
And the study states, the percentage of rape, adultery, illegitimate children, even drug abuse, prostitution in countries where women drive is higher than countries where women don't drive.
One of them is when I was in jail.
I was asked last year to give a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum.
For me, I'm a proud Saudi woman, and I do love my country, and because I love my country, I'm doing this.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Saudi Arabia today is taking small steps toward enhancing women's rights.
20 percent of the Council. (Applause) The same time, finally, that Council, after rejecting our petition four times for women driving, they finally accepted it last February.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
But the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008, the great crash, broke this illusion.
So the understanding of this Great Recession was that this was completely surprising, this came out of the blue, this was like the wrath of the gods.
So, as a reflection of this, we started the Financial Crisis Observatory.
The root mechanism of a dragon-king is a slow maturation towards instability, which is the bubble, and the climax of the bubble is often the crash.
This is similar to the slow heating of water in this test tube reaching the boiling point, where the instability of the water occurs and you have the phase transition to vapor.
(Laughter) There are many early warning signals that are predicted by this theory.
From seven months of pregnancy, a mother starts to feel episodic precursory contractions of the uterus that are the sign of these maturations toward the instability, giving birth to the baby, the dragon-king.
Epileptic seizures also come in a large variety of size, and when the brain goes to a super-critical state, you have dragon-kings which have a degree of predictability and this can help the patient to deal with this illness.
We have applied this theory to many systems, landslides, glacier collapse, even to the dynamics of prediction of success: blockbusters, YouTube videos, movies, and so on.
This is rooted in 30 years of history of bubbles, starting in 1980, with the global bubble crashing in 1987, followed by many other bubbles.
The biggest one was the "new economy" Internet bubble in 2000, crashing in 2000, the real estate bubbles in many countries, financial derivative bubbles everywhere, stock market bubbles also everywhere, commodity and all bubbles, debt and credit bubbles -- bubbles, bubbles, bubbles.
The problem is that we see the same process, in particular through quantitative easing, of a thinking of a perpetual money machine nowadays to tackle the crisis since 2008 in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan.
This is the expression of the stock market of a massive bubble, a factor of three, 300 percent in just a few years.
In September 2007, I was invited as a keynote speaker of a macro hedge fund management conference, and I showed to the conference a prediction that by the end of 2007, this bubble would change regime.
They told me, "Didier, yeah, the market might be overvalued, but you forget something.
There is the Beijing Olympic Games coming in August 2008, and it's very clear that the Chinese government is controlling the economy and doing what it takes to also avoid any wave and control the stock market."
Three weeks after my presentation, the markets lost 20 percent and went through a phase of volatility, upheaval, and a total market loss of 70 percent until the end of the year.
The Chinese market collapsed, but it rebounded.
So the crisis did occur. The market corrected.
So there are bubbles everywhere.
But the dragon-king theory gives hope.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I'll leave that to others.
But I do have an idea, and that idea is called Housing for Health.
Housing for Health works with poor people.
A man called Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man, was running a health service.
Yami assembled a team in Alice Springs.
That was our task.
So we had the goals and each one of these goals -- and I won't go through them all -- puts at the center the person and their health issue, and it then connects them to the bits of the physical environment that are actually needed to keep their health good.
Now, I'm going to ask you all a very personal question.
OK. Let's see if your shower in that house is working.
You and your kids are fine.
Why? Because you're all too old.
And before you get offended and leave, I've got to say that being too old, in this case, means that pretty much everyone in the room, I think, is over five years of age.
Those ticks and crosses represent the 7,800 houses we've looked at nationally around Australia, the same proportion.
By the evening of the first day, a few houses in that community are better than when we started in the morning.
(Applause) Thank you.
Why are the houses in such poor condition?
Seventy-five percent of our national team in Australia -- over 75 at the minute -- are actually local, indigenous people from the communities we work in.
Our work's always had a focus on health.
We put washing facilities in the school as well, so kids can wash their faces many times during the day.
And they found a 40 percent reduction in hospital admissions for the illnesses that you could attribute to the poor environment -- a 40 percent reduction.
It was during the design of the first toilet that I went for lunch, invited by the family into their main room of the house.
Later we found the leading cause of illness and death in this particular region is through respiratory failure.
And the answer from the Nepali team who's working at the minute would say, don't be ridiculous -- we have three million more toilets to build before we can even make a stab at that claim.
But as we all sit here today, there are now over 100 toilets built in this village and a couple nearby.
Her lungs have got better, and they'll get better as time increases, because she's not cooking in the same smoke.
Nelson Mandela said, in the mid-2000s, not too far from here, he said that like slavery and apartheid, "Poverty is not natural.
(Applause)
(Video): Man: ... extremely dangerous questions.
Because, with our present knowledge, we have no idea what would happen.
Well, it's been calculated a few degrees' rise in the earth's temperature would melt the polar ice caps.
Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.
When Mahatma Gandhi was asked, "How do you know if the next act that you are about to do is the right one or the wrong one?" he said, "Consider the face of the poorest, most vulnerable human being that you ever chanced upon, and ask yourself if the act that you contemplate will be of benefit to that person.
For those of us in this room, it's not just the poorest and the most vulnerable individual, it's the community, it's the culture, it's the world itself.
And the trends for those who are at the periphery of our society, who are the poorest and the most vulnerable, the trends give rise to a great case for pessimism.
Let's review them both. First of all, the megatrends.
Even though we've dodged Paul Ehrlich's population bomb, and we will not see 20 billion people in this decade, as he had forecast, we eat as if we were 20 billion.
And we consume so much that again, a rise of 6.5 billion to 9.5 billion in our grandchildren's lifetime will disproportionately hurt the poorest and the most vulnerable.
That's why they migrate to cities.
The rural areas are no longer producing as much food as they did.
In Africa last year, Africans ate 600 million wild animals, and consumed two billion kilograms of bush meat.
And in fact, with increasing globalization -- for which there are big winners and even bigger losers -- today the world is more diverse and unfair than perhaps it has ever been in history.
What will happen if the billion people today who live on less than one dollar a day rise to three billion in the next 30 years?
So there's lots of reason for pessimism.
Last year, there were 85,000 riots in China, 230 a day, that required police or military intervention.
We are facing an unprecedented number, scale of disasters.
For us, where does it take us, as social activists and entrepreneurs?
Let's look at one case, the case of Bangladesh.
First, even if carbon dioxide emissions stopped today, global warming would continue.
And even with global warming -- if you can see these blue lines, the dotted line shows that even if emissions of greenhouse gasses stopped today, the next decades will see rising sea levels.
So here's Bangladesh.
Looking at the five major rivers that feed Bangladesh.
As many as 100 million refugees from Bangladesh could be expected to migrate into India and into China.
But if you look at the globe, all around the earth, wherever there is low-lying area, populated areas near the water, you will find increase in sea level that will challenge our way of life.
Sub-Saharan Africa, and even our own San Francisco Bay Area.
You just need to look at the list of Nobel laureates to remind ourselves.
We've seen the eradication of smallpox.
We may see the eradication of polio this year.
Last year, there were only 2,000 cases in the world.
We may see the eradication of guinea worm next year -- there are only 35,000 cases left in the world.
More reasons to be optimistic: in the '60s, and I am a creature of the '60s, there was a movement.
We all felt that we were part of it, that a better world was right around the corner, that we were watching the birth of a world free of hatred and violence and prejudice.
Today, there's another kind of movement. It's a movement to save the earth.
Five weeks ago, a group of activists from the business community gathered together to stop a Texas utility from building nine coal-fired electrical plants that would have contributed to destroying the environment.
Al Gore made presentations in the House and the Senate as an expert witness.
And now 4,000 churches have joined the environmental movement.
The European 20-20-20 plan is an amazing breakthrough, something that should make all of us feel that hope is on the horizon.
And on April 14th, there will be Step Up Day, where there will be a thousand individual mobilized social activist movements in the United States on protest against legislation -- pushing for legislation to stop global warming.
And on July 7th, around the world, I learned only yesterday, there will be global Live Earth concerts.
Now, that doesn't mean that people understand that global warming hurts the poorest and the weakest the most.
And I lived in a Himalayan monastery, and I studied with a very wise teacher, who kicked me out of the monastery one day and told me that it was my destiny -- it felt like Yoda -- it is your destiny to go to work for WHO and to help eradicate smallpox, at a time when there was no smallpox program.
It should make you optimistic that smallpox no longer exists because it was the worst disease in history.
In the last century -- that's the one that was seven years ago -- half a billion people died from smallpox: more than all the wars in history, more than any other infectious disease in the history of the world.
In the Summer of Love, in 1967, two million people, children, died of smallpox.
To eradicate smallpox, we had to gather the largest United Nations army in history.
We visited every house in India, searching for smallpox -- 120 million houses, once every month, for nearly two years.
And when they did, they took smallpox to 10 other countries and reignited the epidemic.
But, in the end, we succeeded, and the last case of smallpox: this little girl, Rahima Banu -- Barisal, in Bangladesh -- when she coughed or breathed, and the last virus of smallpox left her lungs and fell on the dirt and the sun killed that last virus, thus ended a chain of transmission of history's greatest horror.
Doctors, health workers, from 30 different countries, of every race, every religion, every color, worked together, fought alongside each other, fought against a common enemy, didn't fight against each other.
How can that not make you feel optimistic for the future?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in Europe and the rest of the world, but Africa was sort of cut off.
And that changed, first with ships when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and also the Industrial Revolution.
And now we've got the digital revolution.
These revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations.
Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect Africa to the rest of the world.
What I find amazing is that Africa is transcending its geography problem.
The connectivity situation has improved greatly, but some barriers remain.
In 2008, one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow.
It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time.
So we came together and we created software called Ushahidi.
And Ushahidi means "testimony" or "witness" in Swahili.
Clearly I have a German mother somewhere.
And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi, an actual physical space where we could collaborate, and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya.
Now, this year the Internet turns 20, and Ushahidi turned five.
I moved back to Kenya in 2011.
And in Kenya, it's a very different reality, and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress and the digital revolution is the electricity problem.
Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now, and other parts of Africa.
Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria?
And also, when traveling within Africa, you've got different settings for different mobile providers.
So we've got a joke in Ushahidi where we say, "If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere."
Could we leverage the cloud?
We wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world, for our context, and for our reality.
With load balancing, this can be possible.
So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that, through the support of many people, not only here but online, the BRCK has been Kickstarted, and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins.
The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I was born and raised in North Korea.
Although my family constantly struggled against poverty, I was always loved and cared for first, because I was the only son and the youngest of two in the family.
But then the great famine began in 1994.
My sister and I would go searching for firewood starting at 5 in the morning and come back after midnight.
I would wander the streets searching for food, and I remember seeing a small child tied to a mother's back eating chips, and wanting to steal them from him.
Hunger is humiliation. Hunger is hopelessness.
On my ninth birthday, my parents couldn't give me any food to eat.
Over a million North Koreans died of starvation in that time, and in 2003, when I was 13 years old, my father became one of them.
I saw my father wither away and die.
In the same year, my mother disappeared one day, and then my sister told me that she was going to China to earn money, but that she would return with money and food soon.
It was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life.
I have not seen my mom or my sister since then.
So I started to steal from food carts in illegal markets.
When I could not fall asleep from bitter cold or hunger pains, I hoped that, the next morning, my sister would come back to wake me up with my favorite food.
After three years of waiting for my sister's return, I decided to go to China to look for her myself.
I had learned that many people tried to cross the border to China in the nighttime to avoid being seen.
North Korean border guards often shoot and kill people trying to cross the border without permission.
I made it to China on February 15, 2006.
But it was harder than living in North Korea, because I was not free.
Later that year, an activist helped me escape China and go to the United States as a refugee.
I went to America without knowing a word of English, yet my social worker told me that I had to go to high school.
My father tried very hard to motivate me into studying, but it didn't work.
I was only 11 or 12, but it hurt me deeply.
I didn't even go to middle school.
But one day, I came home and my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner.
I was so happy.
Suddenly I remembered my biological father.
My foster father's small act of love reminded me of my father, who would love to share his food with me when he was hungry, even if he was starving.
I felt so suffocated that I had so much food in America, yet my father died of starvation.
(Applause) That chicken wing changed my life.
You have to choose to believe in hope.
But in America, I didn't know what to do, because I had this overwhelming freedom.
My foster father at that dinner gave me a direction, and he motivated me and gave me a purpose to live in America.
Have hope for yourself, but also help each other.
In the same way, you may also change someone's life with even the smallest act of love.
Thank you.
(Laughter) Yes, I'm just looking forward to seeing you, and if you can't find me, I will also look for you, and I hope to see you one day.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Writing biography is a strange thing to do.
What happened, that is, on the night in the year 610 when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain just outside Mecca?
(Laughter) And I plead guilty as charged, because all exploration, physical or intellectual, is inevitably in some sense an act of transgression, of crossing boundaries.
Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air.
Quite the contrary.
So the man who fled down the mountain that night trembled not with joy but with a stark, primordial fear.
And that panicked disorientation, that sundering of everything familiar, that daunting awareness of something beyond human comprehension, can only be called a terrible awe.
Yet whether you're a rationalist or a mystic, whether you think the words Muhammad heard that night came from inside himself or from outside, what's clear is that he did experience them, and that he did so with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world and transform this otherwise modest man into a radical advocate for social and economic justice.
Yet what, exactly, is imperfect about doubt?
And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that he doubted, because doubt is essential to faith.
Doubly ironic, in this case, because their absolutism is in fact the opposite of faith.
And yet we, the vast and still far too silent majority, have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority.
This isn't faith.
We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers.
Could Muhammad have so radically changed his world without such faith, without the refusal to cede to the arrogance of closed-minded certainty?
He'd be appalled at the repression of half the population because of their gender.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
In the northwest corner of the United States, right up near the Canadian border, there's a little town called Libby, Montana, and it's surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky.
And in there is a little town called Libby, which I visited, which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated.
She told me when she went to school, she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing.
But then a few years later, her mother died, and that seemed stranger still, because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever.
In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive to this day, and learning how to waltz.
The town had a vermiculite mine in it.
They said things like, "Well, if it were really dangerous, someone would have told us."
But still Gayla went on, and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town and to screen the inhabitants of the town -- 15,000 people -- and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere in the United States.
And when I go to Germany, they say, "Oh yes, this is the German disease."
And the truth is, this is a human problem.
And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is, "Well, there's no point, because you see what happens to them.
And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers, the recurrent tone that I hear is pride.
We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib, which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq.
I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor, who fought for five years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies.
We all enjoy so many freedoms today, hard-won freedoms: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that wasn't here the last time I came to Hungary; a freedom to vote, which women in particular had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want.
But freedom doesn't exist if you don't use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have.
I took my 12-year-old daughter with me, because I really wanted her to meet Gayla.
I said, "She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity, and she's not an expert, and Gayla's the first person who'd say she's not a saint.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I'll never forget that day back in the spring of 2006.
I can still remember sort of that smell of rotting flesh as I pulled the curtain back to see her.
Despite exercising three or four hours every single day, and following the food pyramid to the letter, I'd gained a lot of weight and developed something called metabolic syndrome.
And insulin resistance, as its name suggests, is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job.
I, as you can see, I guess I'm not overweight anymore.
Now, most researchers believe obesity is the cause of insulin resistance.
In fact, what if it's a symptom of a much deeper problem, the tip of a proverbial iceberg?
So now, when insulin says to a cell, I want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe, the cell, in effect, says, "No thanks, I'd actually rather store this energy."
So for many of us, about 75 million Americans, the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat, not the reverse, getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat.
In fact, it's the opposite. It's a healthy response to the trauma, all of those immune cells rushing to the site of the injury to salvage cellular debris and prevent the spread of infection to elsewhere in the body.
Cause and effect.
Maybe we should be asking ourselves, is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity, at least in most people?
But step one is accepting the possibility that our current beliefs about obesity, diabetes and insulin resistance could be wrong and therefore must be tested.
Others think it's too many refined grains and starches.
But this team of multi-disciplinary, highly skeptical and exceedingly talented researchers do agree on two things.
First, how do the various foods we consume impact our metabolism, hormones and enzymes, and through what nuanced molecular mechanisms?
I wish I could speak with that woman again.
(Applause)
(Laughter) Now let's look at this cartoon.
In general, that seems like a funny cartoon, but let's look what online survey I did.
"I don't like to see animals suffer -- even in cartoons."
To people like this, I point out we use anesthetic ink.
Humor is a type of entertainment.
But this is a worse one.
(Laughter) So in dealing with humor in the context of The New Yorker, you have to see, where is that tiger going to be?
"Now is the part of the show when we ask the audience to shout out some random numbers."
What is New Yorker humor?
No. It's about us.
(Laughter) And this is my most well-known cartoon.
Now these look like very different forms of humor but actually they bear a great similarity.
He is both being polite and rude.
Basically, that's the way humor works.
So I'm a humor analyst, you would say.
Now E.B. White said, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog.
(Video) Bob Mankoff: "Oooh, no.
Oooh. Hmm. Too funny.
I'll enjoy it on my own. Perhaps.
No. No.
(Music) No. No.
(Laughter) That's sort of an exaggeration of what I do.
"T-Cell Army: Can the body's immune response help treat cancer?" Oh, goodness.
One way to look at it is this.
It's like this, like an amusement park.
Now I'm going to show you cartoons The New Yorker did right after 9/11, a very, very sensitive area when humor could be used.
"I figure if I don't have that third martini, then the terrorists win."
(Laughter) Humor does need a target.
But interestingly, in The New Yorker, the target is us.
The humor is self-reflective and makes us think about our assumptions.
Look at this cartoon by Roz Chast, the guy reading the obituary.
"I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, Then it became a moral choice, and now it's just to annoy people."
"You slept with her, didn't you?"
(Laughter) "Lassie! Get help!!"
(Laughter) It's called French Army Knife.
The dog is signaling he wants to go for a walk.
That could happen. It's humor within the realm of reality.
Here, cowboy to a cow: "Very impressive. I'd like to find 5,000 more like you."
In general, people who enjoy more nonsense, enjoy more abstract art, they tend to be liberal, less conservative, that type of stuff.
"It sort of makes you stop and think, doesn't it."
(Laughter) And now, when you look at New Yorker cartoons, I'd like you to stop and think a little bit more about them.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
I'm focused on two projects I want to tell you about.
One is the Thylacine Project.
The second reason is that we killed these things.
There's a dreadful fungus that's moving through the world that's called the chytrid fungus, and it's nailing frogs all over the world.
And this introduces a very important ethical point, and I think you will have heard this many times when this topic comes up.
Yeah, but this was not just any frog.
Now, I'm not suggesting we want to raise our babies in our stomach, but I am suggesting it's possible we might want to manage gastric secretion in the gut.
I called up my friend, Professor Mike Tyler in the University of Adelaide.
He was the last person who had this frog, a colony of these things, in his lab.
And I said, "Mike, by any chance --" This was 30 or 40 years ago.
And he thought about it, and he went to his deep freezer, minus 20 degrees centigrade, and he poured through everything in the freezer, and there in the bottom was a jar and it contained tissues of these frogs.
And normally, when water freezes, as you know, it expands, and the same thing happens in a cell.
If you freeze tissues, the water expands, damages or bursts the cell walls.
It actually didn't look bad. The cell walls looked intact.
What we found was most of these eggs didn't work, but then suddenly, one of them began to divide.
(Applause) Thank you.
The second project I want to talk to you about is the Thylacine Project.
But it's also a tragic history.
There were five different kinds of thylacines in those ancient forests, and they ranged from great big ones to middle-sized ones to one that was about the size of a chihuahua.
Climate change has affected the world for a long period of time, and gradually, the forests disappeared, the country began to dry out, and the number of kinds of thylacines began to decline, until by five million years ago, only one left.
And as you can see, dingoes are very similar in their body form to thylacines.
It's even possible that aborigines were keeping some of these dingoes as pets, and therefore they may have had an advantage in the battle for survival.
All we know is, soon after the dingoes were brought in, thylacines were extinct in the Australian mainland, and after that they only survived in Tasmania.
That guy is going to eat all our sheep.
By the early 1930s, 3,000 to 4,000 thylacines had been murdered.
In 1990, I was in the Australian Museum.
And I was studying skulls, trying to figure out their relationships to other sorts of animals, and I saw this jar, and here, in the jar, was a little girl thylacine pup, perhaps six months old.
But this was 1990, and I asked my geneticist friends, couldn't we think about going into this pup and extracting DNA, if it's there, and then somewhere down the line in the future, we'll use this DNA to bring the thylacine back?
The geneticists laughed. But this was six years before Dolly.
Unfortunately, we also found a lot of human DNA.
We would hope that we'll be able to get that DNA back into a viable form, and then, much like we've done with the Lazarus Project, get that stuff into an egg of a host species.
Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated this might not be a waste of time.
In other words, if thylacine tissues were being produced by the thylacine DNA, it would be able to be recognized.
You've taken the bits of one animal and you've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal.
And the answer is no.
Or has Tasmania changed so much that that's no longer possible?
My interest was in whether the environment had changed.
The southern beech forests surrounded his hut just like it was when he was there in 1926.
That's classic thylacine habitat.
And the animals in those areas were the same that were there when the thylacine was around.
If it had not been illegal to keep these thylacines as pets then, would the thylacine be extinct now?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good morning.
This was where I was born: Shanghai, at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
My grandmother tells me that she heard the sound of gunfire along with my first cries.
Communism!
Sooner or later, all of humanity, regardless of culture, language, nationality, will arrive at this final stage of political and social development.
The entire world's peoples will be unified in this paradise on Earth and live happily ever after.
We were taught that grand story day in and day out.
The story was a bestseller.
Then, the world changed overnight.
As for me, disillusioned by the failed religion of my youth, I went to America and became a Berkeley hippie.
Sooner or later, electoral democracy will be the only political system for all countries and all peoples, with a free market to make them all rich.
(Video) George H.W. Bush: A new world order...
According to Freedom House, the number of democracies went from 45 in 1970 to 115 in 2010.
In just 30 years, China went from one of the poorest agricultural countries in the world to its second-largest economy.
Eighty percent of the entire world's poverty alleviation during that period happened in China.
See, I grew up on this stuff: food stamps.
Meat was rationed to a few hundred grams per person per month at one point.
Middle class is expanding in speed and scale unprecedented in human history.
Yes, China is a one-party state run by the Chinese Communist Party, the Party, and they don't hold elections.
Adaptability, meritocracy, and legitimacy are the three defining characteristics of China's one-party system.
Now, most political scientists will tell us that a one-party system is inherently incapable of self-correction.
So the Party self-corrects in rather dramatic fashions.
One thing we often hear is, "Political reforms have lagged far behind economic reforms," and "China is in dire need of political reform."
But this claim is a rhetorical trap hidden behind a political bias.
Now such changes are simply not possible without political reforms of the most fundamental kind.
The second assumption is that in a one-party state, power gets concentrated in the hands of the few, and bad governance and corruption follow.
Indeed, corruption is a big problem, but let's first look at the larger context.
China's highest ruling body, the Politburo, has 25 members.
He started as a village manager, and by the time he entered the Politburo, he had managed areas with a total population of 150 million people and combined GDPs of 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars.
George W. Bush, remember him?
In 1949, when the Party took power, China was mired in civil wars, dismembered by foreign aggression, average life expectancy at that time, 41 years old.
Satisfaction with the direction of the country: 85 percent.
Those who think they're better off than five years ago: 70 percent.
Ninety-three percent of China's Generation Y are optimistic about their country's future.
Democracy is becoming a perpetual cycle of elect and regret.
Pollution is one. Food safety. Population issues.
On the political front, the worst problem is corruption.
So if election is the panacea for corruption, how come these countries can't fix it?
In the next 10 years, China will surpass the U.S.
and become the largest economy in the world.
Economic reform will accelerate, political reform will continue, and the one-party system will hold firm.
On the contrary, I think democracy contributed to the rise of the West and the creation of the modern world.
Communism and democracy may both be laudable ideals, but the era of their dogmatic universalism is over.
It is wrong. It is irresponsible.
And worst of all, it is boring.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.
The Chinese government.
Are you happy with the garbage collection?
But then you've just mentioned other elements like, you know, big challenges, and there are, of course, a lot of other data that go in a different direction: tens of thousands of unrests and protests and environmental protests, etc.
Because, by Western definitions, a so-called civil society has to be separate or even in opposition to the political system, but that concept is alien for Chinese culture.
There's an old joke about a cop who's walking his beat in the middle of the night, and he comes across a guy under a street lamp who's looking at the ground and moving from side to side, and the cop asks him what he's doing.
(Laughter) There's a concept that people talk about nowadays called "big data."
So we don't know, for example, how many people right now are being affected by disasters or by conflict situations.
Because once you've collected all that data, of course, someone -- some unfortunate person -- is going to have to type that into a computer.
And the fact is, millions is a gross estimate, because we don't really know how many kids die each year of this.
What makes it even more frustrating is that the data-entry part, the part that I used to do as a grad student, can take sometimes six months.
Now 1995 -- obviously, that was quite a long time ago.
Digital data collection is actually more efficient than collecting on paper.
While I was doing it, my business partner, Rose, who's here with her husband, Matthew, here in the audience, Rose was out doing similar stuff for the American Red Cross.
There are millions and millions and millions of programs, millions of clinics that need to track drugs, millions of vaccine programs.
There are schools that need to track attendance.
Of course, all of these things are cloud based and don't require any training.
It's cloud based, and it doesn't require any training, programming, consultants.
But there are some additional benefits as well.
We can take a process that took two years and compress that down to the space of five minutes.
And I told you that in the first few years of trying to do this the old-fashioned way, going out to each country, we probably trained about 1,000 people.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In the next 18 minutes, I'm going to take you on a journey.
And it's a journey that you and I have been on for many years now, and it began some 50 years ago, when humans first stepped off our planet.
Now, the Saturn system is a rich planetary system.
And here's a beautiful picture of the Andromeda Nebula, which is our closest, largest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way.
So the journey back to Saturn is really part of and is also a metaphor for a much larger human voyage to understand the interconnectedness of everything around us, and also how humans fit into that picture.
They range in size from a few kilometers across to as big across as the U.S.
Its atmosphere is largely molecular nitrogen, like you are breathing here in this room, except that its atmosphere is suffused with simple organic materials like methane and propane and ethane.
And these molecules high up in the atmosphere of Titan get broken down, and their products join together to make haze particles.
But this is what we suspected. And these molecules, especially methane and ethane, can be liquids at the surface temperatures of Titan.
And so it turns out that methane is to Titan what water is to the Earth.
Try to imagine what the surface of Titan might look like.
This is a picture of Titan, backlit by the Sun, with the rings as a beautiful backdrop.
We have instruments on Cassini which can see down to the surface through this atmosphere, and my camera system is one of them.
This, we later found out, is, in fact, a crater, but there are very few craters on the surface of Titan, meaning it's a very young surface.
But we couldn't make sense of our images, until, six months after we got into orbit, an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of Cassini's investigation of Titan.
This is a device of human making, and it landed in the outer solar system for the first time in human history.
(Laughter).
(Applause).
(Applause).
And then, only a week and a half ago, we flew over the north pole of Titan and found, again, we found a feature here the size of the Caspian Sea.
And I think you would agree that we have found Titan is a remarkable, mystical place. It's exotic, it's alien, but yet strangely Earth-like, and having Earth-like geological formations and a tremendous geographical diversity, and is a fascinating world whose only rival in the solar system for complexity and richness is the Earth itself.
And so now we go onto Enceladus. Enceladus is a small moon, it's about a tenth the size of Titan. And you can see it here next to England, just to show you the size. This is not meant to be a threat.
(Laughter).
In other words, we have possibly stumbled upon the holy grail of modern day planetary exploration, or in other words, an environment that is potentially suitable for living organisms.
Right now, Earth is the only planet still that we know is teeming with life.
And if any of you were alert and coherent during the 1960s -- and we'd forgive you, if you weren't, OK -- you would remember this very famous picture taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968.
It is a total eclipse of the Sun, seen from the other side of Saturn.
And in this impossibly beautiful picture, you see the main rings backlit by the Sun, you see the refracted image of the Sun and you see this ring created, in fact, by the exhalations of Enceladus.
But as if that weren't brilliant enough, we can spot, in this beautiful image, sight of our own planet, cradled in the arms of Saturn's rings.
Now, there is something deeply moving about seeing ourselves from afar, and capturing the sight of our little, blue-ocean planet in the skies of other worlds.
And thank you very much.
(Applause)
I saw an article the other day.
(Laughter) But most people, when you stop to ask them, will admit to harboring a strange sort of fondness for clouds.
I think we should perhaps do a bit more of it.
(Laughter) Or maybe you see a topless sunbather.
Let's start with this one. It's the cirrus cloud, named after the Latin for a lock of hair.
These clouds form in the region of mountains.
This is when a layer is made up of very, very cold water droplets, and in one region they start to freeze, and this freezing sets off a chain reaction which spreads outwards with the ice crystals cascading and falling down below, giving the appearance of jellyfish tendrils down below.
Rarer still, the Kelvin–Helmholtz cloud.
All right. Those are rarer clouds than the cirrus, but they're not that rare.
And that connection, that visceral connection to our atmosphere feels to me like an antidote.
If you close your eyes and think of a cloud, it's probably one of these that comes to mind.
It's pointless. It's a pointless activity, which is precisely why it's so important.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
But now you don't have to worry about it.
Taking this idea further, I started to think, instead of just seeing these pixels in our space, how can we make it physical so that we can touch and feel it?
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Laughter) We discovered bluegrass a few years ago, and we fell in love with it.
On guitar is my 15-year-old brother Tommy.
And I'm Robbie, and I'm 14, and I play the fiddle.
I'm going to start by asking you a question: Is anyone familiar with the blue algae problem?
Nobody wants to drink blue algae-contaminated water, or swim in a blue algae-infested lake.
Instead, I'll be talking about the main cause at the root of this issue, which I will be referring to as the phosphorus crisis.
Why do we use chemical fertilizers in agriculture?
So, what does a plant need in order to grow?
Several of these nutrients are essential chemical elements: phosphorus, nitrogen and calcium.
Phosphorus is a chemical element that is essential to life. This is a very important point.
Experts in the field will know that cellular communication is phosphorus-based -- phosphorylation, dephosphorylation.
Cell membranes are phosphorus-based: These are called phospholipids.
The energy in all living things, ATP, is phosphorus-based.
And more importantly still, phosphorus is a key component of DNA, something everyone is familiar with, and which is shown in this image.
As I explained earlier, plants extract phosphorus from the soil, through water.
(Laughter) Put yourselves in my position.
We got off the exit, we found a Shoney's restaurant.
OK. Now, what can you do?
Many of you here have the opportunity to ensure that a lot of people see it.
Not just this, but connected to the ideas that are here, to bring more coherence to them.
Because it gets into all sorts of crazy realms.
But in the whole county there is no coffee shop, there's no Internet cafe, there's no movie theater, there's no bookstore.
So fast-forward to today, and we now live there.
He came out for one of our teacher-training days and won like five rounds of Match Me in a row and was very proud of himself.
And this is what it looks like.
By no means.
And that's what I want to focus on -- the one who takes the best part of the meat.
They were tired of sacred hills.
They're failed states.
This is offshore.
The sporting goods industry, in particular, stepped up to the plate and have done it.
It's actually very popular.
But now you can find out all about -- unfortunately, my weight is a little higher than that, but -- all about what happens.
And of course, math is very powerful at doing that.
But that math liberation didn't get into education yet.
Why do you think that was?"
All backwards.
They've got hair all over them.
Why is this?
This is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens.
This isn't some optional extra.
It's quite a familiar story.
It's women who actually push history forward.
He actually used that word.
It would hardly do to eat your baby or your lover.
How about artistic beauty?
Isn't that exhaustively cultural?
So we had a lot of this going on.
So right now, I feel more like these are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others.
Landscaping.
We dropped them gently in.
But you also learn other things.
We had them engineered by the engineers.
We believe it is.
And how did we do that?
He's interested in playing football.
So, a car accident.
(Music) What would you say?
How many Gs?
Close.
Should your kid play football?
I don't know.
Which brings us to: suit up.
It's like dying from inside-out.
This is the language of sterility.
Are there good news? Of course, there are good news. There are lots of good news.
You almost never hear someone say, "The office."
There are five of them, and in order to get to the really deep ones, the meaningful ones, you have to go through the early ones.
That doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense, to me.
Some of you may work at places where you can't get to certain sites.
Show me what's up." This sort of thing.
I mean, what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop?
Just don't have it.
I don't mean move it; I mean just erase it from memory, it's gone.
Have a little turret there.
This is a deadbolt.
It's a pretty panel of glass.
You translate that to the building industry.
Let's take it out and throw it away so nobody can use it and put a new one in."
So, that serves me every day.
I feature organic process.
"Jim, now it's time. You're the down -- oh!"
The superintendent walked up and said, "What are you doing?"
"Oh, just looking for header material," waiting for that kudos.
The whole thing has the structural value of corn.
"Woo. Woo-hoo."
Sometimes those guys are Nazis, my oh my.
Wildebeests don't hang with lions, because lions eat wildebeests.
Thank you very much.
I came here today to talk about what's wrong with our food system.
What I discovered was this is not true.
This is what I found out.
And so for that, he's called crazy by the system.
So then, they had 18 camels.
It's very easy to react.
But it's not just what he stood for, it's what his message was.
And so we studied the idea at Harvard.
So effectively, we went from womb to tomb.
We showed it could be done.
How many of you have ever had that experience?
That's the essence of the Abraham Path.
And on and on.
And here you see just a selection.
What do they do?
And they prepare it in a wonderful way.
We're even doing this on purpose.
We're not taking the bonus yet.
We're not taking the nine kilograms of output yet.
We'll have to.
It's just very good food.
You can vary enormously.
We're not used to it, and we see insects as these organisms that are very different from us.
And some might think, well they're not yet available.
Well they are.
And they're being made in the most wonderful ways.
It's really taken off the ground.
MD: Thank you.
That reminds him of the word baroque, barrack, bark, poodle, Suzanne R. -- he's off to the races.
Yes.
Front and back.
And I was thinking, well I'm trying to think nature, nature, nature.
Rather than me putting a dish down, they were allowed to help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted.
A couple of wormeries in there too.
So you've got to watch your space for that.
So basically, the restaurants only really hit people who believed in what I was doing anyway.
And, you know, we open it up ...
I will do exactly as I'm told.
And I'm being told the dynamic.
(Drum sounds) (Drum sounds end) And so on.
So there, we experience the translation.
But actually it's so unbelievably shallow.
And I said, "Well, how do you hear it?"
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.
So it may be that, in certain halls, this dynamic may well work.
(Soft clapping sounds) Have you ever heard snow?
(No sound) See, you're awake.
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."
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."
Experimented with all sorts of things.
They're experiencing that rawness there.
But thank you very much for having me!
Explain to me what's wrong.
Tell me what's wrong. I can't understand you.
Just go on, go on in your room.
And I think back.
We lived in New York City, as I said.
And the limousine empties out.
That's what the sisters said, "He was fine."
Johnny call, you go.
So I run right upstairs.
For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two.
There ain't no first time.
That's even worse. We're supposed to always be on the prowl.
Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that.
Folks, I'm petrified.
We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it.
The world I envision for her -- how do I want men to be acting and behaving?
Why I said this, is the background.
So I'm going to move on.
Normally police officers don't want to do prison.
Obviously, it was.
They saw me as a young, short woman wearing a pathan suit.
You will hear about it, and you will love it.
There we go.
So watch that. You see them both drop out of the middle class.
You would be very hierarchical.
They are more controlled.
HR: So there you go.
We have the charmless misanthrope.
I could get access to it.
And they will step up.
I asked them to produce a little movie about it.
But I gave them the room to just do the thing.
And I said, "Well what makes it great?"
The network is redundant.
It's that predictable.
And we do this automatically.
To truly widen, what we have to do is, we've got to fight our sense of choice.
I move them around from seat to seat.
They thought of more people.
They thought of fewer people.
And I was there with my arms open.
So I'm not going to go.
It's a bad idea. Don't do it."
So it's quite simple, but see if you can spot the magic going on.
PJ: Ready? Becka: Yeah.
Man: Sure.
No inclination of that happening?
And in the end, we also had them fill in their voting intention once more.
People say things like this, and I'll read it to you.
And that's when I put it together.
I say, I am on fire now! You say it.
This idea is particularly powerful for things that have high-idling capacity.
Now, let me just put that into context.
BJ: Well we certainly did spend a lot of time with her -- in fact, more time than even her mother did.
And actually from that day on, she's been comfortable with us.
So we felt that that day was the day that she really earned her name.
And surprisingly, it became a cult film.
But for us to get them, not only do we push ourselves, but we live by certain rules of engagement, which mean we can't interfere.
Sleep deprivation is extreme.
And I do believe you should stay with us.
That was one sentence.
Which part of this don't you like?
We see the flows of materials in a rather terrifying prospect.
One, sit at the table.
Number one: sit at the table.
Don't you love that kind of thing from college?
She starts leaning back.
Your job needs to be challenging.
Stay in.
They're just not moving.
How you get it shouldn't make that much of a difference.
Not quite an obvious alliance.
Yeah.
These examples indicate a trend.
And I thought, "Well, what's the struggle?"
I was like, "Really?" and he was like, "Absolutely."
But I want to be able to make them not messy.
I want to hack into these things that I know are important and lay the code out for everyone to see.
(Laughter) And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right?
Do you have any recommendations?"
And I said, "But here's the thing: no family stuff, no childhood shit."
And she said, "It's neither good nor bad."
Because I wanted to know what's out there.
obese ...
You can't say, here's the bad stuff.
God.
There's no conversation.
We just need you to be authentic and real and say ...
"We're sorry. We'll fix it."
We need character.
We need people who want to do the right thing.
So what do they do?
He robbed him at gunpoint.
He had never committed a crime before.
Judge Forer quits, and Ms. Dewey in completely disheartened.
None. None.
I've always as a listener, as a fan, I listen to that, and I'm astounded.
All of us have this remarkable brain, which is poorly understood, to say the least.
That was not what was going on.
And then we looked at the brain activity.
I will try to condense this for you.
We had this broad patch of area called the lateral prefrontal cortex that went way down in activity, I'll summarize that for you.
Mike Pope: May the force be with you.
Now when I think about improvisation and the language, what's next?
He doesn't know what's coming. Computer: Like.
It's doing something neurologically remarkable.
Whether or not you like the music is irrelevant.
Creatively speaking, it's just a phenomenal thing.
This is a short video of how we do this in a scanner.
If you don't, you're not alone.
But that very fact is telling.
So how do you know if your breasts are dense?
And breasts that fall into these two categories are considered dense.
(Laughter) This makes no sense, because physicians have all kinds of problems that they don't realize have solutions.
on a Sunday night.
I said I wanted to tell you the Awesome story, I wanted to share with you the three As of Awesome, and I wanted to leave you with a closing thought.
He said that it calmed him down, it relaxed him, it took away his fear of flying and helped him meet chicks.
And he's a bad guy. He's like a bad kid in church.
You keep going, and both things are lots of hype.
These are both very successful -- a physician in one case, a surgeon in the other.
I'll just play one of these and you'll remember it.
It's not a specific thing.
And, but it really -- it got the electricity. It took a long time.
And they're tearing up all the streets.
Now, not all these things were highly successful.
People, I guess, decided that they would not wrinkle their ties.
That's what you did. You didn't turn it off.
And they couldn't yank the cord out because it was screwed into a light socket inside the house.
This is a total kludge, if you ask me.
We're in 1908.
This was the advertisement that they ran in 1917.
We're very, very early. Thank you very much.
And I want to make a time machine."
So we have this thing called ambient intimacy.
They've made me a proud "I-don't-know-it-all."
Guess what?
Video games are a symptom.
These topics are banned.
What do you want to write about?"
I want to write about this really interesting world.
"All right. OK."
The answer to that question changes depending on who's sitting around that table.
Are there men around that table?
So what do we do?
Do they make sense?
They are sure that parents and administrators will never accept anything.
It's not even mining.
It is terrestrial skinning.
An escape hatch has been reached.
A new frontier has been found.
It was a match.
What if the oil actually got where it was trying to go?
Poor people also suffer at the point of use.
If we -- well, OK, I'm just ... me.
They're all being harmed -- greatly -- by this addiction that we have to disposability.
But guess what?
But ...
So that is consistent with this idea that disposability is something we believe in.
And they ask a question, and the question is: How can these people be so passionate?
I want to look at the blood vessels. I want to look at the liver.
That's where those artifacts are coming from.
And to take that even further, this is a heart.
And then he's going backwards.
And we've been experimenting with this.
It knows how much it's moving.
Audience: Yeah.
Heather Knight: He's talking about the Swiss.
One of them falls to the ground.
I can help.
It will remain in very fundamental respects very different.
We can't.
"Window dressing.
So fear showed up as not really the driver.
This is a bankrupt effort at communicating health information.
You can understand exactly what the benefits are.
Why is Wired magazine doing this?
It should be the patient.
I've learned to be flexible.
And I just ate it up.
I was launched as a cartoonist.
And on top of all off these rules, they keep changing.
Consequently, we have.
Would they wonder who I was, I thought.
We thought our family would already be there.
What would you tell them?"
Instead, it was all-hands-on-deck.
We set out on crutches.
So again, we got the short end of the deal there.
Apparently it can.
Makers are in control.
They want to use it to their own purpose.
They're not mainstream.
They're a little bit radical.
It was not something you'd even remark upon.
We made it, and we were connected to it that way.
One of the coolest things is, Makerbot sent out an upgrade, some new brackets for the box.
Fascinating work they're doing.
It's more makers.
It's old-school demographics.
It's really just been basic demographics.
They can make some educated guesses.
She was, uh, you could say, more relational -- right now, like, in your face, right now.
Do you understand what I'm saying to you?
How many of you ever give that talk?
And I know some of you are saying, "Practice?
We're talking about practice?"
JS: "And there's nothing you can do about that.
JS: Remember when we were ...
JS: That's -- one minute.
mmm, mmm, mmm.
JS: What will happen?
JS: Because what? HS: I'm gonna get 'em.
JS: See? (Laughs) HS: I'm gonna get 'em. JS: Really?
JS: Plus they could be an army or something.
JS: Um ...
That's her competition.
The gun goes off, and -- I mean, she's not even an underdog; she's, like, under the underdogs.
But the under-underdog hangs tough, and 22 miles into a 26-mile race, there is Derartu Tulu, up there with the lead pack.
Derartu Tulu ruins the script.
She catches up with the lead pack and is pushing toward the finish line.
She loses the check, but she goes home with something bigger and more important.
And there they've remained since the 1600s, essentially the same way they've always been.
So what's the connection?
If you know it, you're smarter than anybody on planet Earth.
Now, we're not using our strength, because we are the biggest sissies in the jungle.
Usain Bolt can get his ass kicked by a squirrel.
We're not fast.
(Laughter) And yet, she beat 492 other people.
The last mystery: Why is it that women get stronger as distances get longer?
That's all we could do.
They need to be part of the pack.
The pack stays together.
You can't be a pissed-off pack.
You can't be bearing grudges, like, "I'm not chasing that guy's antelope.
He pissed me off. Let him go chase his own antelope."
The pack has got to be able to swallow its ego, be cooperative, and pull together.
But maybe it's something different.
We try to cash in on it. Right?
Why do we keep getting hurt?
A curious thing about running and running injuries is that the running injury is new to our time.
It's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain.
Geronimo was never saying, "You know something, my Achilles -- I'm tapering.
I've got to take this week off."
So what's the benefit? So what?
So hopefully it's something we can all benefit from.
Thanks very much.
I will not dance to your drummed-up war.
I will not be played.
Confused, aspiring pacifists.
What that means is prepping my outfit, (Laughter) prepping options, trying to figure out what I'm coming behind and going in front of.
This is "Break Clustered."
One woman never did.
De facto landmines.
Redemption, smoke.
So I've decided to get a grip and sort it out.
But I want to do more than that.
[Whomever] makes those things we throw out.
So Dr. Deqo has to explain.
I would love to, but why?
But actually, I did.
Well actually, you are going to whistle along.
The track that I will whistle is called "Fête de la Belle."
Yes, so I whistle the tone.
(Laughter) OK, here it is.
So what is it, three-dimensionally?
What are its kindred and component parts?
I can't quite explain it, and he can't either.
The distribution shows.
Six to eight months, they're totally equivalent.
And I have learned that power, particularly in its absolute form, is an equal opportunity provider.
Wow, that's great. Okay, thank you.
They made it aspirational.
They understand that they are an information company.
Any guesses?
So it's like vacation rentals for cars.
Because it just creates more flexibility.
Now we're saying that there's other options as well.
So I just want to welcome all of you onto the ride.
Pat Mitchell: What is the story of this pin?
PM: Oh.
That was well chosen, I would say, for TEDWomen.
I'll tell you what happened.
So I wore it when we talked about Iraq.
I said, "Because Saddam Hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent."
And then I thought, well this is fun.
So that's how it all started.
MA: Pretty big.
It's now traveling.
And it goes with a book that says, "Read My Pins."
(Laughter) PM: So is this a good idea.
But people did pay attention to what clothes I had.
Go out and look like a diplomat."
So that did give me a lot of opportunities to go shopping.
And no guy ever gets criticized. But that's the least of it.
and so how did you handle that?
So it evolved.
You want to get the feeling of the room, and "do people like me?"
and "will I really say something intelligent?"
And all of a sudden I thought, "Well, wait a minute.
I think we are a lot better at personal relationships, and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it's necessary.
Only girls are Secretary of State."
PM: What a change that is.
Where are we?
MA: From some people.
I think that they thought that it was a soft issue.
The women in Bosnia were being raped.
Now there are 192.
But it was one of the first times that I didn't have to cook lunch myself.
I get there, and there are six other women, out of 183.
So being an American, I decided to set up a caucus.
But it doesn't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women.
If you think that, you've forgotten high school.
And so it was nice when one of them would show up.
And it was really terrific.
Because one of the things I think you'll understand.
And so then Tarja was sitting across the table from me.
And my male colleagues kind of got it all of a sudden.
In fact, I think "guilt" is every woman's middle name.
MA: Thank you all. Thanks Pat.
But how can we do this?
This doesn't mean having to get a Ph.D.
in every single subject, you'll be relieved to hear.
I'll get, "Baby, just give me the frickin' TV guide."
Everybody means everybody, means everybody here.
There's about 10 million phage per job.
Everybody gets heard.
And that obviously alerts the child to their unusual nature.
He looks pretty good at this stage.
They're trying to achieve difference in their lives.
They have it forced upon them.
So it's very valuable to have that tool in our armamentarium.
Let's leave it as it is."
Also, the data wouldn't have been granular enough for us.
And the predictors were correct.
Well, let's just jump right in and play the hits.
So you know what that means.
Artificial intelligence, yes.
The only real artificial intelligence is our American Congress.
What could possibly go wrong?
I hate you!"
Absolutely.
And it will take all of you.
It will take all of you."
He's also considered the greatest wave finder in the world.
This whole notion of every man for himself is completely unsustainable.
This is the great frontier.
I can make them healthy."
That was one of the worst nightmares that we have seen.
Nothing happened. No violence. Nothing.
The intelligence agencies wanted to arrest people.
They found something called Facebook.
They found something called Twitter.
They were surprised by all of these kinds of issues.
And this is what the story's all about.
Whatever.
I would control it directly with the public in the streets.
I was quite proud of that one.
We're in Ramallah right now.
And most of them couldn't say.
They are not meant to stay.
After that day, everyone in the favela gave me the green light.
I mean, you should see that.
Before I start that, just so you know, each time we go to a place, we don't have authorization, so we set up like commandos -- we're a group of friends who arrive there, and we try to paste on the walls.
In India it was just impossible to paste.
But yesterday the city called them and said, "Look, you're going to have to tear it down.
There are a lot of people who are frustrated."
And I went out.
Well what are we taking in?
So you get a big squeeze.
Well, some really nice little tricks.
It's riddled with gimmicks."
They borrow money.
They're not supposed to, but they figure out a way.
No, they wasted their money on this. What about this thing? -- it really is quite phenomenal.
We need lots more.
We just shot you."
This is actually a biomaterial.
Go backwards.
I pulled them aside.
I thought they were really hot.
They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin.
And they all fit together.
Every column is one of those concepts.
(Applause) Bill Gates: I'll ask about two or three questions.
They disappeared.
They enter the queue, they just zip right out.
And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't.
DR: He sure nailed it, didn't he.
He was an early talker.
So here's how we're approaching this.
He's leaving red ink behind.
This has become my favorite way of videographing just about any space.
It's not one way.
And he was quiet for a moment.
And I thought, "What am I thinking?
And I really want you to focus on something as I take you through.
(Video) DR: Hey.
it looked like this in the summer.
And from that much contact with politicians, I can tell you they're all emotional freaks of one sort or another.
And I was like, "Get a room. I don't want to see this."
Babies flop out, they're flashing Mandarin flashcards at the things.
It would be a big seller.
I'm not exactly comfortable with emotions.
It tells us what to imprint.
The baby wagged her tongue back.
It seems so elementary.
And even light could not escape this current.
This is the hardworking scientist under harsh conditions.
But basically that's what we're talking about.
You would literally hear the sound.
But it comes in like a mallet, and it literally cracks space, wobbling it like a drum.
In this case, they're both wobbling quite a lot.
We weren't even here.
Here's my multiverse creatures.
And how can light help there?
Is it really needed?
What just happened?
What will be happening in the next five minutes?
I feel that I've fitted in, in many ways, to some of the things that I've heard.
They know mental as well as physical suffering.
So, this is a pretty grim picture.
How can we do it?
Everything is hopeless -- we're always being told so by the media."
Okay, there's a few that chocolate can't fix.
I don't have anything interesting to say."
You try to figure out what it is.
In fact, it doesn't feel much at all.
What is special with this?
Here we are.
And they also have electricity.
They love them!
Who are these cousins?
It might be the evolutionary origin of the phrase, "she's got him by the balls."
And that's actually a conservative estimate.
AB: Thanks.
And there's different text.
(Singing) Gloobinoí più chiara Si ceci est cela cela est ceci Totalmente soi whom they sought to slay To have the fruits gloire J’écoute ...
And so light shone upon the Dark Ages of Europe.
Okay.
It is generic.
So it needed a very articulate front paw.
BJ: From an actor.
BJ: Okay so.
BJ: And the two manipulators are inside.
It had to be shipped to London.
And plant.
So I posed her with her back to the audience.
She's all that.
Quite an accomplishment.
Like this.
We've driven 140,000 miles.
(Video) Man: Oh, my God.
What?
Such an intimate video.
And a number of sopranos uploaded their parts.
Thank you.
You see that really salty Play-Doh?
So what does that mean?
And of course, you're responding with all of these.
You can't delay that much.
It's this elegant little land, twist and roll.
I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together.
He certainly doesn't look like me.
So what are they?
That's one.
It's less naughty than it sounds.
I want you to be happy."
None of them wanted anything to do with this movie.
That's the two-cent tour.
If they could do it for them, surely they could do it for me.
MS: Yeah, I don't know what's going to come of this.
Those are juxtaposed very nicely together.
Are you an up attribute? Are you something that gets the blood flowing?
And how has that been for them? Has it been successful?
These devices aren't accessible to people."
And I said, "Well, how do you actually communicate?"
Since that time, we've had all kinds of acknowledgment.
It's all coming out of our own pockets.
So let me just tell you, the great part of all of this?
Beyond this hand is a world of Vaseline.
Can I tell you, airports are a disaster.
Oh, for the love of God.
I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture." (Laughter) To leave would be failure.
And he said, "Do you love it?"
I couldn't even speak I was so choked up.
I just was so -- how do I tell him?
He thought I was mad enough anyway.
I know this run so well, by the back of my hand.
Because who am I going to be?
What am I going to be?"
This is me, all of me.
You ever see one of these before?
As you can see, it's impossible to read.
I'll give you an example.
This is the cover story.
Anyone?
Number two, it's imperfect; it's not very glamorous, and doesn't suddenly start and suddenly end.
But most importantly, it's voluntary.
It's voluntary.
We can open up city hall.
By seeking the God within. By cultivating my own inwardness.
In awareness of the inner conversation.
When you hear the word "forger," you often understand "mercenary."
There were obviously financial sacrifices because he always refused to be paid.
But I'm not here from the Chamber of Commerce.
I am productive.
in the following year.
Some of us may have been sublimated, but really none of us remained the same.
And they say, "So, how can I be a sociologist?
How can I understand those invisible forces?"
And I say, "Empathy.
This is what I saw.
I saw people struggling to get by, not knowing what was what and what was next.
And we fight back, and it gets really ugly.
You've left your shoes, and you've stood in mine.
You want your kids to have a better life.
That's what you want.
You want a better life for yourself.
Let me help you with some things that you might be thinking.
It's because somebody else has a design for your resource.
It's your resource -- it's not somebody else's.
Somebody else has a design for it.
And you know why they have a design?
You know why they have their eyes set on it?
And that's what you get.
I mean -- this is Iraq.
These people have designs for your resource, and this is what you see?
Not a single person in your country has not been touched.
Why?
And you feel something about that -- of course you do.
That's what they want to do.
Here's a guy who says that your god is a false god.
Whatever. I don't know what that means."
He's a former hotel manager; he's got three dozen members of his church ..."
They laugh him off.
You don't laugh him off, because in the context of everything else, all the pieces fit.
Of course this is how Americans think.
"He wants to burn Qurans, our holy book.
They're so evil, they're so mean -- this is what they're about?"
And you're reading this website.
You don't know that.
It's all over the Web: "Bible Boot Camp."
And look at this.
Isn't that interesting.
You see, I, Sam Richards -- I know who these guys are.
You don't know.
When you see them, they're something else.
So here.
You're generalizing. It's wrong.
Of course you don't. Very few people do.
Now here comes the radical experiment.
So we're all back home.
I want you to go there.
This is the scene here.
OK, now follow me on this, because I'm taking a big risk here.
And maybe they succeeded. Maybe they succeeded.
Can you go there?
You just -- oh, man.
Now, put yourself in their shoes.
Can you go there?
You're allowed to hate these people.
You're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being.
Whatever it is, you can go so far.
His name is Chris Farina.
That's the smile I use -- that's his smile.
I saw Jan Polo's flashing eyes.
And Miss Banks was there as a great mentor for me.
And it has four Plexiglass layers.
There are four countries around the board.
I'm just a clarifier. I'm just a facilitator.
That's the kind of engagement you want to have happen.
If only.
Now, the next one.
It sounds scary.
I was sitting in 1D.
Now, imagine being in a plane with no sound.
It feels great.
And it made all the sense in the world to me.
Quite a few more.
Some have come and gone.
And they're different.
And there's some basic innumeracy going on.
Not enough examples.
Models are not static.
For us, we're very facile around electricity.
And we're good at it.
Global warming is a great example.
And we rely on others. We rely on proxies.
And this works, as long as it's the correct others.
It actually does.
Thank you.
So it just stops.
This would be trivial.
So we say they exploit.
We say they explore.
Here are some examples.
I absolutely love the periodic table.
Well, I'd like to share a story with you.
Just a path.
So you can open this one.
Open it up.
It's like its own little coupling.
You just need a ton.
This is one-way traffic.
Teachers who have been teaching science for donkey years, they just muck up the definition and they spit it out.
They are fused together, so you can't separate them.
But this has come as a great boon for them.
And it is.
But we were all so nervous.
You can play with a different type.
You can go all the way through.
So we start by brewing the tea.
So we only grow what we need.
It's extremely beautiful.
You might say, "Well, maybe things just smoothed themselves out."
The universe is not only expanding.
Well what is the implication of that?
If they disappear, so do we.
Everything in the universe wears out."
And what does that mean?
You glaze over with it.
There was no ice around.
But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it.
Which means, "Take my camera."
And they're also curiously aggressive.
And he has a lot of experience with leopard seals. I have never seen one.
And this was the first thing she did.
I mean, why would you want to do all these things for real?
And you see there, it gets reintegrated in tissue.
Oh, wow.
And it took 18 months.
You move around, you have fun.
Now this is one of the images.
So this is all of the meta-data information.
But then you really want to go deep.
But what if you want to see brush strokes?
Well, not as big as his, but fairly big.
He always made me feel smart.
And they were full of all kinds of jargon.
Well, what do you talk about when you talk about minds?
He really popped their balloon.
And the amazing thing is these guys were flying.
And one day, we were walking.
(Laughter) Well, he did.
He went out and did an experiment.
There was a theory.
People were trying to do them.
What do you see?
You don't have to worry about the forces between them.
But ...
How should we really honor Feynman?
And that's what happens.
OK, there it goes. Right ... now.
Let's give an example of where we think this is going to go.
So how can we solve this?
I think we all kind of stand and watch.
So that's it speeded up.
And instead, we had to learn -- we kind of forced them to teach us.
And to make the project affordable, we focused our energy.
And so there was a moment when suddenly -- actually, the next thing.
Please keep your seat.
And we have a pretty good idea, for most of them, why.
And this was very consistent.
This guy is a little more contemplative.
He's thinking about it.
I know that seems ludicrous.
(Laughter) But not so -- let me demonstrate.
Now as it turns out -- thank you.
(Applause) Wait, there's more.
Kind of amazing what some people did.
That gives you an idea of the different types of motivations and dedication.
This is again showing all the different contributions.
So basically motion through 3D space.
So we did exactly that.
We should abandon this idea of eradication.
Umar was paralyzed for life.
And we didn't start with the easy places.
I did not start to make social commentary about my country.
For me, this became incredibly important.
These are some of the shots actually from my film.
The challenge I have is how to do that.
How to tell a political story but an allegorical story.
They were together while praying.
Now that is pretty authoritarian, and that's something I'm very much critical of.
And they look at Europe, and see an example, again, to follow.
Mark Riccobono: Yes.
What's in it for the ant?
Is it just a fluke?
So there's nothing in it for the ant.
Pretty scary.
This is what our summum bonum is.
And we should be very alert to this.
Now it's only at precise times when they align.
The rest of the time they're delocalized.
Does that sound good?
So there is no excuse for any of us here in this audience.
We should be able to rock anything we want to rock.
Or should we leave him alone?
Leave him alone.
I know a guy who did exactly that.
He wanted to know what is just.
Stop. Good work.
So it was pretty interesting stuff.
But there was something left.
We thought maybe it was deteriorating very fast.
And we did. We got better material.
The vessels looked better.
Found the protein collagen.
So we have discovered that dinosaur DNA, and all DNA, just breaks down too fast.
But there's another thing.
We can save that one.
We know we can use that.
But a gene turns on and resorbs the tail, gets rid of it.
Now it had a sense of place.
My life was not going to be the same.
And as a general term, we can use the term "intersex" for this.
Intersex comes in a lot of different forms.
They had a concept of blue blood.
So how do we operationalize the question of content of character?
How'd you like to avoid the pointy end of the stick?
Compare those two pictures.
How about other exponentials?
A few examples: we're now in the era of "Fantastic Voyage," the iPill.
Now how about exponentially cheaper?
We're now approaching essentially a $1,000 genome, probably next year.
(Laughter) It was like peanut butter meets chocolate.
But you see, they don't really hold a grudge.
projects and programs.
So they came up with "dig jigs."
So that's what she did.
that entrepreneurs provide benefits to society.
So if our engine's broken, guess what?
Last.
I'm going to give bebko to baba.
And you can say, "That's ridiculous, Steve. What a dumb idea.
It can't be because of play.
It's the ones that play more.
And who are the biggest neotenists?
It's pretty bleak.
We had marginal profit -- I did.
Is that all there was?"
But mostly ...
For these kids, I wanted to track the idea back to something that exists inside that no one could take away, so I developed this curriculum that's part poli-sci class, part soccer tournament, inside of an arts festival.
Most people, a majority of people, say sad.
(Applause)
Okay? Mmhmm?
Now I hope all of you feel better.
SB: What is it?
But this is what helped me see it.
Here it's slightly logged.
This is how we have to move the bits around to actually get the people the answers to their questions.
You can see that it got started right here.
as it did in Spain.
A-ha!
SB: Yes! Somebody got it.
This is one of our engineers.
That's how we churn those products out.
So this is what he built.
And -- well, I'll leave you in suspense.
So it'd be like three people, or something like that, and they would try to make a product.
All right, see? You guys should try it out.
And then we produced "You suck."
Perhaps that big?
Or maybe that big?
These were used to make those kinds of packing slips.
We need to decipher the script to answer that question.
And why was I fascinated?
I'll give you a couple of seconds.
Okay. Right to left, how many? Okay.
And so they had to cram the sign.
Here's an example of one such text.
I'll give you a couple seconds.
Got it?
So that was pretty exciting.
Why should we care?
I'm going to define what the terms of my success are."
I'll explain what that term means.
All right?
Who knows what we'll be able to do when we learn to make more use of it?
And here, she has our "damned" data -- it's a pun -- which is starting to break out, starting to break through -- the water symbolizes our data.
It's not my data.
Well, that's not what he was supposed to do with it.
I'm going to fast-forward through a lot of lawsuits and a lot of community engagement.
For fun!
But they're less likely to stick.
This is a picture called a cutaway.
We make every aspect of this burger.
And because people watch Mythbusters and CSI, I thought, well, let's put in a recipe for a ballistics gelatin.
And flowers are a real bugger.
I think of it as insidium sometimes.
And this one doesn't have anything for them.
This one doesn't smell so good.
They fly into this thing, and they fly all the way down it.
And that's a real fantastic bull's eye.
This is not supposed to occur.
That's why the same between the before and after that this shows, it's hard to see the difference.
So I think this one detail went past people really quick.
It works.
I should clarify that.
What else do we know about the heart?
And after one week, it's beating.
They will not recognize me when I get home.
So here's the thing.
In certain countries, mosque minarets are being banned.
And it's with that thought that I'll end.
Three pieces of data is nothing.
He's at MIT.
You think it's obvious?
He ran his trial.
Archie lets it die down.
But it was always a conjecture.
Obviously, there's always the dark side of it.
Is it going to be another Somalia?
And he was such an extraordinary man.
It's about proving who you are and what you can do.
And then after that, you can take it off on assignments.
They think that if there's anything against them, then we are being an opposition newspaper.
And that's not fair.
I'm just not in touch.
It's natural.
PM: So you are plugged in.
All right.
So where are all these coming from then?
But just keep staring at it.
And he drives a very nice car.
Or who we really want to be, or should be?
My history wasn't right.
On the one hand, result.
Right?
And of course I did.
I give it its due.
I've become very familiar with its dysfunctional behavior.
And I said, "How does that work?"
And what could go wrong?
People panic.
So here is one without a skin.
We have to turn it, go up and go down.
We have a split wing.
Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj was a great host.
Instead, there was a litany of astonishing optimism.
What is the solution to this?
We criticized people a lot in Bosnia for being quite slow to take on war criminals.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
And we are always being tempted up to our neck.
We put our toes in and we go up to our neck.
That's where all these problems come from.
The planet has crossed the halfway mark a few years ago.
This is going to affect everything.
Now these are my comrades in arms.
That's the quest.
And here's the point of that.
There is a scaling.
But here's what's surprising.
So there it is, I've said it again.
We could use sales, anything you like.
This feels like a safe space, is it a safe space?
She was like, "No, they do like you.
But then they turn into stomps.
And let your presence be a gift.
Now often, a result of Capgras syndrome is tragic.
So she's struck with pity.
There's no malevolence, they're just pressing a button.
First, I'll ask you: Why should you care?
Why should we care?
People have to eat.
There's going to be a lot of people.
And I was just struck that this is out of place.
Well guess what?
Do you think you could go to the store and get a choice of power bars, like we can, and pick the right one to match?
Even if they know what they need to do, it's not available.
So is this a hopeless cause?
Absolutely not.
We certainly saw that in 2008.
It says "bon appetit" in Arabic.
And guess what?
No more are we going to accept this."
We retain just 25 percent of what we hear.
One of them is pattern recognition.
Differencing is another technique we use.
(Laughter) But that's not all.
I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening.
Why did I say that?
In this scenario, nobody's listening to anybody.
We don't want oratory anymore; we want sound bites.
This is not trivial, because listening is our access to understanding.
How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to?
I love it!
Or just try this one on for size.
This is playing with those filters.
These are just some of the listening positions, or scales of listening positions, that you can use.
That's too much to ask for most people.
Why is it not taught? It's crazy.
And guess what?
Yes.
What do we need to do?
This is a smart academic doing a little bit of tricks here."
But let me do this.
And then I've mentioned the availability.
You need to see what to do.
And that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve, and why did it evolve only in our species?
Why not? I mean, that's what we do.
We can build on their wisdom.
And let's pretend the other one is good at language skills.
Okay, now replay this scene now, and you're approaching the one who has language.
Now you might say, well, this is just natural.
They're far closer together than that."
They slow the flow of technologies.
And they even slow the flow of genes.
And you can probably think of many, many more in your own everyday lives.
And gratefully, it didn't.
What's the evidence of wiping out?
The problem is these are arousal addictions.
Arousal addiction, you want different.
Drugs, you want more of the same -- different.
So what's the solution? It's not my job.
He's in there for life.
You're the only guy that kept it real with me.
It's hard to miss.
Who's sitting in court waiting to see the judge?
What do they look like?
What did you say, you're 14?
That was pretty much it.
This is one way to do it.
And I could not disagree more.
At the time, I was working down the street.
And the amazing thing was that not one of them had to be there.
Yet they were.
And luckily, the day they arrived, it was.
And was Silvia Gaus right?
Should we routinely euthanize all oiled birds because most of them are going to die anyway?
Because it's obviously incredibly frightening.
For me, it was really about the process.
and working with NGOs and building this case.
Ultimately, that's what it's about."
It's not civically rich enough for them to go down there.
The dead malls: what are we going to do with them?
Be prepared to be good neighbors.
Can you see it?
That's "Clair De lune."
What would happen then?"
Do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this?
Right, that's what he seems like.
So we decided not to throw the guy out and to rerun the experiment.
Because we don't see how conflicts of interest work on us.
I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions.
And that's indeed the case.
The other one is from the previous brick that was placed.
It hooks up all parts of the brain.
It was really bad news.
It could benefit from tragedies.
So it shows that we're really all in this together.
Is life that improbable?"
But what else is life characterized by?
And the answer, of course, lies with mice.
They want their shape to persist.
Let's zoom out to what that could mean.
We really struggle to do this.
Thank you.
And it's a much better way to see.
So you feel that in your cubicle.
You cannot be constrained by the public's opinion.
That's not too good.
And they all tell you, "Yes, we have won the lottery."
(Applause)
being a victim of hacking for a change.
Is nothing sacred anymore, for heaven's sake?
Okay, they're a little inchoate.
And after that, it just went wild.
And how are they transformed by wearing it?
She goes home.
None, not one.
And it looks really good.
Then she challenges all her competitors to do the same.
This is rising. Comfort stays whole.
What's number one?
That's what we mean by a breakout show.
What were those shows?
Well, as we say in the business, X marks the spot.
They start off pretty close together.
It's the institutions.
That is so right and so cool.
There are six which I think explain the Great Divergence.
and Albania and Tunisia.
And we compare that to the fame that we observe.
We have to make this available for people."
(Laughter) Actually, we're not going to have to talk, we're just going to show you all the slides and remain silent.
He said there's just not in demand.
This is Kimbo.
We also believe this cancer might be very old.
In reality, it is one of its greatest allies.
I am not a Luddite.
I'm a physician practicing with cutting-edge technology.
I've actually coined a term for that entity in the computer.
I call it the iPatient.
I say that because these are difficult patients.
There was just no way.
And if I tried, I'd disappoint them.
This is real.
That's grown this year to about 10.
It doesn't animate them.
And then the cliche came to haunt us.
People were being beaten brutally.
They were chanting, "We want peace.
And I realized it had to come from the people.
So it could happen.
A democracy could be upheld peacefully.
And guess what, it worked.
Every country in the world has a newspaper like this.
So you can see there are contradictions.
Coffee both causes and prevents cancer.
It's like a consenting intellectual S&M activity.
In science, we don't care how many letters you have after your name -- we want to know what your reasons are for believing something.
(Laughter) Again, every country has somebody like this.
That's not the only reason we think this person is an idiot.
This is a headline from The Daily Telegraph in the UK.
"A glass of red wine a day could help prevent breast cancer."
That doesn't mean it's the vegetables or olive oil.
This is the trial of fish oil pills.
They said, "We did a trial.
All the previous ones were positive, this one will be too."
(Laughter) And no professors of clinical trial methodology are allowed to answer this question.
But that's not the only way you can rig your data.
So how does this work?
It's at the top of the pyramid of evidence.
So they all cluster together.
So you see here that the small negative trials that should be on the bottom left have disappeared.
Well, they're heinous, they really are.
They were all positive, all well-conducted.
I found no flaw.
Unfortunately, it turned out, that many of these trials were withheld.
Around half of all of the trial data on antidepressants has been withheld, but it goes way beyond that.
And they need to have access to all of the trial data.
What mattered was that it was there at all.
We get bored.
Too much?
How does that sound? OK?
(Laughter) But what no one knows ...
is that I was a bully.
I called her "Sticky Vicky."
Isn't it?
I mean all of us ...
It is still boiling.
China is soon to pass the U.S.
Anyone know?
Well how would you go about it?
Not as far as I'm concerned.
Well I can't really go into the details, but what you see here is some of the entrails.
As long as I know that there's some sort of alphabet.
They all have their own type of frequency distribution, but it's robust.
And some other ones that are not used in the set of 20, they will not appear at all in any type of concentration.
So this also turns out to be extremely robust.
So let's see what that looks like.
Too hot, too hot.
And then, that signature is lost.
What do we learn from that?
And so that's really the only take-home message that I have for you.
And I'm going to leave you with that.
So where does this lead?
So how can you live little?
We've got to clear the arteries of our lives.
Go from 3,000 to 2,000, from 1,500 to 1,000.
They get to close the loop with their products.
You overcompensate.
Bugger me, they wouldn't give it to me.
South Africans just make music really freely.
Will you have a go for me?
You won't make the key otherwise.
All right, why would we see this correlation?
Here's one from Cristine Legare's lab.
Oh.
Not working either.
So when you put four.
Well, what's it like to be this kind of creature?
OK?
And would you do me a favor?
Now I'm going to tell you what it is. Are you ready?
And they found that it was almost exact coincidence.
So that's getting me excited.
We have to deal with it.
Did you see what I did?
Are you ready? Okay.
It's not.
I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying."
That's an eyelash under a trillion dollars.
That's seven percent of revenues.
He was interviewed once, and he said the following.
And this was Henry's rule, he said, "Look, everyone is willing to give you something.
And that's the crux of it.
It's been very confusing for a long time now.
There are no real original liars.
And then we're going to look at the hot spots and see if we can find them ourselves.
We all chatter with our fingertips.
Now we're going to look at the hot spots.
They're going to be enthusiastic.
They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth.
But I'm happy to participate in one.
Here's what it looks like.
We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long.
This is all mumbo-jumbo if you can't show it on the ground."
This is what it looks like today.
And they haven't collapsed.
Comes back, goes into the village, says, "Well what's the story?"
"What's the story."
They're all over the world.
We can do better than this.
Have you ever really tried to break down the steps?
I have two affiliations.
I have one slide on my other life, the computer life, and that's this slide here.
It was one of their best issues ever.
It was really quite impressive.
I thought the word "framework" was great.
He didn't say we didn't have a theory.
He says we don't even know how to begin to think about it.
We don't even have a framework.
I was depressed; I said, but I can make a difference in this field.
That's what it's doing.
No, you have an expectation of what you're going to see.
Every single moment.
It's spatiotemporal patterns.
It's very different.
One more slide.
They couldn't anticipate cell phones and the Internet and all this kind of stuff.
They just knew like, "We're going to build calculators and traffic-light controllers.
But it's going to be big!"
regarding cyberattacks against the American company Google.
It so happens that these weapons are dangerous.
I mean, the functional impairment is clear.
And finally, there's a profound social impact.
And when they're missing, it's a barrier.
There are two general types.
Now you've lost your arm above the elbow.
We have robotic limbs.
If they did, how would we tell them what to do?
How do we control them?
So it was very exciting.
So I didn't have to do any of the cocontracting and all that.
See.
She's carrying all the weight through harnesses.
If it stops working for some reason, I can retrain it.
So Amanda, you can see, has really good control.
I've got a real estate problem.
So for example, one is to get rid of my real estate problem and get better signals.
And we can have the real estate open to try more sensation feedback.
I'd like to tell you a little bit about the dark side, with yesterday's theme.
And none of those problems could I have dealt with, but I have a really bright research team.
We put them all in one index.
Everything goes into it.
Here, for instance, is trust.
We spend a good bit of time.
Thank you.
And he's a Swiss engineer, Carl.
And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word.
Well it allowed you to do that.
And the chemical plant comprised 757 acres.
You know what the answer was?
We didn't fly him to Boston.
And he obliged us.
We told people exactly how to make it.
In fact, I see it more as a spiral.
"ModiCity."
"FeliCity."
So artist books, you take them off the wall.
And when most of us get asked, "Where were you September 12th?"
But good thing I did, because I don't look good in orange.
This was in Tampa, Florida, so I was like, "Winter clothes that I have no use for in Florida.
I was like, "Great."
I know everything's fine."
So they're looking at me really odd.
And I was like, "All we need is Alaska not to get the last memo, and here we go all over again."
Just wanted to say, "Hey guys.
Don't want to make it look like I'm making any sudden moves."
Just letting you know. Heads up."
And so I just kept doing this over and over and over.
Then I'd make websites.
And then I built this over here. Let me go back to it over here.
Basically, what I decided is okay guys, you want to watch me, that's cool.
So in the process, I start thinking, well what else might they know about me?
And then sometimes you get this.
I had to tell them every little detail of everything.
So there's multiple databases.
And there's thousands and thousands and thousands of images.
So you get something like this.
So again, you have to do some detective work here.
It's actually quite user-unfriendly.
So what do you do when everything is out there?
Well you have to take control over it.
And I understand that, on an individual level, it's purely symbolic.
Not really sure why they show up, but they do.
It's one of those things, we got by just fine before we had to do any of those.
So it's just become another day.
And everything's automated at the other end.
So it holds onto the very last point.
But it was testably stupid.
So we recruit some people for an experiment.
Great, so I tell the guy, "Look, relax.
Get yourself a fat reward. Life's good."
So this is a classic con called the pigeon drop, and I was the pigeon.
They checked.
And how do you do that?
How do you do that with an animal -- very few places in the world.
How do you get insight?
So the great thing about the Mola is that when we put the tag on them -- if you look up here -- that's streaming off, that's right where we put the tag.
I think Donne wrote a poem about that.
We'd love to tag in Monterey.
Well, not the one we tagged!
And that's kind of their home range.
within the light sport aircraft category.
Radio 2: That was gorgeous.
Radio: What did you think of that?
That was beautiful from up here, I tell you.
There's no competition at all.
Well there's good reasons.
That's true even amongst peers.
(Music) Come on.
(Music) You heard her, go ahead.
It's actually quite lifeless. Once it forms, it doesn't really do anything.
You add the droplet to the system.
And they don't react to background sounds.
This is a video installation called "The Missing Person."
So this is a work called "The Sun Shadow."
That's my colleague. He's let it go.
There's the cerebellum; that's keeping you upright right now.
They're storing it, they're processing it.
This a place where the dead are brought in.
They scribe along a place there.
You can see on the microscope slide here, that's what's happening in real time.
It tells you the what, but it doesn't tell you the where.
Now they can come in and they can start to get clues about activity.
These are things where genes are turned on in an individual cell type.
This is the new frontier, if you will.
Now, this took place in January of 2002.
And this woman is the star of the video.
She's being filmed with a hidden camera.
This is on the 6 train in New York City.
And this is the first stop along the line.
One person's not that unusual.
She goes back to reading her book, which is unfortunately titled "Rape."
They think this is the funniest thing they've ever seen before.
This goes on for another four stops.
And also in 50 other cities around the world, people participated.
So I could do more large-scale projects.
She was very much onstage and I couldn't figure out why she was doing it.
They laughed, hugged each other and ran away.
Maybe she had been dared to do this.
We had 70 actors dress in black.
There were several other activities.
We had people jumping up and down, people dropping to the ground.
I think I'll try to do that this weekend. Thank you."
So here's the video.
So again, this is 2005.
A lot of them made jokes about trying to get us to go to the back to get heavy television sets for customers.
You can see them in this footage.
And one morning, I was riding the subway.
And of course they don't.
And we're never given a reason why we should play.
It's just acceptable that play is a good thing.
Nobody thinks there's opportunity.
Here's a human heart at 25 days.
Then you start to take a look at adult life.
So our first critical moment, it's open.
He's out over the channel.
Commentator One: There he is.
You are just in the element.
I have 55 kilos on my back.
(Laughter) BG: Something that is not very safe, the image.
YR: I do a roll.
(Laughter) BG: That's exactly why I asked the question.
(Laughter) So -- (Laughter) Sorry.
Is it miserable? It doesn't seem to be.
And it's just sitting on one of them.
Let me get this straight.
You house is in a terrible state.
You can make your own purpose.
Lump that in there, and put that in space as well.
And the Indian peaks.
To give you a sense of the scale ... there you go.
They're just not big enough.
What do we do?
You don't land on it, because these things are tumbling end over end.
The probe would just shoot away.
This happened to them.
This man refused to fold to the conventions of normalcy and just decided to fold.
"What are you going to teach me about right and wrong?
I want to know about wrongness itself, the idea of wrong.
What is that idea?
What makes something wrong?
I want to know what is wrong.
Turns out, Tony's got the philosophy muscle.
That's Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche and Bill Clinton.
And now his shoulder says, "Wino forever."
And okay, I wouldn't change it.
And do you guys just want to see it?
It reminds us that we know we can do better.
Or is it other countries?
What's going on?"
But those are all the roads in the U.S.
superimposed on top of a NASA geospatial image.
It's very gratifying to have this kind of reception here.
It's a classic network effect.
It makes it hotter. It's happening right now.
Superfluids are one of the most fragile things we've ever discovered.
Go on the Internet and search for "Dance Your Ph.D."
After all, they are the most perishable of their kind, prone to injury and very slow to heal due to our health care system.
Right?
JN: Yeah.
JN: And how can you avoid being annoyed by her?
Now if we could just play this.
Go ahead and play this one.
Go ahead and play that.
Since then, I've never looked back.
And I was sure that if I was going to do everything, that it probably meant I had to move pretty quickly, because there was a lot of stuff I needed to do.
And I wanted them to know, I wanted to tell them.
Here it is.
So what's new in it?
The rest is the year in front of us.
Same with planning.
Now, let me move to another place.
Sounds loud.
Well, that's just the beginning of the show.
(Laughter) "What will they do?"
We were like three blocks away, observing it from our espresso bar.
Because these guys really are taking themselves too seriously.
Well, the million-dollar question.
How many of you found it really annoying?
(Laughter) Or I was one of the people who did it.
That thing is called a CAPTCHA.
I thought, look at the impact my research has had.
But then I started feeling bad.
But then I started thinking, can we use this effort for something that is good for humanity?
So see, here's the thing.
So can we get you to do useful work for those 10 seconds?
Let me explain how this works.
There's a lot of projects trying to digitize books.
Google has one. The Internet Archive has one.
Amazon, with the Kindle, is trying to digitize books.
Basically, the way this works is you start with an old book.
This is an image with text for every page of the book.
But since it doesn't know the answer, it cannot grade it.
So this is how the system works.
So funny things can happen.
For example, we presented this word.
It's the word "Christians"; there's nothing wrong with it.
(Laughter) Oops.
Here's how it works.
(Laughter) That's how it works.
It's weird; they were all done with about 100,000 people.
It hasn't yet been launched. It's called Duolingo.
Since it hasn't been launched, shhh!
So this is the project. Here's how it started.
So I posed the question to my graduate student.
Right now, the web is partitioned into multiple languages.
A large fraction of it is in English.
If you don't know English, you can't access it.
Why can't we use it to translate the web?
So back to the question.
It's about 20 percent of the size of English.
So it would be very expensive.
When we were starting to think about this, we were blocked by these two things.
To kill two birds with one stone.
And it's not just because they're being forced to do so in school.
So people really do learn a language.
We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator.
So here's the site. Thank you.
We haven't yet launched it.
(Laughter) We spend long days and nights staring at this part of the spider.
Minor ampullate silk is used in web construction.
And the most studied silk line of them all: major ampullate silk.
Some of them are orb-weaving spiders and some of them are non-orb-weaving spiders.
You see the phantom within the aquarium.
There's no damage outside.
What can be done there?
I didn't realize there was going to be a little music before.
(Music) So if Christian played a note -- like play an F.
If you played an E.
And we're going to play on this palette.
And at some point, Christian will introduce this note.
He'll play it. I don't know how we'll react to it, but something will change.
(Music) So you see, he played this note.
And I know that I speak for all of us when I tell you that we don't take it for granted.
One, two, one, two, three, four.
I'm telling them, "You come with me over this way."
Watch. One, two, a one, two, three, four.
And it didn't seem, at least, that your sell outs, whatever they were, were very big.
So I approach it with the same trepidation.
RSW: No. What did he say?
(Laughter) FG: Anyway, the Siza thing.
Blah, blah, blah and all that stuff.
And it's like cleansing yourself so that you can ...
FG: Yeah, the computer building.
FG: No. Not now either.
OK, you solved all the problems, you did all the stuff, you made nice, you loved your clients, you loved the city, you're a good guy, you're a good person ...
What do you bring to it?
That's what reminded me of it.
Each one was more beautiful than the other.
FG: Can I say something?
It would be terrible.
The human being is almost out of time.
Basically, she would collect string.
What do we do with them?
But then we actually don't know that it's all out.
There's still cancer in your patient."
Nothing will be specific.
There's no specificity there.
And yet, we began.
What is this about?
It completely passes below the radar screen.
Once again, most of that doesn't get paid.
That has to stop.
And a few friends of mine and I decided this doesn't make sense.
He's basically worked the cost to PUMA.
We are measuring it because we know that you cannot manage what you do not measure."
It's not doing too well. We've over-issued.
Well I'm afraid not.
So the key now is to make it behave like tuna.
What in the world are you going to do there?"
I was bald.
I was wearing hospital scrubs.
This kid needs a lot of work."
But one of the first things they needed to do was assess what I needed right away.
You learn things unconsciously.
I thought it was a monster, so I was walking around it.
I'd do these very quickly with very little planning.
Things seemed to be progressing.
But trust me -- we have very, very little in common.
Alright?
Why not?
("Also sprach Zarathustra" plays) (Applause) (Applause and cheers) Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you.
But at any rate, they are there.
And finally, you could rightly ask, why care about this?
Why care if it is the brain stem or the cerebral cortex and how this is made?
It's really our first foray into this.
So let me start in on that problem.
There are 10 million people in the U.S.
Anyway, you get the idea.
This is just actually the first one that we tried.
Hit me.
And I can pull them off when I want to work with them.
Odysseus would have said, "Okay, let's do a dry run.
And the first mate thinks, "Well, I guess at some point the rehearsal has to end."
So he unties Odysseus, and Odysseus flips out.
Hilarity ensues.
He just wants to get to the front row.
So why do we need commitment devices?
It doesn't even have a lawyer present.
I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were.
(Laughter) Such it is with commitment devices.
Hal is here, so I think we owe it to him as well as yourself to disabuse you of that last image.
It's not a priority."
But Najmuddin told me, "Listen now, we're here."
Maybe some of them are here now.
Suddenly, they started fighting.
And it's even cruel to think of anything like this.
But with Najmuddin, we cannot discuss.
It was true.
So of course, I understood.
And you know what?
But also for the newcomers.
Poof, they learn much faster -- the motivation, the empathy they can establish with the patient is completely different, completely.
I got both of them.
So there was the topiary there.
And I have to say, thank God.
All of the markers went in the right direction.
So I finished.
Age as potential.
And guess what?
(Laughter) This is not what I expected, trust me.
And I got scared.
Some of it is a matter of luck.
(Laughter) Myself included.
How was I supposed to live it?
These kinds of things.
And you're able to go back and forgive them.
(Laughter) We have agency.
We are the subjects of our own lives.
Oh yes? Why not?
It's its capacity to lock together its institutions.
So I had to find a different method, preferably involving total strangers.
He always proves us wrong.
(Laughter) And finally also, I never understood this, some people really came up with their own version of the truth.
Here are some of my favorites.
So here I was.
So I had 50 overall summaries done.
"Mess" can be liberating, "mess" can be empowering, "mess" can be a way of drawing upon multiple strengths.
Pull back and say: "What are the messages, what are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell?"
We just have to persevere."
And you can always walk.
It will last for a long, long time.
And the paradox is that the decade before the last decade was so promising -- and for one reason primarily.
It's their right to fight."
That it would be my job that would give me routine and stability when I was dealing with so many difficult personal decisions and so much uncertainty.
Like, what sort of breast reconstruction I was going to have.
These employers want you to go away and focus on yourself.
But I still remember the hesitation in their voices when it came to asking for things.
And asking me to do things by a certain time.
So again, here we are at that equator moment.
It is a signal broadcasting system.
It's molecular clockwork.
So again, this is all derived accurately from the science.
They are society's disposable people.
Where is their platform?
Where's yours?"
OK?
Now I think it's too easy.
I think it's too easy to dismiss the whole of religion that way.
Interesting where it came from.
We need data, we don't need help.
And we need help. Of course, we need help.
Otherwise our minds are like sieves.
If I said to you, "Okay, we're not going to have new TED.
I couldn't disagree more.
These are massive machines.
AB: Indeed.
You move on.
So it's a wiki project.
This is Stephen Watt.
DigiNotar is a certificate authority from the Netherlands -- or actually, it was.
But today, it goes beyond that.
It's from the Senate.
That was the level of rhetoric.
But this taping business, fine, let it go.
If they break it, they will break it for everybody.
They're always worried they're going to lose shelf space.
They're all important choices."
But you know what?
What am I going to look at?
How engaged you are.
We're losing them.
It was a ping much like the following here.
It turns out that's a really bad ping.
This is a tone row there.
I say, "Hey, I mean, we're about to be fired."
He'll figure it out.
He had completely disarmed their fixation on the programming skill.
But it's totally overblown.
It irks me ...
Come on!
And three: Is it renewable?
Why do you think that's so?
Here's the plant species. Salicornia virginica.
In some ways, it's a massive one.
Many barriers are breaking down.
So really the resolution is quite incredible.
I believe we're at a tipping point where this is now something that we can't avoid.
You can just make it physically on the spot.
But I don't think that that's immediate.
Here's the product being built.
It's this lamp, as you can see here.
We're all different sizes and our companies the same.
As a matter of fact, this picture is supposed to be me during training.
It's tricky.
No stone left unturned.
You're really left alone with your own thoughts.
Is there an edge?
Then come convulsions.
And they do this wrapping.
He said, "That's what you need.
Are you going to swim the Atlantic?
No, that's the last swim.
It's the only swim I'm interested in.
But, but, you know what?
And she's hitting a 257.
and to report back to my attending.
And they did.
And here's the thing.
Much of the time we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves out into the world.
We've cluttered ourselves up with all this.
It means we've got to get out of here.
I say the answer is yes.
This is not a fake.
Business, she said, was critical to her country's future.
And she was just the start.
Now that makes me pause for just a couple reasons.
First of all, for exceptions, there are a lot of them and they're important.
(Laughter) And when I was applying to business school and felt certain I couldn't do it and nobody I knew had done it, I went to my aunt who survived years of beatings at the hand of her husband and escaped a marriage of abuse with only her dignity intact.
Or she has to reach in and get it.
She scans it and she puts it in the bucket.
When I look around, I see people who want to make a contribution.
A real gun at a few feet's distance.
Why?
He entered our trial.
Of course, this option was open to her brain at no point in the past.
And the latter won.
and we tailor the class towards the average.
But normal is merely average.
Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you.
in fact it's negative.
This creates "the medical school syndrome."
I didn't expect to get in, and my family had no money for college.
When I got a military scholarship two weeks later, they let me go.
Something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality.
So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we have a wellness week.
Tuesday night it's school violence and bullying.
Thursday night is illicit drug use.
The absence of disease is not health.
And the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons.
And that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.
Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise.
In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves.
Which means we can reverse the formula.
We've found there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive.
Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters.
And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness.
Voila!
Everything else is the same.
Is this the design that's going to work in place?
And this is a new thing that we talk about technology on semi-log curves.
And they don't tell us much.
It's not moving like that.
And I say, "Computer, would you please now take the 10 percent of those random sequences that did the best job.
Score them again.
I've tried looking at them and telling you how they work.
I knew being called "mom" or "mommy" would be easier to digest for most people.
Better, but not perfect.
And move on.
Only men can be dads."
You know, here's the status quo, here's what's going on.
They're not going to be excited, they may love the world the way it is.
So you'll encounter resistance.
That's why you have to move back and forth.
They gasped. You can actually hear it.
I know you can't read it.
And then he also made a lot of political references of the promises that were made to the people.
And you know what?
Its technical name is "sortition."
The question is: Would it be better?
What does this mean?
I want to share a story.
Do people have grid cells?
Ask me.
We don't want to have what there is in the West.
We don't want their collections.
Khaled: Why would I want to put it on?
It's hard to ask for help.
What message did they hear? "It's me or you."
It's me or you.
(Laughter) All right.
They went out and gathered them up.
Every museum wanted a little bigger or better one than anybody else had.
And it comes down to a couple of things.
Now think about that.
So this was interesting.
So this is where people went astray again.
They're very well taken care of.
So that's what I do.
And if you cut into an older dinosaur, it's very massive.
Guess where that came from?
Dragon.
If you cut open Stygimoloch, it is doing the same thing.
And we know why, right?
So everyone had a big one.
And the little one is really spongy.
And the middle-size one is really spongy.
Here's another one.
And they're not happy with this.
Is it a duplicate of something that I already own?
We love you no matter what.'" She says, "So I went the next day.
Twenty feet in every direction, everyone started to howl.
I knew I was where I was supposed to be; I knew I was home.
And I haven't spoken to you once in the four years since that day.
If you think you haven't, think of all the hands that didn't go up when I asked.
How do you show that?
Oh what?
Blimey.
Ever.
So, what's going on when it doesn't?
(Laughter) Obvious. Right?
(Laughter) But here's what's going on here.
Yeah.
Now, I have to say, I don't get this one at all.
And I'm thinking they've done more for my marriage than a lifetime of therapy ever could.
I'll see you at the bar.
She's just different."
They were unable to see anything beyond that.
Let's appeal to it.
Hi, everybody! How are you?
That's insane!
And that's what I want to talk to you about.
I don't want it to sound good to other people.
You could Google it.
Ever.
Of course not!
And you're never going to!
Because you won't. Ever.
If you're in your head, you're behind enemy lines.
You were inspired by somebody and you have a request?
Make it!
You have the impulse, stand up! Thank you!
What's the harm?"
That's the canary in the coal mine.
Nonsense: it's a slot machine in your phone.
So it’s less of an embodiment now.
That's it.
You're getting warm.
The other thing is we know where all the gas stations are.
And sure, we could find fast food chains.
Nobody knew where the nearest lifesaving AED was to be obtained right now.
Mhm?
They are just magnificent.
They're fantastic creatures.
We're often frightened of sharks, thanks to "Jaws."
(Laughter) No one seems to know why.
Hope there's no one from Tory here. Lovely place.
There's great concern that basking sharks are depleted all throughout the world.
They are awesome creatures.
It gives us a fantastic opportunity to study them, to get access to them.
But it's a very simple, easy technique; I'll show you what it looks like.
Take me away.
And that's very important if you want to know what the population size is, and the status of the animals.
And Rus Hoelzel came up with an effective population size: 8,200 animals.
They actually did get a fine for that.
So that must have come from the shark.
And they sat on it for months.
It was only because we had a conference on the Isle of Man.
So he was very excited.
What you're trying to look at is, the males have claspers, which kind of dangle out behind the back of the shark.
And they are caught and are on the market.
But for the time being, thank you for that.
We wanted to be able to target specific geographic communities.
We didn't need to talk to the whole country at the same time.
It has been used to help communities prepare for disasters.
You can find out about the health centers.
And they are giving a voice to themselves.
I did the math.
The ones I do know, you probably know them, too.
Or would we?
They're not shy of hyperbole as you can see.
And guess what?
Now let me give you an example from my act.
Why is this remotely controversial?
And this made me really sad.
They stopped us from being inspired.
It can know how we're holding it.
But what are we doing with it?
What if you do this?
Anyone?
So where does it take us?
What are we going to do about it?
One, two, three, four.
We were poor.
"You have not let it go."
Who could ever wish it on their own?
It's true.
Wooo!
This is a chart of what it looked like.
Thank you.
And so this photograph shows a small boy next to a codfish.
Neither does the government in coal country.
So what happens here?
It was not drowned yet.
At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers.
That's not possible.
Oh, my God.
Without GPS.
So we use a little trick.
They sense their neighbors.
There's no explicit communication.
So this also has to be done in a decentralized way.
I can ask this robot to go in, create a map, and then come back and tell me what the building looks like.
Robots like this can really change the way we do K-12 education.
And kids are working in countless group assignments.
Guess what?
Just stop it.
That is great.
And if I said, "No," she'd assault me again, and if I said, "Yes," she'd leave me alone.
I never will forget it.
I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't.
We've been disconnected.
We're looking at some very interesting developments in our work.
They tell me to say, "No, tell them that we grew up with that."
And I began giving her my rap.
I've learned very simple things doing the work that I do.
It's just taught me very simple things.
I don't believe that.
I sometimes get out of balance. I'll end with this story.
There was a crazy line in there about how there's no conduct in this county, it's all misconduct.
We're born for them.
We all know what it's like to not care.
It's the most inclusive approach you can take.
I took to this like a duck to water.
So we're all learning all the time.
I said, take care of them.
I couldn't get enough of it.
Do unto others what's been done to you.
Daddy's got you.
It's a cute little app where you can adopt a fire hydrant.
So you agree to dig it out when it snows.
So it's got cute little game dynamics on it.
And that's nothing.
But what happens with Citizens Connect is different.
Have you seen these guys?
So naturally, I wondered: What else can these letters spell?
I hated it.
overgeneral ...
they don't belong.
But where are the words to stop this?
And how do we find the words?
It will never grow back."
You are unwanted by anyone.
They are Steven J.
Hmm. Not.
I love you more than --" All right.
She left the room halfway through his enumeration of his love for her.
(Laughter) But the point stands.
You know what you're going to say?
In your heart of hearts, you know why, and I'm being deadly serious.
It is because you are -- you know what you are.
How can you be one without the other?
Unless -- "unless," that most evocative of all English words -- "unless."
Unless -- Unless.
And it gets worse.
How's your brain doing?
How can you have this at the bottom?
Meanwhile, I'm coming at you.
Did we get the exciting stuff or is there more out there?
It's not true at all.
They just knew their timing.
It's got a bunch of notches and it's got a bunch of teeth.
In fact, it was always done manual.
The freshness, the capacity. I can turn this image.
(Laughter) ... if we use pennies.
So that's a chunk of what we're looking for.
Thank you very much.
But it was great."
And I said, "This can't happen.
YouTube, they're putting this thing on YouTube.
Then we'd have to break into his dorm room and then erase the tape?"
Have you lost your mind?
And he said, "I saw this need.
So you know what I did? I made it."
I guess I'm doing it right now.
(Laughter) No, it is.
(Applause) You know why this place is amazing?
You're not good enough.
Us.
I said, "Yeah."
James lost his leg in a motorcycle crash.
And the motorcycle is still a big part of James's personality and style.
Check out the tattoo on his forearm.
We three-dimensionally printed that into what would be his calf.
It's kind of a chimera hybrid between the two, and James likes that.
(Laughter) So, we don't ever try to make something look like it could be human.
You don't look at him and say, "He's an amputee with a prosthetic."
We created this lace pattern that lends itself well to 3D printing.
We switched things over.
What I like about this shot is you can see daylight through it.
So we're not trying to hide anything; the load-bearing carbon component is totally visible.
Love that.
We try to capture as much of somebody's personality as we can.
This is George. His will be finished next week.
This is the raw computer data that we deal with.
Part of it is, yes, we're showing off, because we can do this, but the other part is this connects him to what will be a part of him.
That is something really valuable; we believe in that.
Tattoos are especially exciting for us.
You get a free-floating tattoo defining their body.
So why not just print the entire leg?
That's the concept that preceded the work we're doing now.
This is a three-dimensionally printed leg. It's symmetric to the other leg.
(Laughter) There's a value to that, too.
The proof of concept works great, we're finding it; we'll get there.
Or, we upped the quality of the materials and created this for John.
He turned to us and said, "Nobody says that."
He's never heard that in his life.
That connected with him very deeply.
And the end user relinquishes their body into the process, and their taste.
The individual will actually be part of the DNA of the end product itself.
We thought about that.
Thanks.
It's what we use a year.
In a nutshell that's what happened?
TBP: That's what happened.
Don't I wish.
And now I think reformers are safe.
Is that a concern?
TBP: Fracking? What is fracking?
I've fracked over 3,000 wells in my life.
TBP: How do we get there?
What is at the other end of that bridge is for this audience to figure out.
We're trying to be as good as the breast cancer campaign.
We need to be as good as the breast cancer campaign to address this crisis.
And here's what the story is.
And they're just passed.
Hollywood heart attack. Ughhhh.
They're often not recognized, sent home.
Where do women get fat?
So we're very excited about M.R.
So those are the consequences.
We are bending the curve.
We're bending the curve.
And in fact, it probably won't.
Well it doesn't break even.
I was called down to the ward to see him.
His is the little hand.
He said, "Look, there's a guy down here.
And I thought, surely, we do better than that.
The big growth industry are these.
The cultural issue had reasserted itself.
The big idea, I think, is more political.
I cover my lifetime here, you know?
And how do they live?
Because we don't consider where they came from.
CA: How do you answer them?
So you can't put them the wrong way.
Instead, access was going to.
But I do.
I embody the central paradox.
And then we unplugged.
So what happened?
I study this.
We short-change ourselves.
It's like calling in the cavalry.
And I say believe because this process is still ongoing.
No hands at the wheel.
It's not going to look like that.
This is what it's about.
So how do we show this?
Now, the irony is, it's probably sold in our supermarket shelves in the Twin Cities.
They really needed the money.
Let's start with this.
In fact, we completely depend on it.
Professor Willie Lynch taught you well, huh?
Keep the body, take the money.
Give us enough to get by but not enough to provide for ourselves.
Just, please, put the money in the bag.
(Laughter) Maybe one of you sent this one in.
I don't know.
We all heard you pee."
Right. You know what I'm saying.
These pictures mean more to me than you know.
Voicemail recording: First saved voice message.
But why reconcile after a fight? That doesn't make any sense.
And so they're bringing in the box.
And you can see that they're synchronized.
You can see that they work together, they pull at the same moment.
It's already a big advance over many other animals who wouldn't be able to do that.
(Laughter) He takes basically everything.
Why would that be?
Well, that probably has to do with reciprocity.
There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.
And so that's how this all operates.
There they are.
But now we're going to make it more difficult.
Now this elephant does something illegal that we did not teach it.
And the emotional part.
And that's more limited.
That's consolation.
So it doesn't matter whatsoever.
And she should actually be choosing blindly.
We take them out of the group, put them in a test chamber.
And that's what she does.
and eats it.
The other one sees that.
She needs to give it to us.
In one of the studies, what did they do?
And that is wrong."
What would you say to them?
Are they going to be horrified, or are they cheering you on?
Did you learn anything?
In concept, though not in execution.
Happy, away I went.
Our disciplinary conventions were funny as well.
And we had to get past the NICE problem.
(Laughter) Which it probably is.
(Laughter) That's all the bad news.
Many thanks.
How can we do that?
Just a little bit of data, a tiny bit of data.
This was a randomized trial.
(Laughter) It's a great source of stem cells.
The gun that you see there sprays cells.
It's no coincidence.
Doctors and medicine made no difference at all.
And we've reached the point where we've realized, as doctors, we can't know it all.
And so he asked the question, "How many did we do?"
Well in surgery, you couldn't have people who are more specialized and you couldn't have people who are better trained.
And then you need to focus on the killer items.
It fell in every hospital it went into.
This was bigger than a drug.
Wrong.
And they started settling out.
with no employees.
No counter offer.
So they're testing its virulence.
You hear about it on your television sets.
It's brand new.
Probably not, but people like me do.
And I hope I have convinced you of the value of dental calculus.
And that's a question on which we can make headway.
We had a little natural experiment.
It ruins their social relationships, in fact.
So I told you it ruins people's lives and their friends bug them.
How happy do you feel now?"
What did they spend it on?
One woman said she bought a stuffed animal for her niece.
People gave money to homeless people.
So the very same purchase, just targeted toward yourself or targeted toward somebody else.
People thought 20 dollars would be way better than five.
We see this again and again when we give people money to spend on others instead of on themselves.
Describe it. How happy did it make you?"
Then we asked them how happy they are, again.
Very similar thing.
Maybe you have something in mind, maybe not.
But then we see extraordinary differences.
So look at these two.
And you can see, the world is crazily green.
Maybe it's different there for some reason.
Buy them something as a gift and give it to them.
And if he doesn't show me that it works here, I don't believe anything he said.
I know what you're all thinking about are dodgeball teams.
You and I can go on and buy it for them.
It's an extraordinary thing.
Ultimately, when you do that, you'll find you benefit yourself much more.
Thank you.
You know what? It would be invisible.
Is it one car? Two?
That's the place to be.
If you don't have open spaces, you've got to go there and open spaces.
And it's something that we're doing, again, lots in Rio.
I'm going to give a fast example here.
There's like two million people on Copacabana Beach.
We have problems.
We're going to speak now to the Operations Center.
This is live transmission.
Waste collection on time.
Public services working well.
EP: Okay, Osorio, thank you very much.
It was great to have you here.
We're going to move so that I can make a conclusion.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices.
We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works.
I think it might be a lifeline.
He told me not to tell anyone.
And yeah, we're there.
Because this isn't what we do.
This much, right?
There's the one that cuts itself.
JS: OK. Wet hands.
JS: Cuts itself. Fold. The fold is important because it allows interstitial suspension.
JS: Cuts itself.
If you think this isn't as good...
JS: Now, let's all say it together. Shake. Fold.
All these things happen to me.
This is one my partner and I worked on.
Maybe you play Facebook games, and that's what we're making right now.
It was practically a religious event.
Or the houses, you'd come out, because every game, well, I think almost every game, went into overtime, right?
And this particular shot -- this is one of the more traditional shots.
Like, seriously, nobody would do this.
It baffles the mind.
And so Zig, being Indian, likewise it baffles his mind.
He just couldn't capture the picture.
Do you take the picture or not?
So she said, "We talked about the Middle Passage."
Pause for about 10 seconds.
"Can I play a game, Mommy?"
(Laughter) And so I happened to have all of these little pieces.
These are pictures of Maezza when she was -- God, it still chokes me up seeing these.
So she's painting her little families.
This is the Middle Passage, Nobody wants to go on the Middle Passage."
"Yes."
"No."
"But what if I saw them? Couldn't we stay together?"
"Yes."
And originally, it was a math problem, more or less.
Here's the economics of illegal immigration.
Where would it go?
It can't go in the Mall.
Well there's always the hole.
And what language would it take?
So it's down the hierarchy on lighting.
So it comes to the site twice a year.
It's hoisted.
And I'm just going to zip through these slides.
It's fallen by half.
You have no idea how much time I spend.
We are leaving our birthdays, our places of residence, our interests and preferences, our relationships, our financial histories, and on and on it goes.
Von Mises completely rejected this distinction.
The effort to do that almost broke the organization.
That's pretty good.
We can't tell the difference between the quality of the food and the environment in which we consume it.
You can't be smart and pretty.
It's a bit different from the others.
And I think inspired by that memory, it's been my desire to try and bring it to as many other people as I can, sort of pass it on through whatever means.
Brah dada dadadadah."
Well let me show you a story of what I mean by "really sticking with us."
And the exciting thing is all this is just a prototype.
You don't need to worry about knowing anything.
You can start anywhere. Ramble a bit.
What changed was the balance of the tissues available.
And the paper then suggested that you traded one for the other.
Which brings me to the final element of this.
And the truth is I just don't have one.
I need you to actually see this.
It's a talking horse.
Walk past him.
And I started talking to a few of the competitors.
I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?"
(Laughter) Yeah.
And it serves you the 404 page.
But these things are everywhere.
They're on sites big, they're on sites small.
Each one of them found this.
Why does she receive more bites than I do?
Why?
She's one of the best dog trainers in the world, and she believes that we can do a lot more.
(Audience cheers) Yeah.
in my pocket -- (Laughter) if I get it.
It's a tablet.
A simple tablet, and when I take it with water ...
There we go.
Don't worry, I do this all the time in the lab.
very dead mosquitoes.
And I'm going to say, ladies and gentlemen, we have swapped the cards with mosquitoes.
Now, think of what we can do with this.
our first disruption.
So, guess what?
And it has more notes.
You run out of room.
Everything you know about Beethoven -- basically wrong.
I mean -- I don't know.
So, the question is ...
It's quite widespread.
But this is not one of them.
This is something that we can solve.
Neither can I.
If they stick with the process, if they stick with it, they end up doing amazing things.
In fact, everything was better than fine.
And something else happened.
Nobody tells anybody what to do.
So, things happen to an ant colony.
So that's what the midden workers do.
So, despite what it says in the Bible, about, you know, "Look to the ant, thou sluggard," in fact, you could think of those ants as reserves.
They somehow get into this reserve.
And then eventually they get recruited to join this exterior workforce.
The patrollers become foragers.
But not every transition is possible. And this shows how it works.
You really would be kind of out of luck.
And it works in a very particular way.
If everything had been labeled, nothing would have been visible.
Sharmeen is actually here.
He was quite a figure.
Just look what they have done.
So what does it take?
You need to have children to survive.
Well I do as I always do.
We have reached peak child.
Well I will show you here.
So what will happen now is quite straightforward.
It's inevitable.
Nothing to do with golf.
And he finally asked, "Can I see those?"
These are rejects. They are completely out of alignment.
If not, I will never do that first step.
I step over the beam.
So after the walk people ask me, "How can you top that?"
Well I didn't have that problem.
I was not interested in collecting the gigantic, in breaking records.
You know that, right?
You don't want me to juggle, right?
I mean, a bird needs space to fly.
It will go perfectly on the day of the walk.
What a genius, what a professional.
And the entire valley goes crazy.
I will never forget this music, and I hope now neither will you.
Wow. Wow.
(Non English) (French) Mais Des fois on peut voir parce Que Les gens ici faire Des choses on peut manger.
It's not so much, as so little has to do with what everything is.
So please, without further ado.
It goes like this.
I hope you guys recognize it.
Here we go.
But, it's very -- now ...
And that's the answer.
Maybe this isn't going to be quite so easy."
(Laughter) What can we do to it?
There was no emotion.
This isn't a spectator sport.
This book is the definition of a write-off.
He wanted to make that which was unique ubiquitous.
He wanted to make that which was expensive free.
But none of them worked.
How were we going to do that?
under a Creative Commons license.
What's in it for the institution?
Stay with me.
Whatever."
No.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
Let it breathe and listen.
CA: How?
It's going to take off.
Anyone heard of it?
And the transformation continues.
They want us to fit in even better.
Is it "still" permissible?
We're fishing at the low end.
I don't think so.
It's a sextra-quadra-hexa-something or other." Right?
And that's very subversive in a modern world.
So you've got to give them your Facebook password.
Sure. They sign me in.
You're not nerds if you say yes.
Is that what you're going to tell us?
It has to be a utility which is extensible.
And it turns out that we keep discovering upgrades.
Because you have one and you don't have one, I'll give you a tenth of a second head start.
So what's the bottom line on that?
And the questions usually have a very particular format.
A lot of it didn't pan out.
It's easy to bend.
What are you going to contribute?
What new thing are you contributing to our knowledge of biology?
But instead I saw this.
The thing is, no one had ever seen it before in nature.
Trust me on that one.
So by convention, they created a rule in which they borrowed the CK sound, "ck" sound, from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai.
They power our minds.
Run the movie, please.
But this will produce an equally massive amount of desalination brine.
They didn't talk.
But they're always doing things by themselves.
These are survival skills.
And I am coming so close to her that I am maybe two inches from her face, and she's quite oblivious to me.
(Laughter) You would do something, because it's literally impossible to penetrate somebody's physical space and not get that reaction.
And you know what?
I thought at the time that this was an intractable condition.
We want them to be free to do that.
Putting them there made them more recognizable.
Show everyone what you intend," is what he said.
It's where we all belong."
So I would roll, I'd make no eye contact -- just kinda frown, right?
I mean, how important could you be then?" they said.
No, no, no, no, no.
It conveys authorship.
He's the random state of nature we emerged from.
We're really hoping he thanks us for that later on.
He goes, "Hey, mister! Mister!"
He would have loved those! Oh yeah.
And I went, "Oh my God.
And I don't even have any help."
That's a lot of pressure."
But the choice was theirs, and our audience quickly grew to choose the richest and most varied diet that we could provide.
"To Sir, with Love" ignited its teen audience.
But you know, these shells, they're hard to find.
It goes and goes and engulfs!
What do they want?"
So, without further ado, I will present to you, ladies and gentlemen -- now be careful, 'cause it's evil -- a copy, the official copy, of the gay agenda.
All of that flies in the face of what they did.
He has a 4.0.
That's how you make your money, you know?
"Champion," again.
So people would go, "Oh, what happened to Mullen?"
Because that had not yet been done.
So there were a couple of weeks where I couldn't skate at all.
But there's this other aspect of it for wheelies, so check this out.
OK, up there?
That was called a 360 flip.
So, next -- Oh, mind you ...
What makes them great is the degree to which they use their skateboarding to individuate themselves.
I should say this.
(Laughter) Next, and this is something deeper.
The rest of the time, you're just defending, and you get into this, turtle posture, you know?
Parse it cover to cover for whatever hidden references you want.
Well, how could it have?
That's the corner I want to explore.
(Laughter) But they did all those things.
We also refer to subclinical conditions.
Season follows the pre-season.
So, just take a moment.
I didn't make up pre-vivor.
MT: Tesla's career as an inventor never recovered.
And how does it look like in a stadium?
And how do we do that?
We are not using fossil energies.
Our friends think we're mad.
You know?
Name it, I'm on it.
I like to think -- Thank you.
Students learn best when they're actively practicing.
It's actually pretty busy.
Anyway, while we're here, again, if you want to visit anything, all you need to do is double-click.
We're now riding along with Voyager 1.
The date here is November 11, 1980.
There's a whole story to tell here.
You can manipulate it yourself.
Now, this has, of course, some implications, and so we developed three implications of this research.
Yeah.
But not when they're together like that.
He doesn't.
I click on him, and I really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice, in fact.
I said, these kids are different.
I've read some of your books."
I said, "Great. What do you do?"
And then it ended up having a whole bunch of other words too.
I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.
There's nothing benign about it.
I'm afraid by what I see.
They had BlackBerries.
The op center had found him and they had a match.
With great precision I actually was able to make this just the other day, a very cute little ducky.
If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you.
That all seems like win to me.
even when it's so hard.
Can you? Do you jam? Do you have anything else?
It won't make much sense now.
You weren't going to have them anyway.
Now, because I'm a game designer, you might be thinking to yourself, I know what she wants us to do with those minutes, she wants us to spend them playing games.
It's true.
Now at the time, I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here?
Well, it turns out there's some science here, too.
So, everybody ready?
You are overachievers. Very good.
(Laughter) Well done, everyone.
Got that?
That's amazing.
You totally earned them.
Does this sound familiar to you?
Now, why would we want to do such a thing?
So watch as John does this here.
It requires very little mental workload for them to perform these amazing feats.
So, there we were.
Well, the short answer is yes.
I'd never really memorialized myself.
So I decided to create a piece which is a self-portrait piece.
So, in doing so, you're erasing time.
So, why doesn't it do it?
What does that mean?
They are completely different from each other.
So, what does this tell you?
This tells you that here also, context overrides.
So, what do we do now?
And of course, we now ask, where do we go now?
What do they do in the beginning when they do?
The minute he stops, we have neither.
So go to it!
They are stuck in their intellectual patch.
It's taken out of Africa.
Look at Africa's begging-bowl.
It's dysfunctional.
But that's not what we did.
Could you please show that?
Both, if we're honest, a bust.
This must drive you crazy.
by which this might happen.
(Laughter) And it might happen the opposite, the other way around. So I really enjoy creating, like, sound portraits of people.
Here's some faces.
We see it in the Caribbean.
Let me give you a couple of examples of how this works in a positive way.
And you know that.
Anyone in the audience want to take a stab?
Right?
So these have been calibrated to your level of expertise, because we want this to be difficult, and I'll tell you why, momentarily.
You will spend less time compared to you.
You focus on the foregone option.
You say, you know what?
A patient in the driver's seat, for example.
That's what we're after.
But what fuels this?
So we said, "What can we get out of this?
You know, like, what are the key values that we can get out of this?"
But it's not limited to just education.
Bruno Giussani: Like this, works?
You see it all like this.
If you've ever seen an electron microscope picture, you'll see this. This all looks the same, then there's this bit over here which is incredibly complicated.
So there are plans.
Hold it up.
Would they surprise us? Would they intrigue us?
Would they delight us?
These forms are undrawable.
Because we are confronted with a challenge.
What does this mean?
We were going nowhere.
And that's not what the debate should be about.
Getting the creative juices flowing on this continent, much of what you have seen here.
So I'm afraid we've been engaging a little bit in the wrong debate.
Africa has been giving the other countries aid.
I want to tell you a little story.
From 1967 to '70, Nigeria fought a war -- the Nigeria-Biafra war.
And in the middle of that war, I was 14 years old.
We were on the Biafran side.
My father was not there.
He was in the army.
It didn't look like it was going to work.
Almost a thousand people were there, trying to break down the door.
She was doing this in a church. How was I going to get in?
This woman told me it was in the nick of time.
By the time we jumped into that hall, she was barely moving.
The EU transferred 10 billion. Where did they use it?
What did they do with the 3 billion dollars in aid?
They didn't say, "No, you know, we're not going to take this."
They are just discovering.
And now I'm maybe being harsh.
And each one is making their own individual effort.
This is what gives us the hopeless image.
And we don't do it because there are so many of us. We don't coordinate.
Each one should not be an entrepreneur going out and finding what is best.
And what is disappointing me is that we are not doing this.
But it cannot do it alone.
That agriculture will work better if there are railroads to get the goods to market.
Invest some of your resources in that, too."
But it can be catalytic. And if we fail to use it as catalytic, we would have failed.
They don't shy away from infrastructure.
So we can make a catalytic to help us provide some of that.
But I'm saying it's not either or.
Let's see how aid can be a facilitator in partnership.
OK, so let me not forget my punchline.
She will create another 100, 200 more jobs.
It doesn't become dark. Why is that?
I'm not connecting to them.
So that keeps me coming back.
How do we get her into the studio?
How does a painter paint such calm, quiet paintings with 11 kids around?
She's in the studio. He's got her in the studio, they're together.
I would not allow anyone else.
I know, I could barely utter them.
I was called everything.
Others are more concise.
But just to provide context.
DM: Really?
I mean, really open your mind with this.
You can't just tell a one sided story.
How to make it? It's simple.
That means keep the server in your hands.
So, the up is the Embassy data, the PM 2.5.
So that's kind of a caoníma versus the héxiè, that's very good.
What should I try to emulate to some degree?
So this is what we created for "Apollo 13."
That doesn't move."
No, well, I don't know, it's very familiar to me.
The full score is 72 feet wide.
Another adaptation would be this piece.
Yeah? It's absolutely there.
It gives me something to do, something to work towards.
And we'll see what we come up with.
So I have to get myself in the zone. Right.
They start with small little units and build it up.
So they've been working on those mental architectures in the here.
What's going on?
Let me tell you about rock snot.
Most don't.
So I documented his life.
That's him, there.
We can all make a difference.
He was loved and respected, and everyone was taking care of him, and this is not always how it goes, because some males don't end so well when they lose their position.
In captivity, you can test it out, and you can know that this male has no trouble with either one.
And so that's one of the costs.
This is basically the whole community.
The alpha male does far more than anybody else.
And I tried, and I made it.
Good afternoon.
And I'm here today hoping that my reach will exceed my grasp.
And this is where it becomes true triple bottom line.
Really scholastic, if you ask me.
That's triple bottom line! Okay?
And what does it really do?
And I love it! And so do they.
I expect them to be engaged, and man, are they!
Let me tell you something, people.
So help us go from this to this.
This has got to go tomorrow.
Sí se puede!
We got dirty, and we loved it.
And everyone was doing the same.
They were collecting them up, and handing them in to various places around the different towns for safekeeping.
It could take months.
She also had duplicates.
Openness alone can't drive change.
No expensive staff time required.
We see all the same symptoms.
That means they can be self-administered.
When something becomes ultra-low cost, it becomes massively scalable.
ML: It's much better than that.
We'll do some side-by-side comparisons here.
"The worlds are the important thing.
Actually you don't.
KF: So he's pretty frank about it not being new.
For example ...
So here's the sort of equation we're looking at.
Can we find that language?
We're starting to build resilience ourselves.
It certainly is not clever, and it's not original.
This isn't a second class exercise.
That's enough.
And I sought out the most remote places.
Bellwether signs again.
They have nothing to compare it to.
This question: "How do I deal with a bully without becoming a thug in return?"
What will I stand up for?
How can this be made better?
How can the child feel stronger?
Totally ineffective.
They know best what to do.
And I've got malingering.
And we got to Broadmoor.
And they didn't send him to some cushy hospital.
(Laughter) So I changed tack.
I was desperate to define him by his maddest edges.
It's what all journalists do.
He said, "You know what?
So I said okay.
MO: So we started organizing. Why? It had to be done.
Hey, there's a news truck. I'll tell them.
And there's two of me.
CO: The timing.
CO: So it's working, but it could be better.
MO: It's not rocket science.
Let's start here.
What would this lead to?
Programmers take this capability for granted.
The problem is that many people start to believe that it is not a game worth playing.
And that title ...
It's fantastic, it's going to blow your mind.
It's the knockout.
We wanted to make beautiful things that are going to make the world a better place, and I don't think this kid was even in it long enough to get warm.
What's a problem you want to solve?"
In fact, that sounds kind of dumb.
So Firefly's totally sealed.
He's sniveling.
Excuse me.
Kadoom. Kadoom. Kadoom.
And that was the pile, by the way.
OK.
Why aren't we making use of this?
How?
Or perhaps with off-grid scenarios.
She couldn't even tell me what she did on the factory floor.
There's nothing underground about it.
And where's the airtime sold?
The name is a misnomer.
Zhuomani instead of Armani.
You can buy cloned cologne.
Now, there's another problem.
This is a real street sign in Lagos, Nigeria.
Oh, I know, "poor me."
I don't get that.
You needed easy access to the fields.
Imagine that.
can be concentrated there.
And he might be right.
Maybe that's most of the time.
(Laughter) So the developers say, well, this is great.
An algorithm will keep it in that location as long as she's engaged in that activity.
Several, for me.
And every single one of them has been placed.
So what's wrong?
Well, what's that got to do with this?
Their eyes just glaze over, all right?
Some of the teenagers said that in fact the car was 15 feet away when it shot.
He was totally stoic. I couldn't see a twitch of his eyebrow.
I couldn't see the slightest bend of his head.
Which they decided not to.
None of them thought they couldn't see the person's face.
So you don't have to ask any of these guys.
How does this work? Well, two ways.
It's not just these modern buildings which suffer.
Children are losing one word in two.
Julian Treasure: What a difference.
Two and a half thousand pounds.
I was 21.
Where does it come from?
And for what?
I thought so.
We do exactly the opposite.
When it comes to power, it also goes both ways.
Probably not, right?
This one is very low-power.
We want them to be feeling power.
So this is what we find.
Where can you actually apply this?
How good is it? What are their qualifications?
These kinds of things.
They're bringing themselves.
I was thrown from the car.
That's it.
I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling.
Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes.
It's a company with one big customer.
So here's what Dan said.
Do you know about the parent-teacher conference?
So -- yeah.
Now, I know what you might be thinking.
Joy?
And this is actually a technical thing.
All right, so what does this mean?
They keep you alive. It gives them the pie, it gives that kind of a behavioral punch which we've called a superpower.
These kinds of probes exploit it. Okay?
Let me leave you with one thought in closing.
So the businesses are getting out their checkbooks.
Is that good or bad?
And right now, humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive.
And I want to say to that very clearly: nonsense.
We don't hear about all the times that people got stuff wrong.
Now these are stories from basic science.
These are stories from 20, 30 years ago.
So here is one example of how you approach it.
But that wouldn't mean that I had a two-headed coin.
The results were unavailable to them.
But people didn't bother to use those registers.
It was unequivocally not something a squirrel could chew on. (Laughter) But that in fact seemed to be the case.
It wasn't a real world out there.
That's what he thought he was there for.
So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don't know.
Okay? I'm an ignostic.
What's the point of these radio waves that you've found?"
(Laughter) He was a cheerful bastard, wasn't he?
It could have been a train wreck.
and I think those numbers are a resounding rejection of that notion. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a huge advocate of the Web.
You know it's an orgy.
It's got to be stretching. How am I going to make — ?"
It was to teach us parallax. Do you remember?
People are supposed to be good at making stuff happen.
This is a quote, and I'll just pick words out of it.
And they think it's a metaphor, but this is not a metaphor.
So, it's a product.
It's a power play.
Leaves her alone.
Nope.
It's gaslighting.
But the question is, why is it obvious?
It's got 90-degree corners.
(Laughter) They were not geographically distorted.
And I built this city center bus map of the system, how it was five years ago.
So here's what we did.
Any gaps that appeared in the outskirts were filled again.
And how will they cope in a foreign land?
The larger point I'm trying to make is this.
We're all learning by doing.
A computer scientist can't get access to it without filing paperwork.
One in four men dies of cancer.
So I could show you mine. It's just A's, T's, C's and G's.
Naturally, it would follow that you meet kind with kind.
It doesn't actually do what it says on the tin.
But what you realize, it's got an Achilles' heel.
And that is a hard thing for the head to take.
They're not just going to be smart.
So what we need to do is we have to effect it.
They were embarrassed. Their recruitment went down.
Governments are receptive. It won't come from those dusty corridors.
So, I'm going to count to you, so we don't all do it together.
That's what you should have said. Right? Why is this?
They begin with a question.
They say no.
before we think about where we go from here.
Again, please pick a percentage.
They're not magic. They are not our parents.
Why should we get away from those arguments?
So the adoption papers were signed.
Now, in their religiosity, in their naivete, my mom and dad, which I believed them to be forever, as they said they were, my mom and dad conceived that I had the Devil inside of me.
It gives you reference points.
Why this might be the case?
So turn away. I'll tell you when you can turn back.
So there's no more signal for us to tell us to stop.
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.
And it goes like this.
It's by a guy called Yuan Zhen.
You aggrandize them.
Real dependence on this person.
And last but not least, it is an obsession.
as if I had asked them to pass the salt.
And indeed, that's exactly what happens.
With orgasm, then you get a real rush of oxytocin and vasopressin -- those are associated with attachment.
Hence they have no option but to implement a regimented program.
This state of affairs is neither necessary nor is it inevitable.
Not a single one tells you how to do it!"
This was a total jackpot moment for me.
Those are my damages.
You can't expect a certain outcome.
Joker: Ready!MT: Let me see what you've got.
Joker: Whoa, whoa, whoa, oh! (Music) MT: But today, I am performing for a different kind of audience.
I'm performing for you.
Find me when you can."
They're like a snapshot in time.
But what would be so amazing about this?
Turns out, they wander a lot. In fact, really a lot.
It pervades basically everything that we do.
Right? Nobody hugs their dictionaries.
There'd be virtually no learning curve.
Computers! What about computers?
I mean, I'm a huge geek, I love computers.
They don't change the end result.
There's not a lot of clickiness.
Do you know what that says to me?
They use it synecdochically.
It's been fantastic.
Our relationship is still important.
My friends, no way they can be that cool and have good of a life.
In fact, they lied about their height about nine tenths of an inch, what we say in the lab as "strong rounding up." (Laughter) You get to 5'8" and one tenth, and boom! 5'9".
That's really bad. Why is it so bad?
A lot of humans have lived since then.
The person never was at the James Hotel.
All right, so why do I care about this?
Now, you guys did pretty well. Most people perform at chance at this task.
You can see the sort of break in the everyday.
and she said, "Probably never."
And it's called affordability.
Why I am not getting [any]?
They are performing puja.
That's why I'm not running after this bloody money.
This is the seduction.
Instead, everything we touched we killed.
Guess what?
This person has never been born.
It's not, and binging is never good.
And it's better in two different ways.
I'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so.
(Music) This is the Animaris Currens Ventosa.
(Sound of running air) Yes!
It's moving by itself, okay.
It basically organizes itself."
It organizes itself.
You would be wrong.
They'd have to operate.
That's the sort of thing that happens to someone else, not me, surely.
But the damage is permanent.
You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life.
Gone."
(Laughter) I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidate to get a pilot's license.
I go, "Great!"
I'm going, "Wow, how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do?"
They use his rhetoric.
The good news is that it doesn't have to be.
And it's hard for a couple of reasons.
So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way.
You'd think he'd be worried about staying alive.
Because people like me took your job.
They were not the only ones.
So what has this got to do with this?
This is poo, and what I want to do today is share my passion for poo with you, which might be quite difficult, but I think what you might find more fascinating is the way these small animals deal with poo.
So, according to dung beetles, dung is pretty good.
So the question is, how do they deal with this material?
And most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort.
What are they doing? And there was a cue that was available to us.
How are they maintaining it in a particular straight line?
It's about the same as yours and mine.
Watch how often the beetle dances.
We don't know yet what dung beetles use.
And then we sat there for two minutes.
(Laughter) I said, "What?" He goes, "Where is it?"
(Cheering) Lebanese, yeah.
In Saudi Arabia, they go one, two, and then they stay on the same side: three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 -- (Laughter) Next time you see a Saudi, look closely.
Why is that? Are you too tired to go all the way around?
(Laughter) "With your three kisses."
People don't know we laugh.
Never "Hi, Jack."
That way no one knows what you're saying. Life goes on.
Perhaps this could be an advantage.
Let's click down now to the decade scale.
President Clinton, if you're here, thank you.
And what does he see but a burglar with a gun in his hand.
Now, one way of dealing with this problem is by deterrence.
So that's a bit of a support for the leviathan theory.
The second explanation is that in many times and places, there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap.
This was an argument from the political scientist James Payne.
And there are a number of possibilities, such as increasing circles of reciprocity in the sense that Robert Wright argues for.
Because we have been doing something right, and it sure would be good to find out what it is.
Thank you very much.
(Applause).
These are the ones that are obviously making sense.
The pithiest answer to the question "why?"
There was a bit of fun, a bit of joy.
So again, there wasn't an awful lot of joy or fun to be had.
This is all happening with excess capacity.
And not just easy things that anyone can do.
This Peers, Inc. concept is in a very difficult and complex realm.
Back to this spectrum.
So what's happening is, we had the yuck side, but we actually had this real wow side.
So how'd they figure this out?
We see it in supermarkets, on book covers.
Ask for the part of the story that's not being told.
Because you're not in the Middle East.
And that was the end of it.
Just raise that. Exactly.
But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way?
Here's another way to look at exactly the same problem.
But that system has tons of problems.
But here's what I learned.
So gradually raise Social Security retirement age, maybe only on people not yet born.
They way outweigh Democrats.
But that is not the case at all.
Those groups are very, very small.
Then you can see radical partisan change.
The Fed can't mess it up so badly.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I see a lot of very blank faces.
We're talking about our mind.
Every time I sort of pushed one down, another one would pop back up again.
We need an exercise.
We need a framework to learn how to be more mindful.
You go back to it, repeat it.
This one's not. It's invaded you.
You just want to get this one.
Once again, the same process repeats.
Let me translate for you.
They rise or fall, they live or die, as one.
Do you know why they do this?
A part of me had become alienated from myself.
And I would like to say that life was totally easy with them.
(Laughter) So I learned to write about myself in third person at a young age.
I had art.
Don't tempt me, because I will do it.
The kid had no patience for him.
They acted sweet.
That's worse than not having him here at all."
And they are not magnanimous in victory.
It's great. Lots of NO is released.
You know that they'll always start yakking.
And they hate him.
I'm telling you you didn't shave."
"No excuse, sir.""Attaboy, you're learning fast."
Oh yeah, when I don't feel so good down there, she takes care of me.
(Laughter) They had expectations for all of the cousins and the extended family of immigrants that lived in the South Bronx, but they had more than just expectations for us.
They kept us in play.
We've been told for 40 years already that they're coming soon.
Very soon they'll be doing everything for us.
They'll be cooking, cleaning, buying things, shopping, building. But they aren't here.
It did not start that trend.
And I wonder what he's soaking in.
I haven't read as much on how boys are picking up on this vibe.
Why are you still standing there?
Are we soaking up that story?
They're throwing it up in the air.
And that's pretty much why I do it.
Nobody wants an operation.
Surgeons are not made either.
You get your board certificate, and you can go out into practice.
So I was inspired by a friend.
Let me bring it to you locally.
It's really about setting up a dialogue.
And it has to be bi-directional.
It's a big task.
That's a tall order. We have to work at it.
Module five: manual skills practice.
It's important to be accurate.
We want it to be bi-directional.
And you continue to make connections.
There's no need.
No crows are brought up.
So in response to such a pragmatic question, we need to be bold.
He kept one in the glove compartment of our car.
There's silence.
Finally, my favorite student, she looks me straight in the eye, and she says, "The reading sucked."
She said, "You know what, I don't mean that it sucks.
I'm totally clueless.
We have to change it to something much more technical."
They'd have to be available at very competitive rates.
And they would all be legally compliant by doing this booking.
They're from multiple agencies.
It's all extremely low overhead.
What do I mean by fluent?
So I showed him.
So I showed this to the clubhouse member -- let's call him Victor -- and Victor, when he saw that this block would let him increment the score, he knew exactly what to do.
I get it.
It's written in the Declaration of Independence.
Can you quantify your openness?
What is it, then?
Salaam alaikum.
How could we survive that?
We have no water whatsoever.
Or should we use something else?
Without it we can't do anything.
Now what would this mean, and how would we do it?
So what could this mean?
Say a new super bug has emerged.
Beam me up, Scotty.
Big noise raised up: "What is this? What is happening?
It also has disadvantages, of course, and the disadvantage of this road is that raveling can occur.
And finally, this raveling can also lead to more and more damage.
Ha. He's ready.
So this is the specimen coming out now.
Let's see. Yeah, it worked.
How can Korea afford all of this?
The first thing you can see is that the bubbles were a lot smaller, no?
You know, Poland hasn't changed its culture.
Those things really exist.
And how do they do that?
But its strength lies in telling them what everybody else has been doing.
It has taken away excuses from those who are complacent.
But this is different.
This is a surprising and prominent gap in the literature.
Now what we actually computed in our study was the control over the TNCs' value.
And it gets even more extreme.
What should you take home from all of this?
It's not a street map."
That's the million-dollar question, right?
We want to neutralize the tensions.
You know?
Probably the biggest turn-on across the board.
Is it a place for naughtiness and is it a place to be safely aggressive?
What are the ingredients?
Don't we have everything you need together, you and I?"
It starts very young.
They know how to bring it back.
We shut one down that was going to be big.
Could we have the solutions?
And they're trying to do that.
You understood exactly what I just said in English.
And just in summary, no matter how far I push this, I can't get it to break.
Let me show you how far you can do that.
And that's exactly what we find.
Just fast forward 10 years.
And that's exactly what they do.
You might be wondering, who are these people?
It was a shameful thing for him to carry the rest of his life.
We have.
It's a piece of public mischief.
It was kind of a nasty way to get maturation, but we got it, because we all understood it, and for the first time that I could remember, there were mass protests against this corruption.
So it was one of those really superior double bluff kind of things that took place.
What was it that they were accused of?
I'm being a bit mysterious for those of you out there. What were they accused of?
Here is here, and out there is out there. Okay?
I'm serious now.
This is the other context.
I'm going to take you through a worked example of whether that's really so.
The name of the person doesn't matter.
And this is my reality check.
We will continue to work within JCC.
We need to increase the consciousness.
They have international branches, and it's important for us to tune into this one.
Discard the second myth; it is a big thing.
It's going to sashay away to live to fly another day.
And the basic punchline of my talk is, I'd like to turn that over on its head.
Yes, the inequality goes in this direction, or I would posit it.
Wait for it.
Pshhew.
So how can we change this dynamic?
Now give us a punishment. Okay.
What values do we most uphold?
And he's teaching her how to browse.
So I started publishing.
Where does it stop?
I'll spend a couple of months, I'll leave it for a couple of months, I'll go back, they'll get another zero.
So I said, "Well, what did I expect?"
What will it be tomorrow?
Okay?
It's not about making learning happen.
We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle.
And if he says, "Well, what? how?"
Help me build this school.
I don't know, what should I do?"
There is a universal anxiety about these two words.
Would you let me try?
Jakob Magolan: All right, let's go for it.
I'd like to show you what I see when I look at that picture.
That's it.
HONC -- one, two, three, four.
Go around Congress.
And I don't know about you, but I prefer to dine.
All right.
All right.
It's, in a way, your voice box.
They don't preserve well, as you know.
Can you imagine how much biased his report would be?
(Laughter) Hello.
People would yell at me from their cars.
Is this fair?
This is this.
I've always been with my band or my crew.
It's not for everybody.
They don't want to ask for things.
And a lot of artists have a problem with this.
Asking makes you vulnerable.
Should I?
One good thing did come out of it.
We have never understood it.
How were we to do it?
They own 26 square miles of vacant lots.
Why in the hell would they not okay this?
So what I want to do here, we gotta make this sexy.
Geek. Fatty.
Not really a big deal.
We used to stay inside for recess, because outside was worse.
He was a broken branch grafted onto a different family tree, adopted, not because his parents opted for a different destiny.
The classics were "Hey, stupid," "Hey, spaz."
Of course they did.
But they have to be asked.
This created a real problem for these people.
Annalisa Smith-Pallotta: That would be Sage Smith-Pallotta: a real social Rider Smith-Pallotta: innovation.
Gradations of intensity means what it sounds like.
Valence means good or bad, positive or negative.
What happened?
The extinctions still go on.
A little bit of film was shot.
So what do you do about that?
So basically, they're learning how to build on good news.
Everybody thought is was finished.
What do people think about it?
You're going to uncork some sort of Pandora's box of who-knows-what. Do they have a point?
You, your miserableness, have got to be kidding."
We do love a good baseline.
It's what?
RH: No, Disney is in that realm, and if they're able to acquire Fox, they're even bigger.
And the problem is, we were trying to dummy-proof the system.
RH: Sometimes.
RH: That's right.
RH: Sure.
It turns out everybody's minds were fine.
And he's very passionate about that.
CA: Why is this a passion, and what are you doing about it?
CA: Paint me a picture of what a school should look like.
Now, of course you couldn't do that today.
There is no plan B right now.
Pretty good deal.
I made that bet with someone —CA: Definition of plurality is?
Obviously that doesn't work very well for — CA: What just happened there? We just saw something land?
How's it going?
I work a lot. I mean, a lot.
It's really counterintuitive.
There are no shiny bridges.
You sort of place your bets.
Well, what does this really look like?
Well, what is it to make a therapeutic, anyway?
It matters for now. It matters as soon as possible.
We deal in milliseconds.
So what I've done is, I've adapted "Cloudburst" so that it embraces the latency and the performers sing into the latency instead of trying to be exactly together.
So I set up everything.
Not anymore.
There's something a little bit noisy around it.
In the other trials, they're told, you're playing a computer.
They're just choosing randomly.
In this case, they know there's four dollars.
So this is the other group of subjects who often disagree.
We have Lesters from everywhere. We could think, "What could we do to make Lesterland better?"
It's at least possible the Lesters would act for the good of Lesterland.
without the need for additional information.
And here are the ducks again.
I'm going to pass it around.
This is roadkill.
And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition.
And by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning.
What happened in the Sisyphic condition?
For some people, we just eliminated that.
And when I do, it's as a bit of a know-it-all.
But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there.
It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house.
And I saw this line coming for me.
And we realized right away that the computer had a big home court advantage.
Being a Renaissance man or woman, that's something that was only possible in the Renaissance.
Do I take this job or that one?
I've met a lot of them.
So a couple.
(Sneezing sound) Bless you.
Okay. Awesome.
If we could roll?
If we could roll the clip.
(Video) SP: Today is sport. [Unclear] Radio: [Unclear] Christian soldiers.
So, what we do, we ride with the windows down.
We don't fucking ride with the goddam windows down.
This is the scene north.
There's such a disconnect.
And he wasn't going to blink.
And there was a designated kicker every day.
They had not slept.
And it has been for 50 years an experiment.
It's great work.
That's a big deal. It really is.
And so, the real question is, what is the challenge?
Well a part of it, of course, is K-12.
We need to strengthen K-12.
Every foundation makes the difference in the next level.
She never missed a day of school, K-12.
There was fire in that belly.
Students are not taught to work in groups.
And he said, "It doesn't get any better than that."
But now we are looking at redesigning the humanities and social sciences.
Because so many students are bored in class.
They need to be engaged.
It's not something I was very happy about.
That's the other WTO. (Laughter) But it had a lockable door, it had privacy, it had water, it had soap so I could wash my hands, and I did because I'm a woman, and we do that.
It's the runs, the Hershey squirts, the squits.
Where I come from, we call it Delhi belly, as a legacy of empire.
We don't keep them all.
I mean, cancer seems far more serious.
This is obviously not one of them.
Actually, I work for you. You pay my salary.
I didn't see Abed coming.
Did I wish to see him remove them?
We looked down at his laminated mug.
I just wanted you to know that.
We're now going to turn it on.
So we now know how to find these troublemakers and tell them, "Gentlemen, that's enough.
Now we're not going to do this in normal people.
Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic.
It was perfectly natural.
It's a very natural sense.
That's kind of like what we're at.
That's also true of being bidialectal.
That'd be the second thing.
That's long enough for a generation of managers to retire.
There's some bumps along the way, but the big story is you could practically fit a ruler to it.
This guy says, "Nah, I don't use H&R Block anymore.
There is no Photoshop involved.
But you know what?
I love this.
When it's not, it contracts.
You would have seen the same thing.
It was just going 65 -- to zero?
That's very nice about them.
I can tell you exactly what happens.
If I look at your license plate number, I don't really know who you are.
But they don't.
Just by osmosis.
I didn't say these were going to be perfect.
You don't need an app.
Much more precise.
That's someone who is designing a habitat on another planet's dream.
And you know what?
We know why kids don't learn.
(Laughter) And I got back and looked at that teacher edition.
You were so excited, we just let you go."
You just have to strut."
I was somebody when I came.
(Laughter) He said, "Ms. Pierson, is this an F?"
(Laughter) And you know your toughest kids are never absent.
You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason.
Remember? He did a horrible thing, condemned for all time to roll this rock up, it would roll back down, roll back up, roll back down.
So he's walking out and walking out and walking out and he just can't resist. He looks at her, loses her forever.
Nobody here would ever be accused or be familiar with Narcissus.
And each case is different.
They all operate the same way. Right?
I am never using that, right?"
It was a perfect place to have schools.
Why would you look at it?
You're going to go and teach this year.
I'm really good at inner city schools that are struggling.
You know, people tell me, "Yeah, those charter schools, a lot of them don't work."
Please give it up for him one more time.
It was grit.
She's not going to go anywhere."
Laptops, computers, tablets -- you name it, they have it.
It's not exactly a low-cost proposition.
Person.
The sun.
Two suns together, prosperous.
Knock knock. Is anyone home?
You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence.
Aren't they?
ADHD.
(Laughter) Really. Really.
(Laughter) You know?
It's dormant.
How would I know what I was doing differently?
The system we have today isn't fair to them.
What would that system look like?
Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers.
So it would be totally renewable.
Now what form do they take?
How do you make them more friendly at that scale?
And that's a concerted platform.
It's more than one device, you know, it's renewable.
But I didn't handle it.
Here's a story about how that can go.
Why not strangers?
They produce sameness.
We won't bring anything with us.
It was like cell phones strapped to your head.
I would have stopped to help."
I don't really believe it is.
One of them is that it's always incredibly sociable.
What happens to education in that context?
If they do have, they cannot retain those teachers.
It did not correlate with the size of classrooms.
So I came to this conclusion that ET should reach the underprivileged first, not the other way about.
You know, how on earth did they know all this?
I want to just cut this short. We did this over and over again.
Just a quick idea of the measurements.
Ban-gap-seum-ni-da.
Now, when I bring up this with my friends, we often talk about, well, where would you put it?
What's your reticence?
I love them. So we are in the right quadrant.
We are in the Highbrow -- that's daring, that's courageous -- and Brilliant, which is great.
Thank you very much. And that's more than enough.
And you know what?
I consider myself the tide of shit.
We bugged everybody, because we knew that we were ignorant.
I'm sure that all of you know Katamari Damacy.
Or, you know, Vib-Ribbon was not distributed here in the United States.
I mean, we're talking about an experience that of course can seem weird to many, but that is very educational.
And a lot of men literally don't get beyond the first sentence as a result.
This is about domestic violence in particular, but you can plug in other analogues.
Why are they attracted to them? Why do they keep going back?
What was she wearing at that party? What a stupid thing to do.
We have to ask a different set of questions.
Why do so many men rape other men?
That's a very naive notion, right?
And you know what all this is about?
We don't like it when people challenge our power.
Now, I appreciate that that's a problem, it's sexism, but it's the truth.
We live in the world together.
What about all those boys?
You know what?
We are both victims of men's violence.
There's a whole spectrum.
How do we support our friends?
Or could you talk about something else?
I don't appreciate that kind of talk."
My argument is, he doesn't need sensitivity training.
Penn State is the mother of all teachable moments for the bystander approach.
It's unbelievable, really.
I know we can do it, we can do better.
Credit card, investment account?
And wouldn't you know it, they did.
So what are we waiting for?
But that's so unfair.
And I thought, "There it is again: a family that perceives itself to be normal with a child who seems to be extraordinary."
Do you wish you'd never heard of it?"
They got themselves ready.
How do you do that?
And most of our work's pretty non-invasive.
So dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance.
And they're very adept. They like to drag it and drop it from appendage to appendage.
Now in this footage, the adult is Caroh.
He really wants that sargassum.
Now this is video of a session.
You've got full attention.
This is just a plain statement of the facts.
We are in the middle of an astonishing period.
We have had one of those in America for just about the entire postwar period.
So you might wonder, what's the deal here?
How did I do this?
It was kind of a perfect triangle in which the art buyer was happy because he got the instruments at a cheaper price, because they weren't even made.
He took a leap of faith.
So here they are.
In other words, there was space for him to dream with me.
No.
They're all exclamation points.
By the way, what's going on with the eyes?
He's going to map out an area of where the robot should pick up the object from.
He didn't have to select that from a menu.
Two facts.
Or do they?
What is the failure of leadership today?
I'm the younger one there, to the side.
Let me tell you a story.
So how then do we reunite the two halves of the agora?
BG: George, thank you for coming to TED.
He was five at the time.
He wouldn't tell me what happened.
It all hit me.
Allow me to give you a briefing about my story.
We needed proof.
Allow me to help you answer this question.
I know.
I learned to be always there.
I would listen to what they say, and I would never defend myself with words only.
So I have no clue, really, how I became an activist.
And I don't know how I became one now.
I hope you find clues to answer that from my speech.
"Gouverner, c'est prévoir."
This didn't fit the bill.
The pictures that came a bit later had a very simple reason.
And why?
It's very easy to spend money.
Then we wanted to get rid of the bug generally.
And finally, you get a good eye.
So two problems, and design should be about more than one thing.
Never have been.
It's actually everywhere.
He did not run down shouting, "Hallelujah!"
and "Bless the Lord!"
She thought he must just have been worn out by the work.
So now she had an ally.
We're all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind.
Nothing's ever going to change.
That wasn't being asked.
I mean, how hard can it be?
This is called fuel partitioning in the lingo.
Let's look at some suggestive facts.
I'm betting my career on this.
Sometimes we have to put cues around people to make it easier, and believe it or not, that can be studied scientifically.
You couldn't satisfy this guy.
How are you going to manage it?
Overdrawn. Underdrawn.
For God's sake no, a thousand times no.
It's rude. The world really shouldn't be that way.
You glance over at this, and it says, "Asshead. Please help"? God.
"The Rejection Collection" is absolutely in this field.
The first week we did no cartoons.
That was a black hole for humor, and correctly so.
Well, point number one, each of them represents a unique family of its own.
We haven't announced this publicly before.
Watch this space.
But it's not related to any of those. It's a marsupial.
It was a disaster, and they were about to hit the wall.
It has to be a different species. What could it be?
But no, I wasn't born there.
It went like this.
They form separate yet integrated career paths for Chinese officials.
Where is the source of legitimacy?"
We all know the facts.
So here they are.
So the cop takes his time and looks over and kind of makes a little matrix and looks for about two, three minutes.
And the guy says, "No, actually I lost them down at the other end of the street, but the light is better here."
Now try and wrap your head around that for a second.
What do you know?
What happened after we did this?
And so it's been tectonically altered.
They get a bad rap.
So you can probably piece the rest together.
TM: We can't really figure out the reason.
Right?
Why have I chosen to talk to you about the phosphorus crisis today?
Why phosphorus in particular?
Now, where do we find this phosphorus?
Some are happier than others.